Hello Darkness

“Where Christian faith is joyous, certain, serene, loving, humble, patient, submitting in all things to the will of God, its Nihilist counterpart is full of doubt, suspicion, disgust, envy, jealousy, pride, impatience, rebelliousness, blasphemy.” – Nihilism

For most of us, our existence will not be remembered after three generations.  Our backstories will be all but forgotten, and all that will remain will be our headstones with the sobering details of our birth and death.  From dust we arrived and from dust we will return.  Such is the meaninglessness of life, and why so many strive to leave their mark on the world, to make certain that their lives matter. 

For Christians, an afterlife offers some relief.  Believing there is a divine plan where the soul lives on, and where families will be reunited with loved ones, makes inevitable suffering in life bearable. 

Ironically, leaving behind a history of toil at the enjoyment of modern riches has indulged a limitless reflection of one’s existence.  While anxiety, despair, hopelessness, and fears of imminent death are a large part of the human condition, left unmanaged, can lead to an increase in suicide rates, mental illness, drugs, and alcohol.    

In 1882, philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared that “God is Dead”, to emphasize the decline of religious belief in Europe.  By 2021, a UK census found that less than half identified as Christian.  If current trends continue, by 2070, less than half the American population is expected to be Christian. 

In Fr. Seraphim Eugene Rose’s 1994 book, “Nihilism”, Rose, an orthodox Christian, tracks the root cause that made nihilism, the growing dissatisfaction with oneself and one’s country, the philosophy of contemporary thought.  To understand nihilism, Rose follows history to reveal the symptoms, the causes, and the cure.  At its core, nihilism is a rabid pessimism that leads to a life of nothingness.  As the West slowly lost its religion, the void left led to lives with no values and thus a lack of meaning.  With the death of God, came a new order, with man serving as its newest deity. 

One of the first casualties of the diminishing role of God in life was a turn to secularism following the Enlightenment when creationism was replaced with evolution and absolute truth was exchanged with relativism.  Since Nihilism rejects the idea of universal knowledge, it instead believes that the truth changes based on individual understanding, leading to universal incoherence and confusion. 

With a belief in God came a society of common values where morality drew the line between good and evil.  These moral communities were indispensable for a thriving society.  Without God came the loss of community and traditional beliefs, where the destruction of the old order led to a tearing down of institutions to be replaced with moral anarchy.  This post-Christian era of lost virtues led to a secular globalized multicultural movement that is both rootless and anti-human.

In politics, Bolshevism, Naziism, and the Holocaust began the destruction of the modern order.  Today, nihilism is alive and well in the advancement of the irrational anti-racist racism, and gender-bending culture where biological identity is no longer binary, and where fully intact men are allowed to inhabit woman and girl spaces to act out their fetishes.  For those who resist, any increase in rebellion and violence is a feature, not a bug, of the resulting negativism. 

French philosopher, Albert Camus, designed his own ideas around the philosophy of the absurd where life is not only meaningless but irrational.  Comparing the absurdity of man’s life to Greek mythology, where Sisyphus was made to roll a large boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back and require perpetual action became a metaphor for the incoherence of modern life.

Dissatisfaction with oneself and one’s country along with the abandonment of truth is a death warrant for any civilization.  The Roman Empire ended because of nihilism; the West is not far behind.