we all know about Nietzsche and his “century of nihilism”
that he warned us about…and in fact, we know that the century
after Nietzsche was a century of nihilism… we have both World Wars,
the Holocaust, the cold war, the atomic bomb, the nihilism that comes
from capitalism, that has turned human being into numbers…
the nihilism that has corporations/big business devaluing, dehumanizing
the values of human beings… which is is in fact what Nihilism actually means…
human beings values are devalued, destroyed…that is what Nihilism actually is…
but we see this in the actions of the state and within its ism’s and ideologies,
capitalism, communism, Catholicism, Buddhism, all of these ism’s and ideologies
have spent the last century, the last 200 years in fact, devaluing and dehumanizing
human beings…
so we have come to “know” nihilism as being destructive and deadly for human beings…
but let us flip this script…
what about this? what if this Nihilism is actually a force for good…
not today and not tomorrow, but soon and for everyone…
we have been, for a lack of a better word, corrupted, by the ism’s and
ideologies of the past… we are filled with bad idea’s, habits, superstitions,
biases and prejudices that the modern world has installed into us…
dangerous notions such as nationalism, fanaticism, jingoism, zealotry,
bigotry and intolerance…what if, what if we use this current
nihilism to displace or remove these modern ism’s and ideologies that
have corrupted our minds and heart…
what if the current nihilism strips away all our biases, superstitions, prejudices, nationalism,
and habits of the modern world…we are left without any of our current dangerous
notions of nationalism and fanaticism and zealotry and intolerance, to name just a few
of our “modern” notions…and when we reach the bottom, we have no more “false”
values of our modern world, then we can rebuild our values to match what it
means to be human… what it means to be really human, not those pretend Christian
or American values, but human being values…
we use the current nihilism to clear our minds, hearts and head of those
notions which no longer deserve to exists in the 21st century…
the hate and anger and lust and greed that defines our modern
ism’s and ideologies… the animal or human/animal values…
but the values of us human beings… those who are truly and completely
human…the new values for a new being… the human being…
a world where I no longer see Jewish or white or male or American values
but I see just human values…where I look at a human being and all I see
is a human being… nothing more, nothing less…
and this maybe come after we have strip ourselves of looking at human beings
as part of something, American, white, male, Jewish, black… these are no
a full accounting of what is possible, they are just part of what makes us human…
and we must lose that which only show us part of us… we are not just white or
just male or just Jewish… but we are totally and fully human… and that is what
the search is for… to become human, fully human… to escape the partial understanding
of what it means to be a human being… via nationalism or bias, or prejudice or superstitions…
to lose all that and see a human being for what a human being is… a human being…
nothing more, nothing less…
so let us flip the script and welcome the modern notion of nihilism…
because after everything has been stripped away, what is left?
after ism’s and ideologies are stripped away, what is left?
a human being…
Kropotkin