“…there would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know.”
-Ligotti
Well, after our little climax, you’ll agree with me on this: nihilism is really easy. In fact, that’s exactly what it is – it’s easy mode.
Gonna be straight with you: It’s really hard to beat this one.
Nihilism is like a slime coating everything I touch or interact with. It’s the foundation of the ‘happiness-seeking’ mode of existence, it’s indistinguishable from wisdom’s mind farts – it’s just the easiest way to get by as a commodified being.
Nihilism is the final boss level of ideology.
Nobody really gives a shit. It’s fuck you, got mine, all the way up. ‘Why do you care? Don’t you know you’ll be gone when it is?’ – an excuse for a human being actually said this to me once! Spoiler alert: he was born and raised in the North Amerikan Core – here to enjoy destroying a planet and then die, incapable of giving a rats ass about anything beyond the tinglings in his own nerve endings. The apotheosis of narcissistic hedonism and nihilism, an enemy of all life on earth.
The obvious rationality of the theists raises its head again here – nihilism is just not something they ever really have to deal with or experience. But even then, a system of transcendent metaphysics where the point of existence is always elsewhere is fundamentally nihilistic about this world.
To theists, everything about the plane of immanence was always temporary/disposable. They overcome nihilism by leaving it here and ascending to heaven. This isn’t really overcoming nihilism so much as it is just dodging it. You get to be as nihilist as you want about the world of immanence, but still get your transcendent meaning-icing on top of your dgaf-cake.
Nietszche predicted modernity would survive based on whether or not it was able to overcome nihilism. His entire output was an attempt to do just that.
He failed. So has modernity.
The only discourse/practices I have found the world over that are actually able to value this planet, this plane of immanence, without reifying a transcendent elsewhere or falling into the nihilist pit or worshipping ‘Nature’ as some kind of sacred mother or gaia entity or magic vitalist force or looking backwards to before some mythical fall from grace are, well – the ass end of the leftist spectrum. It is only a promethean revolutionary outlook that has ever been able to overcome nihilism even briefly, and even then, it’s hard work.
And after the scientific revolution, there will never be an Eden to return to ever again. The only way out is through. The only way back is forward. We have lost our innocence and plausible deniability forever.
It’s just that simple. The revolutionary left is hilariously dead, has totally failed, is a complete laughingstock the West over, and you know what?
In the Post-Holocene, after the capitalist engineered biosphere extermination, we are now in a position to say this:
they were the best of humanity!
the pinnacle of civilization!
the final evolution of the talking apes!
They were the only reason this species ever had any potential at all.
That we ever generated even a single revolutionary, well – that is reason enough to believe in human beings. The lost causes were always the ones that could have saved the world.
Even though it is hopeless, all is lost, the liberals have destroyed everything, and the biosphere has already collapsed – you still owe it to yourself and to your species to become the best possible version of yourself. The conditions have never been clearer, the call has never been louder:
The best possible version of yourself is an Eco-Communist Revolutionary.
Just as it is only a social project with a self-conscious plan that will be able to navigate the Post-Holocene, it is only a subject that is able to experience the entire planet as a part of their body that will be able to follow the Prime Directive of the Post-Holocene. If you’ve even started the process of deconstructing your conditioning that I’ve outlined here, you’re well on your way to becoming this kind of subject.
When you locate and identify the void of your freedom within the totality of biospheric relations, you have escaped commodified subjectivity forever.
If you do this and you’re honest with yourself in your truth-quest, you will eventually be on the revleft.
This is the only way out of nihilism that I’ve been able to find, and I’m convinced it’s the only way forward in becoming subjects adequate to the grim darkness of the future that capitalists have built for us.
it’s also the best mode of existence we’ve invented, and easily the most fun and interesting way to live through the end of the world. we have nothing left to lose!