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PANTHEON OF OBLIVION

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"Death is the optimal solution for utilitarians - since it prevents suffering and the occurrence of unpleasurable events throughout the lives of men."

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.. My name's anthony, just a person living with no regrets and living the Good Life with Metal and Living the life.. My strongest dislikes would be mainstream music,a terrible life, and fake and/or mean people. Philosophy, Guitar, Music, Bikeriding, Aiding in Society's overall development, Mental and Physical Evolution, Experiencing Life For What It really is, Teas Of All Kinds, Grateful and Whatever's Good make up my Life in general. talk it up.

On the Secret of Degeneration By Baron Julius Evola (from Deutsches Volkstum, Nr. 11, 1938)

"Anyone who has come to reject the rationalist myth of "progress" and the interpretation of history as an unbroken positive development of mankind will find himself gradually drawn towards the world-view that was common to all the great traditional cultures, and which had at its centre the memory of a process of degeneration, slow obscuration, or collapse of a higher preceding world. As we penetrate deeper into this new (and old) interpretation, we encounter various problems, foremost among which is the question of the secret of degeneration.

In its literal sense, this question is by no means a novel one. While contemplating the magnificent remains of cultures whose very name has not even come down to us, but which seem to have conveyed, even in their physical material, a greatness and power that is more than earthly, scarcely anyone has failed to ask themselves questions about the death of cultures, and sensed the inadequacy of the reasons that are usually given to explain it.

We can thank the Comte de Gobineau for the best and best-known summary of this problem, and also for a masterly criticism of the main hypotheses about it. His solution on the basis of racial thought and racial purity also has a lot of truth in it, but it needs to be expanded by a few observations concerning a higher order of things. For there have been many cases in which a culture has collapsed even when its race has remained pure, as is especially clear in certain groups that have suffered slow, inexorable extinction despite remaining as racially isolated as if they were islands. An example quite close at hand is the case of the Swedes and the Dutch. These people are in the same racial condition today as they were two centuries ago, but there is little to be found now of the heroic disposition and the racial awareness that they once possessed. Other great cultures seem merely to have remained standing in the condition of mummies: they have long been inwardly dead, so that it takes only the slightest push to knock them down. This was the case, for example, with ancient Peru, that giant solar empire which was annihilated by a few adventurers drawn from the worst rabble of Europe.

If we look at the secret of degeneration from the exclusively traditional point of view, it becomes even harder to solve it completely. It is then a matter of the division of all cultures into two main types. On the one hand there are the traditional cultures, whose principle is identical and unchangeable, despite all the differences evident on the surface. The axis of these cultures and the summit of their hierarchical order consists of metaphysical, supra-individual powers and actions, which serve to inform and justify everything that is merely human, temporal, subject to becoming and to "history." On the other hand there is "modern culture," which is actually the anti-tradition and which exhausts itself in a construction of purely human and earthly conditions and in the total development of these, in pursuit of a life entirely detached from the "higher world."

From the standpoint of the latter, the whole of history is degeneration, because it shows the universal decline of earlier cultures of the traditional type, and the decisive and violent rise of a new universal civilization of the "modern" type.

A double question arises from this.

First, how was it ever possible for this to come to pass? There is a logical error underlying the whole doctrine of evolution: it is impossible that the higher can emerge from the lower, and the greater from the less. But doesn't a similar difficulty face us in the solution of the doctrine of involution? How is it ever possible for the higher to fall? If we could make do with simple analogies, it would be easy to deal with this question. A healthy man can become sick; a virtuous one can turn to vice. There is a natural law that everyone takes from granted: that every living being starts with birth, growth, and strength, then come old age, weakening, and disintegration. And so forth. But this is just making statements, not explaining, even if we allow that such analogies actually relate to the question posed here.

Secondly, it is not only a matter of explaining the possibility of the degeneration of a particular cultural world, but also the possibility that the degeneration of one cultural cycle may pass to other peoples and take them down with it. For example, we have not only to explain how the ancient Western reality collapsed, but also have to show the reason why it was possible for "modern" culture to conquer practically the whole world, and why it possessed the power to divert so many peoples from any other type of culture, and to hold sway even where states of a traditional kind seemed to be alive (one need only recall the Aryan East).

In this respect, it is not enough to say that we are dealing with a purely material and economic conquest. That view seems very superficial, for two reasons. In the first place, a land that is conquered on the material level also experiences, in the long run, influences of a higher kind corresponding to the cultural type of its conqueror. We can state, in fact, that European conquest almost everywhere sows the seeds of "Europeanization," i.e., the "modern" rationalist, tradition-hostile, individualistic way of thinking. Secondly, the traditional conception of culture and the state is hierarchical, not dualistic. Its bearers could never subscribe, without severe reservations, to the principles of "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" and "My kingdom is not of this world." For us, "Tradition" is the victorious and creative presence in the world of that which is "not of this world," i.e., of the Spirit, understood as a power that is mightier than any merely human or material one.

This is a basic idea of the authentically traditional view of life, which does not permit us to speak with contempt of merely material conquests. On the contrary, the material conquest is the sign, if not of a spiritual victory, at least of a spiritual weakness or a kind of spiritual "retreat" in the cultures that are conquered and lose their independence. Everywhere that the Spirit, regarded as the stronger power, was truly present, it never lacked for means - visible or otherwise - to enable all the opponent's technical and material superiority to be resisted. But this has not happened. It must be concluded, then, that degeneracy was lurking behind the traditional facade of every people that the "modern" world has been able to conquer. The West must then have been the culture in which a crisis that was already universal assumed its acutest form. There the degeneration amounted, so to speak, to a knockout blow, and as it took effect, it brought down with more or less ease other peoples in whom the involution had certainly not "progressed" as far, but whose tradition had already lost its original power, so that these peoples were no longer able to protect themselves from an outside assault.

With these considerations, the second aspect of our problem is traced back to the first one. It is mainly a question of explicating the meaning and the possibility of degeneracy, without reference to other circumstances.

For this we must be clear about one thing: it is an error to assume that the hierarchy of the traditional world is based on a tyranny of the upper classes. That is merely a "modern" conception, completely alien to the traditional way of thinking. The traditional doctrine in fact conceived of spiritual action as an "action without acting"; it spoke of the "unmoved mover"; everywhere it used the symbolism of the "pole," the unalterable axis around which every ordered movement takes place (and elsewhere we have shown that this is the meaning of the swastika, the "arctic cross"); it always stressed the "Olympian," spirituality, and genuine authority, as well as its way of acting directly on its subordinates, not through violence but through "presence"; finally, it used the simile of the magnet, wherein lies the key to our question, as we shall now see.

Only today could anyone imagine that the authentic bearers of the Spirit, or of Tradition, pursue people so as to seize them and put them in their places - in short, that they "manage" people, or have any personal interest in setting up and maintaining those hierarchical relationships by virtue of which they can appear visibly as the rulers. This would be ridiculous and senseless. It is much more the recognition on the part of the lower ones that is the true basis of any traditional ranking. It is not the higher that needs the lower, but the other way round. The essence of hierarchy is that there is something living as a reality in certain people, which in the rest is only present in the condition of an ideal, a premonition, an unfocused effort. Thus the latter are fatefully attracted to the former, and their lower condition is one of subordination less to something foreign, than to their own true "self." Herein lies the secret, in the traditional world, of all readiness for sacrifice, all heroism, all loyalty; and, on the other side, of a prestige, an authority, and a calm power which the most heavily-armed tyrant can never count upon.

With these considerations, we have come very close to solving not only the problem of degeneration, but also the possibility of a particular fall. Are we perhaps not tired of hearing that the success of every revolution indicates the weakness and degeneracy of the previous rulers? An understanding of this kind is very one-sided. This would indeed be the case if wild dogs were tied up, and suddenly broke loose: that would be proof that the hands holding their leashes had become impotent or weak. But things are arranged very differently in the framework of spiritual ranking, whose real basis we have explained above. This hierarchy degenerates and is able to be overthrown in one case only: when the individual degenerates, when he uses his fundamental freedom to deny the Spirit, to cut his life loose from any higher reference-point, and to exist "only for himself." Then the contacts are fatefully broken, the metaphysical tension, to which the traditional organism owes its unity, gives way, every force wavers in its path and finally breaks free. The peaks, of course, remain pure and inviolable in their heights, but the rest, which depended on them, now becomes an avalanche, a mass that has lost its equilibrium and falls, at first imperceptibly but with ever accelerating movement down to the depths and lowest levels of the valley. This is the secret of every degeneration and revolution. The European had first slain the hierarchy in himself by extirpating his own inner possibilities, to which corresponded the basis of the order that he would then destroy externally.

If Christian mythology attributes the Fall of Man and the Rebellion of the Angels to the freedom of the will, then it comes to much the same significance. It concerns the frightening potential that dwells in man of using freedom to destroy spiritually and to banish everything that could ensure him a supra-natural value. This is a metaphysical decision: the stream that traverses history in the most varied forms of the traditional-hating, revolutionary, individualistic, and humanistic spirit, or in short, the "modern" spirit. This decision is the only positive and decisive cause in the secret of degeneration, the destruction of Tradition.

If we understand this, we can perhaps also grasp the sense of those legends that speak of mysterious rulers who "always" exist and have never died (shades of the Emperor sleeping beneath the Kyffhäuser mountain!). Such rulers can be rediscovered only when one achieves spiritual completeness and awakens a quality in oneself like that of a metal that suddenly feels "the magnet", finds the magnet and irresistibly orients itself and moves towards it. For now, we must restrict ourselves to this hint. A comprehensive explanation of legends of that sort, which come to us from the most ancient Aryan source, would take us too far. At another opportunity we will perhaps return to the secret of reconstruction, to the "magic" that is capable of restoring the fallen mass to the unalterable, lonely, and invisible peaks that are still there in the heights."

"When the sun rises in another world, perhaps we look differently upon ourselves, and perhaps upon the whole world. Imagine that. Imagine that we, with a huge metaphysical palm, could grab two individuals from our present world, and place them in a bubble, where only their consciousnesses remain – they don't have to care about food, or sleep, or anything like that at all – and we tell them that within this bubble, they will live until they die (or whatever their consciousnesses do when they cease to exist). They can't see us, and we can't see them. So, in the bubble the two people start to chat - of course, they'll need mouths for that, so let's say we give them telepathic skills - and among the first things they'll come to understand is that our rules, expectations etc., can no longer influence them. No matter what they say or think now, it will have no consequences for them or anyone else. Then you can imagine how the two of them all of a sudden would make light of all those things we know as taboos. You almost have a feeling that they start talking and thinking freely and happily and humorously about all those things, which they, in their old world, had to be very, very serious about. Imagine that all "Hitlers" and "Treblinkas" and such words or names are possible to speak of, without having to add something like, "Now, all of that is, of course, absolutely aaaaaawful, but…", before one has even started to talk about it. Now it doesn't matter, they dare everything and more. And you can then imagine how these conversations in the long run develop into criticism of that old world, outside the bubble. And into new ideas. "Hmm, this and that could easily be changed, how difficult can it be?" And so they realise that while they lived in the old world, those thoughts never really surfaced. Not only that you didn't dare talk about it with others - you didn't even dare think it. It was as if this heavy yoke lay on the brain that said: "Hey, you can't think that!", long before you had the idea. But now, when they're in the bubble, the ideas gush out from everywhere, and they start to develop whole mental blueprints for an ideal world, without all those hindrances that proved to be only drivel, which not a soul dared ignore earlier on. Too late now, they're in a bubble! But so the bubble bursts, and the sun rises. The end."

Used to be original, but now i tremble in fear i am like everyone else alabary spell Is this how it feels to reach black bottom want to know how it feels to be forgotten I become the distance, I am the sober and irrelevant, I don't feel but in this, what is there to believe? I'm not asking for much just a moment a chance to pick up the pieces happyness please come home what if it ends right here how do i change it Hoping to find a saviour I lost my way I become the distance, I am the sober and irrelevant, I don't feel but in this, what is there to believe? is this how it feels to reach black bottom want to know how it feels to be forgotten hoping to find a saviour i lost my way I become the distance, I am the sober and irrelevant, I don't feel but in this, what is there to believe?

"We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time."

The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!

"I used to be the God of the heavenly children Playing wicked games in the garden of Eden But their apple went rotten down to the core So with hands outstretched they begged for more Then I gave them the Messiah to teach the Word He was born like a butterfly... died like a worm My kingdom rusted - The heavens burned So now I sit here watching the end of the world"

"Happiness is not synonymous with pleasure. It is, instead, a deeper emotion that originates from within. . . . Happiness results from a sense of mental and moral contentment with who we are, what we value, and how we invest our time and resources for purposes beyond ourselves."

"My understanding surrounds the truth of things, And the truth is mixed up in me, And the truth of my descent is set forth by itself, And when it was known, it was altogether in me And all the habitable parts and deserts And everything created is under me And I am the ruling power preceding all that exists And I am he that spoke a true saying And I am the Just Judge and Ruler of the Earth And I am he that men worship in my glory Coming to me and kissing my feet And I am he that spread over the heavens their height And I am he that cried in the beginning And I am he that of myself revealeth all things, Verily the all-merciful has assigned unto me names, The heavenly-throne, and the seat, and the heavens, and the earth. In the secret of my knowledge, there is no god but me. These things are subservient to my power. O mine enemies, why do you deny me? O men deny me not, but submit. In the Day of Judgment, you will be happy in meeting me. Who dies in my love, I will cast him In the midst of paradise, by my will and pleasure; But he that dies unmindful of me Will be thrown into torture in misery and affliction. I say I am the only one and the exalted; I create and make rich those whom I will. Praise it to myself, for all things are by my will, And the universe is lighted by some of my gifts. I am the king that magnifies himself, And all the riches of creation are at my bidding. I have made known unto you, o people, some of my ways. So saith Shaitan." - Lucifer

"SO ASK ME NOT MANY THINGS; FOR THY KINGDOM ALSO AFTER A LITTLE TIME IS TO BE DISRUPTED AND THY GLORY IS BUT FOR A SEASON, AND SHORT WILL BE THY TYRANNY OVER US."-Asmodeus

". . . the weal of the race, and the cause of humanity, here and now, are enough To give life meaning and death as well."

"It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy - from lack of character."

"When I became convinced that the universe is natural – that all ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain . . . the joy of freedom. . . . I was free – free to think, to express my thoughts . . . free to live for myself and those I loved . . . free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope . . . free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the ‘inspired’ books that savages have produced . . . free from popes and priests . . . free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies . . . free from the fear of eternal pain . . . free from devils, ghosts and gods. . . . There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought . . . no following another’s steps . . . no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words."



" And now the end is near And so I face the final curtain, My friends, I'll say it clear, I'll state my case of which I'm certain. I've lived a life that's full, I've travelled each and evr'y highway And more, much more than this, I did it my way."

"Common-sense understanding of human nature tells one that lack of goals whose attainment requires effort leads to boredom and that boredom, long continued, often leads eventually to depression. Failure to obtain goals leads to frustration and lowering of self-esteem. Frustration leads to anger, anger to aggression, often in the form of spouse or child abuse. It has been shown that long-continued frustration commonly leads to depression and that depression tends to cause guilt, sleep disorders, eating disorders and bad feelings about oneself. Those who are tending toward depression seek pleasure as an antidote; hence insatiable hedonism and excessive sex, with perversions as a means of getting new kicks. Boredom too tends to cause excessive pleasure-seeking since, lacking other goals, people often use pleasure as a goal. See accompanying diagram. The foregoing is a simplification. Reality is more complex, and of course deprivation with respect to the power process is not the ONLY cause of the symptoms described. By the way, when we mention depression we do not necessarily mean depression that is severe enough to be treated by a psychiatrist. Often only mild forms of depression are involved. And when we speak of goals we do not necessarily mean long-term, thought out goals. For many or most people through much of human history, the goals of a hand-to-mouth existence (merely providing oneself and one's family with food from day to day) have been quite sufficient. A partial exception may be made for a few passive, inward looking groups, such as the Amish, which have little effect on the wider society. Apart from these, some genuine small-scale communities do exist in America today. For instance, youth gangs and "cults". Everyone regards them as dangerous, and so they are, because the members of these groups are loyal primarily to one another rather than to the system, hence the system cannot control them. Or take the gypsies. The gypsies commonly get away with theft and fraud because their loyalties are such that they can always get other gypsies to give testimony that "proves" their innocence. Obviously the system would be in serious trouble if too many people belonged to such groups. Some of the early-20th century Chinese thinkers who were concerned with modernizing China recognized the necessity of breaking down small-scale social groups such as the family: "(According to Sun Yat-sen) The Chinese people needed a new surge of patriotism, which would lead to a transfer of loyalty from the family to the state. . .(According to Li Huang) traditional attachments, particularly to the family had to be abandoned if nationalism were to develop to China." (Chester C. Tan, Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century," page 125, page 297.)"

"[A] culture based on the principles of science must be destroyed when it begins to grow illogical, that is, to retreat before its own consequences. Our art reveals this universal distress: in vain does one depend imitatively on all the great productive periods and natures; in vain does one accumulate the entire "world-literature" around modern man for his comfort; in vain does one place oneself in the midst of the art styles and artists of all ages, so that one may give names to them as Adam did to the beasts: one still remains externally hungry, the "critic" without joy and energy, the Alexandrian man, who is at bottom a librarian and corrector of proofs, and wretchedly goes blind from the dust of books and from printers' errors. (The Birth of Tragedy, §18)"

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your live will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence--even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' (The Gay Science, §341)

Who I'd like to meet:

Someone who is real and original.

Read, From a friend....

"Nihilism -

The Continuity of Life

Dare you face the light?

Introduction

Together, like waves on the sea, we move in rhythmic pace between office work, supermarket, and family. Our lives are defined, not by their collected share of experience, but of the financial worth according to economical income and material wealth. Every day the massmedia of our society is filling us with new promises about peace, love, and respect, when none of that has yet been seen come true. As the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe noted, all it takes for a human individual to consider death as an alternative, to a life it cannot stand nor bare, is the crossing of the boundaries of his or her own limits.

When we reach this point in life, we lose control over ourselves and feel that we are abandoned by our surrounding, thus in a need to reduce everything around us to a level, which we feel is able to confine under our control. The engineer at work who suddenly loses his mind when his boss continues to bully him in front of his co-workers, the wife who at last have had enough when coming home and seeing her husband in bed with the neighbour, the little boy who runs from home when his stepfather decides to beat him up again; what these people have in common, is that they've reached an end point in their lives, where they have to re-consider the things they see as important to their basic existence. The engineer will switch job, the wife will leave her husband, and the little boy will live with his biological father instead. These choices are made, because the individuals in question have broken down the conventions of their daily life, and chosen to look for the most basic of needs, to find out what is draining their energy and what is nurturing it.

Definition

One could say this form of self-reductive process, is a form of philosophical nihilism. Nihilism comes from the Latin word nihil, meaning 'nothing' or 'not anything.' The most common definition and use of nihilism, is the belief in nothing or a rejection of objective truth, social conventions, and moral meaning. Nihilism as a philosophy goes back several hundred years B.C., when certain philosophers used a scepticist outlook to claim that absolute concepts, like the Christian God, were illusions and thus had to be denied. During the latter half of the 19th Century, nihilism gained both a cultural and political revival, when Russian writers started to reject social conventions such as the traditional family, the church, and the State.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche developed a larger perspective on nihilism as a phenomenon. He claimed that the West, through science and secular humanism, had "killed God" by proving his non-existence. According to Nietzsche, this would mean that both Heaven was seen as an illusion but also that the Earthly life was a lie, since it had been demonized by the Christian doctrine. He called this "nihilism," or the state when the West had found that there were no gods up in the sky, but that the current life on Earth also was filthy, immoral, and violent, thus reducing the existential outlook on life to a state of emptiness.

Nietzsche therefore saw nihilism as something horrible and destructive, because it meant the end of the European civilization and cultural life. However, Nietzsche also saw this process as inevitable and therefore attempted to use nihilism as a philosophical tool, a process, in which moral conventions and absolutes, had to pass through his "philosophical hammer." The idea behind this, was that only true values would survive the beating of the hammer - those that remained dust, were therefore false values. By utilizing this metaphor, Nietzsche - perhaps unintentionally - realized that nihilism, which otherwise to most people seemed as something illogical and dangerous, had potential in creating new values, if used as a process and not an end in itself. Below we will examine this process in depth and explain its relevance to other philosophies.

The Process of Nihilism

Active and Passive Nihilism

We argue that there exists two basic ways of approaching nihilism as a philosophy:

a) Passive Nihilism: Nihilism seen as an end in itself, meaning one strips the outlook on life to reject all established morals, values, and truths, thus finding oneself in a void of emptiness where nothing is real, and thus nothing is worth doing.

b) Active Nihilism: Nihilism seen as a continuous process, meaning one strips the outlook on life of all values, and then create new values out of the void, thus turning nihilism into a form of mental weapon, that one can use to examine different interpretations of reality.

The passive nihilism is essentially what a philosopher would call fatalism; there exists no reality and no truth, thus we as human individuals are trapped within an illusion. One could say this is a form of extreme depression or extreme passive outlook on life, as it claims that the individual lacks any form of free will, since it cannot act upon something that doesn't exist. Passive nihilism can therefore be seen as us giving up on life, rejecting our potential in acting upon the world, regardless if it is ultimately "real" or not.

This conclusion, that we don't need to "objectively" affirm everything in order for it to become worth believing in or acting upon, leads us to the nihilism that will be discussed here; the active nihilism. The active nihilist sees nihilism as a sort of mental filter, that kills established norms and values, to examine and re-create an interpretation of an idea, that is closer to reality. Nihilism bypasses moral conventions to study ideas from a causal perspective. Let us systematically, step by step, go through this process:

Fatalism

A winter forest depicting freezing, existential cold.

Parable

According to Nordic mythology, there was in the beginning of time only a massive hole of emptiness, Ginnungagap. Nothing existed, nothing had ever existed; reality was not. On the one side of the hole laid the world of ice - Nifelhem. On the other side of the hole laid the world of fire - Muspelhem. Inside this large hole, the fire and the ice met and formed a giant creature called Ymer and a cow called Audumbla. These were the two original creatures that together were to become the universe, as we know it today. Why, you may ask, did fire and ice meet to create life? What was the intention, the reason, the "truth," behind such a creative process? Why did emptiness turn into somethingness?

The passive nihilist rejects all value and claims nothing is real. The logical fallacy here becomes obvious: if we claim to believe in no values, we've managed to create a new value; the belief in non-belief. Thus passive nihilism is a self-contradictory state that leads us to the realization, that life is a space in which we as individuals all the time establish new values, derived from the study of the world around us.

Realism

A dead tree to symbolize the realization of the tangible material side of reality.

Parable

John and Mike were playing in the forest. They stopped by a giant river and Mike said to John: "Nothing is real, you know. This is all made-up to fool us into thinking we're living in reality. That river is nonsense; it's not even there. You're a fool, John, to believe that this world is real." John felt angry and in pure rage, pushed his friend down into the river, where he tried to fight against the strong current, but it was of no use. Mike screamed for help, kicked with his legs to remain above surface and catch some air, until he disappeared down into the water and was never seen again.

As active nihilists we wish to examine and study ideas, to find their counterpart in reality and see what is real and what is not. To agree upon something that we can use to find correlation between idea and function in reality, we look for that which we by all means can say is real. The first thing we will find is that physical reality is real. Realism claims that the physical world is the "ultimate reality" or "end reality," thus a form of space in which the nihilist can test his or her ideas and weed out those who do not match reality.

Idealism

A light cast through the forest to demonstrate the highest metaphysical truth.

Parable

"And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets." (Plato, The Republic (Book VII), The Allegory of the Cave)

A visual image of Plato's allegory over reality as representation of our mental senses.

In the famous allegory of the cave, the Greek thinker Plato spoke of humans trapped inside a cave, chained to a wall. Behind them was a burning fire that created shadows when things were moving in front of the light. These shadows were cast upon the opposite wall in relation to where the prisoners were chained. The Christians interpreted this as there existed a "pure" abstract world and that the physical world was an illusion. Plato was actually hinting at the opposite: we as individuals create when we interpret physical reality. Words, ideas, truths - these do not "exist" in the actual sense of the word, but are subjective creations that exist only within the mind of individuals. In order to interpret physical reality, we must create symbolic representations of it, in order to try to understand it. This is the basic foundation to all traditional Indo-European religion and philosophy.

What this means, in relation to realism and how we see physical reality, is that our internal, subjective world, and our external, objective world, share a function in the process of life as a whole. The American Nihilist Underground Society describes this as a parable in Love and Nihilism: An Integralist Primer:

The derivation of truth, and attainment of goals in the language of truth, is a process of uniting mind and body that transcends subject/object division. These perceptions are not objective in that they originate and end in the individual, but are stimulated by and acted upon within objective space. The individual, and its thoughts, are part of the mechanism of life.

For this reason, moral distinctions such as "mind your own business" and "thou shalt not kill" are meaningless, since they presuppose the barrier between subject and object, and mind and body, to be absolute.

A simple example can be found in nature. A man moves to a distant valley and sets up his house. Because he exists in the external world, he must use it to survive; because he can conceive of the concept of farming, he acts upon this and creates a farm. Yet he attempts to do so in concert with the tendencies of nature, such as seasons and rainfall, so that he may succeed with the minimal amount of friction with the tendency of his world.

It would be false to say his desire was wholly subjective, because it was shaped by the objective. Also false is the idea that it was objective, as it originated in his mind. This is part of the mind/body dualistic paradox that causes us to perceive either that our thoughts are more real than our world, or that we must not act to change our external world because it is divided from our thoughts.

In philosophical terms, this idea is most commonly referred to as idealism, or the belief that the world consists out of ideas, that manifest themselves in physical matter through schematic structures. For instance, think about the chair you're sitting on right now. It is both a physical object, but at the same time it is built on a certain design, which you could draw on a paper and show your friend, so that he - if he had the skill and the material - could build his own chair and sit down next to you.

Structuralism

A forest as a manifestation of a complex structural design manifested in physical trees and branches.

So we have concluded that nihilism is the study of physical reality, through a process of extreme scepticism that kills false values and re-creates new ones, that share a function with its counterpart in reality. This means that we over time will build a large amount of ideas, based on structures we've found to describe how mechanisms in reality function. The study of structures is fittingly called structuralism. Structuralism is at core a theory that claims that no individual symbols, values, truths, or words, carry an internal meaning in itself. The only way, says the structuralist, to create meaning, is to place individual symbols within larger structural contexts.

An example is our language: what does the word 'kill' mean to You? Quickly we realize the fallacy here: 'kill' can for instance be seen as positive, as in "I killed the thief that broke into my house and raped my wife," or be seen as negative, as in "I killed my best friend because I envied his family." This example is not a way of saying "this is right / this is wrong," but a way of demonstrating how individual words can have different meanings, depending on the context that they are placed within.

Our ideas and "truths" work the same way: they are only given a functional meaning when they are understood as parts of a larger structural idea. A five-dollar bill is not worth anything in Norway, since Norway doesn't deal with American dollars, but in America you'd be able to purchase a pack of seeds for the birds living in the tree next to your house. The active nihilist is thus at the same time a structuralist, that wants to improve his or her way of finding structures in reality and creating a representation for them, in order to form beliefs and ideas that are as realistically as possible.

Integralism
~ The Continuity of Life via Philosophical Nihilism

Autumn as an expression of an organic cycle that integralism sees as the highest value.

When we understand nihilism as a way of determining realistic ideas and values, we also understand ourselves as part of something larger and greater. Our world is no longer a space full of trees and birds, but of complex systems that determine the course of the creatures living here. The material world is to the idealist, not an end in itself, but a playground in which we can create and destroy, by changing the underlying ideas. We stretch a bow and shoot an arrow, hitting a deer in the forest. The physical body will decay within months and turn into earth, but no ideas were actually "killed." In science we often say that universe is energy, and that this energy cannot be destroyed, nor that we can create "new" or more energy, only re-form the energy we have.

This means that while all physical matter, like our body, is transient and eventually will become something else, ideas like cultural values, symphonies, paintings, and ideals, can remain intangible but eternal. We cannot "feel" or "touch" a symphony, but the composer can write down notes, reflecting certain tones played on an instrument, on a paper, and if read by a skilled musician, be remembered and passed on to future generations to come, that will be able to listen to the symphony, performed by an orchestra and a conductor. More or less all European philosophers have claimed that this is the only way to reach immortality: to create something lasting that will live on beyond our mortal lives. Ludwig van Beethoven's music is still alive, so are the paintings of Casper David Friedrich, and the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Their bodies are gone but their ideas - their art - is still alive and praised around the world. They've reached immortality through idealism.

As idealists we understand that we are not to live on this planet forever. We will all die and are in fact only part of a great organic cycle, without inherent "purpose" or "meaning" behind it. It just is. If we dare to face our own mortality and the possibility of preserving our planet for future generations, we will place the order in which we live above our own immediate existence, as it is the source of all our pleasures, dreams, and possibilities. Without it we wouldn't be. This is called integralism: the belief in Life as a whole. Just as an infant would not hurt the womb that brought it life and nurtured it, claims the integralist, we as human beings must fight for life as a continuous process, including our planet and its ecosystems. The human individual is thus no longer a sacred absolute, which no one may kill or hurt, but a part of a larger life that is far more important. We call this the final realization of a mature active nihilist: integralism, the continuity of life, via philosophical nihilism.

Nihilism and Impact - a CORRUPT perspective

Nihilism is a gateway to all mature philosophies. Nihilism as a belief system has gained popularity in recent years as the futility of a belief system in human society has seeming gone awry. We went from having not enough civilization and civilized morals in our lives, to having lives that are almost nothing but moral and sentimental messages from society. Thus we are both conditioned toward social objectives, and determined to avoid them, forming a paradoxical state of mind.

This mental worldview is hard on people of a logical mindset, as they find themselves rebelling against anything which does have positive value, yet sickened with fear of that which they sense as negative, thus constantly in a loop shuttling between fear and inflated self-vision as "good." Many are finding nihilism is a logical solution to this problem. The nihilist strips away all of the values but the most basic materialist concepts: I am here and alive. This x will hurt me if I get too close to it, and this y is generally safe to eat. W is a firm friend and I trust him; Z has done nothing but borrow money to buy drinks. (Center for Nihilist and Nihilism Studies, About Nihilism)

The quoted text above describes how nihilism can be applied to human thinking in our daily lives. At CORRUPT we believe that modern society has turned subjective interpretation of reality, into a "world" in itself, in order to try to control the uncomfortable sides of our existence, such as death, inequality, war, hate, struggle, natural selection etc. This means that we have created a CORRUPT society that no longer upholds realistic values and ideals.

Nihilism, in our view, is an effective way of reducing the modern worldview to the most basic set of values that coincide with our natural reality. We believe that nihilism can be used to avoid depression, self-defeatism, guilt, passivity, and other forms of psychological neurosis that are so common in our modern time. Because most of these inner problems stem from different forms of fatalism, nihilism can effectively bypass that and look beyond the fancy symbols and holy promises of our current society.

NORMAL: DID YOU HEAR HOW BUSH STOLE THE ELECTION?
NIHILIST: OH, THEY'RE STEALING ELECTIONS NOW. HOW FUNNY. DID YOU KNOW BELL PEPPERS ARE A GOOD SOURCE OF VITAMIN C?
NORMAL: OMFG I HEARD AL-QAEDA IS PLANNING TO ATTACK US!
NIHILIST: YOU KNOW, VAN GOGH REALLY CAPTURED THE ESSENCE OF SUSPENSE IN HIS SURREALISTIC PAINTINGS. MIGHT BE A GOOD TIME TO CHECK THEM OUT.
NORMAL: GASOLINE IS TOTALLY EXPENSIVE THESE DAYS.
NIHILIST: MONEY EVERYWHERE. I MADE AN INTERPRETIVE SCULPTURE OUT OF MY COMPOST HEAP. (Vijay Prozak, How does a nihilist live?")
All practical and psychological benefits of nihilism is beyond the scope of this document· Instead we wish to point to general suggestions on how nihilism can be applied to every day life:

- Crowd mentality: A group of people try to enforce a certain idea by justifying it on the ground that many people agree with the proposed idea. Modern society is full of this, from Democracy, where people vote on a belief and claim it's good because a majority like it, to utilitarian thought, that says our society is "progressive" because it manages to make most people "happy" through television and jobs. A nihilist denies these thoughts and sees them for what it is: "a mass of individuals that appeal to numbers, in order to prove that their idea is truth, while reality says this is a logical fallacy. You cannot replace leadership with symbolic votes, no matter how many people that participate in an election!"

- Depression: An extreme form of fatalism, that has created a negative circle from which the individual cannot seem to escape. Nihilism frees us from this and opens up our eyes to something larger: "we can bypass our depression and passivity by creating new values and finding things in life we deem as important and beautiful, like nature, art, struggle, and love."

- Existential crisis: Existentialists like Sartre claimed that the human individual had complete control over its choice of values applied to phenomenon's in reality, meaning that the individual alone had to create a meaning with his or her own life. These choices created a form of anxiety that was inevitable for this existential condition. Many people today feel, not happy or rewarded by all the "choices" we have in modern society, but anxious and confused by all the alternatives that lay before us. What do we want? What is our purpose? The nihilist says that "free will" is not interesting: "we must find the things we feel are important to our lives, regardless of the alternatives. If you walk into the supermarket and want to buy lettuce, and find that only one piece of lettuce is healthy and the others are rotten, which significance has 'freedom of choice' in that particular situation? You choose the healthy lettuce and walk away with a smile on your face, while other people will stand there and study colour, shape, and smell, to anxiously decide what lettuce they wish to bring home. We don't need more choices, we need the right choices."

- Disconnection: Our suburban cities are placed far away from green forests and blue lakes, thus many people today cannot relate to nor understand the beauty and wisdom of nature, as they've disconnected from it and spend their lives in front of computers, televisions, and office desks. Nihilism penetrates the illusions we fabricate while we find our existence boring and pointless: "money and material pleasures do not satisfy us in the long run," claims the nihilist, "we need to return to nature and live lives that are more fulfilling and meaningful. We must re-reconnect our lives to nature, not only to understand our own life better, but also to learn how to appreciate beauty in things that also may seem violent or dangerous. A bird eating another bird, is it "evil", or just another inseparable mechanism of the process of life?"

- Hedonism: Many people feel their lives lack meaning, so they do their best to fill that vacuum, by following their material desires, leading to an excessive hedonistic lifestyle of shallow sex, lots of fast-food and television, many social events with false friends, and political groups where people scream the same symbolic message, and congratulate themselves for being "modern." The nihilist says that tangible material pleasures only constitute as temporary escapism: "You may enjoy this evening with a man you find attractive and have sex with him because of that, but when you wake up the next morning and look yourself in the mirror, a cold and dead face will stare back at you. You've become an empty shell that hates itself and find no reason to keep on living, except for the next time you'll have sex again."
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- The moral God: Modern Christians hover between the Christian morality and the functions of reality, like the difference between "Thou shalt not kill" and watching a bear slicing and dicing his fish to survive. The nihilist exclaims: "God is not in an external heaven, separated from our world, but a part of our natural reality. Thus his moral laws coincide with those of how reality operates. I pledge alliance only to the God that is found within nature!"

- Culture and racism: People on TV say that those who oppose the idea behind multiculturalism, are racists and full of hate, even if multiculturalism has created ethnic conflicts, killed a lot of native culture, and continues to systematically discriminate other races. The nihilist explains his view on this: "It seems to me that there indeed are differences between cultures and races, and that these differences make life interesting. But if you force two or more cultures to adhere to the same norms in society, you destroy these differences, which creates a grey mass without identity, other than McDonald's and corporate jobs. What if each culture and each race had its own space? Then they would be able to develop themselves freely without the intervention of other cultures and people."

These are theoretical examples on how a nihilist may bypass moral and social conventions, to find new values more close to reality. The difficulty here is to apply theories to daily life and put ideas into practice. Nihilism is therefore, from what we've discussed here previously, both a very simple idea - the belief in nothingness - and a complex philosophy that varies exponentially in par with the logical ability of each individual. The more intelligent and intellectual we are, the better nihilists we become.

Conclusion:

Nihilism is eternal beauty. We face many challenges in modern society. Most people seem to have already given up on their community and relapsed into comfortable, passive roles. This has created a negative loop that continues to add to the larger problem. Nihilism, in our view, can bypass this. By removing all external value and social pressure, we are able to free ourselves from the chains that have held us down, inside the cave of imprisonment. Plato knew it, Nietzsche knew it, and Beethoven knew it: we can learn to appreciate and love life again, if we are willing to go beyond the symbolism of our perception of reality, and see things for what they really are. Nihilism offers that key, if we dare to use it, and unlock the gates we've kept closed for thousands of years.