Notes: Nihilism, and LARPing
I wrote something about LARPing some time ago, about how most modern people simply cannot believe and do not accept that some people do things for objective reasons. This I will get to, but for now, I need to outline some fairly blunt assumptions regarding modernity:
What Modernity Presumes:
- God isn’t real
- Truth is relative
Doesn’t look like much, but those two assumptions can destroy anything and everything they like in a matter of seconds. The problem, however, with those assumptions is that they can never build anything. If you believe the truth is relative, then anything you theorize can equally be washed away with the wave of a hand and some fancy wordplay. Likewise, if you don’t believe in God, then there is no objective structure from which to construct or understand reality. From these two assumptions, reality comes crumbling down, nothing has any meaning, and everyone is left scrambling for the smallest scrap of purpose they can find.
Ultimately, after some time looking for meaning, everyone realizes that if the truth is relative, then any ‘meaning’ they stumble upon can just as easily become…nothing at all. Pure, unalloyed nihilism. However, we all have to keep going, so there need to be some cornerstones from which we undertake most of our actions. We have found one, and we interact with it in the negative. The one open and discernible truth the modern world has yet to eradicate via its fancy footwork (though it is trying) is pain. We don’t necessarily find meaning from the pain itself, but from our increased attempts to keep pain at bay and increase the negative of pain, which we call pleasure. After God is dead, truth has been relativized, all modern man has left by way of actual purpose is pleasure seeking.
People have argued with me before about calling this ‘Nihilism’. I use this definition of nihilism:
rejecting all religious and moral principles in the belief that life is meaningless.
From this definition, nothing can be built. Anything which is built can just as easily be proclaimed as meaningless and destroyed. Any attempt to construct a politics of -ism from nihilism is already defeated. Anyone who seeks to do so is just reluctant to admit to the fact they’ve found some amount of Truth.
But what does this mean for those who do believe something? How are they seen in the eyes of others? If you believe in God, if you support some ‘archaic’ form of politics, even if you simply support not the ‘latest-thing’, it is not seen as if you have your own opinions, but simply that you are wrong. Your thoughts are not your own and are simply errors in the very fabric of relative reality. We saw this with Brexit and Trump, and we’ll be seeing it soon in Sweden. Roughly 50% of the population simply not accepting that other people may have different opinions which they’ve come to by themselves, based on the evidence and contexts they have, but simply that their thoughts are errors.
In the modern world, if you genuinely believe in God, the belief itself will never be taken for what it is – a sincere belief and connection with God – but simply as some-or-other variation on various materialist readings of belief that make the nihilists feel better. Nietzsche, perhaps, didn’t go far enough. His contention wasn’t necessarily that God didn’t exist, but that we live in a time where we can no longer believe in God. To push this to its limit, once it becomes accepted that we cannot believe in God (or adhere to various other things covertly proclaimed ‘dead’), then it follows that any such belief is either a form of madness or some form of roleplay as a way to cope with the world. Rituals, belief, worship, etc. are no longer what they are, but are solely socio-cultural relics of a past we have supposedly ‘progressed’ beyond.
There is much talk today about having opinions and tolerating others’ views etc. And yet, when it comes to it, the majority simply cannot mentally concede that other people truly believe the things which are anathema to their own opinions. In this way, contrary and cantankerous opinions, beliefs, and principles, become seen as errors. These readings of reality as either truthful or erroneous, as built atop a nihilistic foundation, lead only to reality being pulled around by the weight of spontaneous mimetic drifts. Because of course, how can the beliefs of other people be errors if there is no such thing as truth? This makes it clear that the condemnation of other people’s opinions as being errors or even glitches is itself a sophisticated form of censorship.
It’s difficult to censor something which is openly accepted as an option. If the discussion or argument is regarding A vs B, then it figures that within the inherent competition lies the idea that both could work as possible solutions for a singular problem. In this case, the task of censorship is twofold. For side A (in censoring B) has to both censor B and equally disprove their position as a means to justify their censorship. However, if A simply promote such behavior that regards positions B, C, D… as errors against their perfect logic, then it follows that censorship shouldn’t be a task, but a foregone conclusion. In a world without truth, however, it isn’t a matter of being able to use any discernible tools to arrive at the truth (for it no longer exists), so the means to attain the desired position are found within power and propaganda alone.