Woody Allen, Nihilist
By Matthew Boudway at Commonweal website
Of course I imagine that any number of folks here will be adamant in their assurance that others should be suspicious of moral nihilists like me. I even manage to push a few of them all the way over edge into posting rather fierce declamatory warnings about me.
Now, I suspect that reactions of this sort are predicated more on their concern [conscious or not] that I may be right. That, in fact, the manner in which they construe their own self out in the world of conflicting goods may in turn be an “existential contraption rooted in dasein”. That they too may well find themselves sinking down into the “hole” that is a fractured and fragmented personality.
Oh, indeed it does. After all, if one comes to accept that, “in the absence of God, all things are permitted”, what might they themselves come to permit regarding their own behaviors. Is there a potential sociopath lurking inside us that just needs the right sequence of experiences – the right set of circumstances – to bring out?
Instead, they have managed to sustain the belief that they really are at one with the real me at one with the right thing to do at one with this or that God, this or that spiritual path, this or that ideology, this or that philosophy, this or that assessment of nature. Ever and and always it is that they believe in the objective [even universal] distinction between good and evil rather than in whatever that moral and political distinction might be.
And, again, the sheer irony here is that, by and large, our world is owned and operated by those who, in sustaining a global economy through government policies that revolve around “show me the money”, the moral nihilists already “run the world” by and large.
America. Russia. China. And all the rest of them. It’s all about markets and cheap labor and natural resources.
No “philosopher kings” around yet to change that.