4 | NIHILISM : the Cynical
Method & Madness | Book II : Archetypical Philosophies
The nihilist is disappointed by the failure of the serious man’s values. When he discovers them to be arbitrary, he concludes that nothing has meaning and existence is absurd. He is haunted still, however, by their memory. His revolt against meaning itself reveals still a deep connection, showing that he has, in reality, not actually escaped the trap of seriousness himself.
—S. de Beauvoir (ab. M. Hise)
Our hero steels himself, and leaps—vaulting over the edge of that wall. He falls, plunging to the earth, where stands a horde of fearsome, horned demons with patchy fur and pale flesh, howling and screaming in an infernal tongue. He brandishes his sword of Truth, locking eyes with the closest one—but discovers not a monster, but instead just a man who wears a strange hat and bears a strange stench, and who seems obsessed with throwing rocks at the wall.
Confused, our hero thus calls out to this weird, stinky man, demanding to know what’s going on.
“I’m gonna knock this wall on its ass!” The stinker replies.
“But why?” The hero asks.
“’Cause walls are fake—unnatural! Can’t you see?” He says. “If someone had to make it, then that means that it was never even real in the first place!”
“Well… stop it!” The hero cries. “That wall protects us—it’s always been there! In fact, what’s unnatural… is that you want to knock it down at all!”
The Idealist is the Righteous; a man of Eden who believes that the world is a place of natural and inherent Order—where everything should and does make sense, and abides by a fundamental rule of law. He chooses to believe in the story that he’s been told for all his life: that he holds in his hand the knowledge, Power, and duty to defend what’s Good against the Chaos—to ward his home against a false, Evil world beyond which seeks to tear it down.
The Nihilist is the Cynical: the one who resides beyond the wall, and thus believes that the world is a place of natural and inherent Chaos—that laws and morals and “Good” and “right” are but constructs, created by man—where nothing should or does make sense. This Cynic is the one who’s realized that the Idealist’s grand Truth is nothing but a lie—that adult knowledge and their “duty to rise” is just a simple, stupid scam. That the world is—in the end—just a place of men lying to men, manipulating everything and everyone else in a futile attempt to distort the world; to invert and suppress the brute Chaos of reality.
Thus, the Nihilist is the one who believes that there are two kinds of people in this world:
The enlightened, and the sheep.
There are the weak-minded: those unable to cope with the simple reality of a cold, uncaring, Absurd world, and so choose to retreat behind the safety of a lie: that it’s the Order they cling to which is natural and True. And then, there are those with opened-eyes—who know, understand, and embrace the fact that abject Chaos is the world’s true-and-only nature.
The Nihilist believes that the sheep hide behind a fragile shield of false walls and lies—that they can continue to occupy their sad, sheltered, naïve lives only because they choose to remain blind. Thus, he makes it his mission—his obsession—to bash and break away at their stones, attempting to tear it all down; to expose their Eden to the real truth, and finally show them once and for all that he is in the right—that Order is fake, existence is Absurd, and:
Everything is meaningless.
The Nihilist stands tall and proud at the base of the wall, preaching the futility of existence and the Impotence of all mankind. Yet still, he stands, putting everything he has—all his conviction, Power, and reactionary sense of indignant injustice—into his project of throwing rocks at a wall. And soon enough—or maybe eventually—he’ll begin to grow bored or tired. It might actually take thousands of years, after all, for one guy to knock that wall on its ass… no matter how good his throwing-arm might be. And a Nihilist is—in reality—not the herald of primordial Chaos which he imagines himself to be… but is, instead, actually just a guy. And a guy will get tired, or bored, or distracted, or hungry… and then, he'll wander off to do something else instead.
If everything is meaningless in the end, then what was the point of spending all that time trying to break something that was… meaningless?
Philosophy: a mindset. a worldview. The way that one chooses to see the world, and thus approach living one’s life.
Αρχή | archí: origin
Τύπος | týpos: form
An Archetypical Philosophy is the logical basis of a person’s attitude, derived from observation of how he-or-she chooses to exist.
