hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.
Why Nihilism?
An active form of Nihilism is basically a worldview recognizing that value judgments like 'good' and 'bad' are simply relative or subjective. Exclaiming that something is 'good' or 'bad' can never reflect anything other than, basically, your fears and desires let alone any inherently 'good' or 'bad' nature of the thing as it is in itself separate from your perception of it.Knowing then that value judgments or morals stem from the fears and desires of human beings rather than from objective truth, the nihilist can re-assess what he or she has been encouraged to perceive as morally 'good' or 'bad' by a society possessing a fundamentally materialistic agenda and which today values tangible things like money, size and quantity more than intangible things like happiness, usefulness and quality - and notions like 'equality' and 'consumerism' more than common sense.
Now, because Nihilism brings all of our values/morals/ethics down from the clouds and reduces them to what they are, i.e. mere human preferences, a mental attitude like Nihilism might initially seem repressive because fatalistic, in that it wrenches people of whatever 'higher' meaning drives them in life, resulting in a stale state of affairs in which people are left with no beliefs, or no internal motivating forces, beyond their desires, and no interest beyond the 'grubby' and overly self-centered urge to satisfy these desires.
However this does not have to be the case. A strong set of values are essential for any ascending civilization, and they will differ depending on the nature and constituents of the civilization. Active Nihilism acknowledges the importance of values but simply bears in mind that all ideals/values/morals are nothing but the product of human desire rather than God or absolute truth. We human beings are the creators of 'good' and 'evil' and thus Nihilism is invaluable as a mental attitude enabling one to 'clear their lenses' so to speak so that one can judge whether a certain conception of what is 'good' or 'bad/evil', or in other words a certain set of morals, is corrupt or alternatively whether it is noble and sustainable. Its about leaving emotions aside for that moment and assessing the pure structural consequences of our morals and associated shared beliefs: Forgetting questions of 'right' or 'wrong', one can look at what we are doing by valuing something as being good or bad and what consequences this will have.
A nihilist can look past the claptrap and differentiate between those human values which twist reality and depict it through candy-coated happy glasses from those human preferences which do not mock reality. Its about perceiving the intangible structure of society that will keep it ticking along well behind the flux of purely self-serving moralising, the materialism, the house & share prices, and the egos.
By David