Nihilism

The 20th century is one of wars and dictatorships. It opened with the First World War, during which Communist dictatorship appeared on the European fringe in Russia, and following which Fascist and Nazi dictatorships arose in the heart of Europe. Then came the Second World War and the Cold War. Communist dictatorship spread to Asia, Africa and the Americas (Cuba).

Even areas which hadn't arrived at dictatorship were well along the road. They suffered continuous erosion of citizens' rights.

History is a record of human actions, and human actions are guided by ideas, so we must seek the cause in the realm of ideas.

Dictators were installed, and launched their wars, to the approval of millions. Fascism was applauded for making "the trains run on time." Hitler was "just what Germany needed." A Canadian Prime Minister cozied up to the world record-holder for mass murder, Chairman Mao. The Soviet dictatorship had the warm approval of the free world's cultural establishment, up to the moment of its collapse. So we must search among ideas which govern approval and disapproval—moral ideas.

Germany is prominent in the calamities of the 20th century. It was aggressor in two major wars, and was the home of Nazism. The founder of Communism was German, and his ideas were variations on a German theme. Germany is the center of the infection. We must seek a German connection.

It takes about a century for ideas to seep down from ivory towers to infect everyone. So we look for ideas which were new about a century before the First World War, in the late 18th or early 19th centuries.

Following all these clues, we look for a German who introduced a moral innovation about the end of the 18th century, and whose influence was global. Is there such a man?

Yes. He was born, lived and died in East Prussia, 1724-1804. His name is Immanuel Kant. You may not have heard of him, but Kant's influence rules your life in myriad ways. Every major philosophy of the 19th century is based on Kant's.1. Kant set the terms for every major philosophy of the 20th century. These Kantian offspring saturate the world's cultural establishments. Kant is one of the "Big Three" philosophers, along with Plato and Aristotle. This much is uncontroversial.

Kant's key moral innovation was to strip self-interest of all honor. No matter whose interest, no matter by what standard it is judged, no matter what consequences follow from it, the fact that it is someone's self-interest damns it!

To act from self-interest is to pursue some value, some good. To reject all self-interest is to reject all good, absolutely and in principle. When good is ruled out, what's left is evil. This is nihilism.

Don't confuse Kantian nihilism with traditional religious morality, which advises men to shun "worldly goods" for the sake of "heavenly goods." Nihilism rejects the good as such, heavenly or otherwise. The saint who pursues heavenly bliss through pious observances and good works wins zero credit from a nihilist. Nihilism credits no-one who seeks, upholds, or defends any good whatever.

Nor can nihilism merely be indifferent to good, as is recommended by some codes. Proof of righteousness for a nihilist is pursuit of ruin; it's the only way to be sure his motives are untainted by self-interest.

Nihilism is active evil with delusions of righteousness. And that exactly describes the major horrors of the 20th century! Nazis were regarded by millions as moral idealists! So were Fascists. So were Communists. They all regarded themselves as moral idealists. This is a mystery to those who don't understand nihilism.

Crusading evil is the curse of the 20th century, not only in politics, but in field after field. We have music without tone, sculpture without form, painting without objects, stories without plots, measurement without standards—the list is long and ugly. All are aggressively and righteously promoted. Only a morality without good can explain that! Nihilism could almost be defined as crusading evil.

Nihilism is far from spent; it keeps mutating into new forms. The cure is to obliterate it at the root, but that requires upholding the good as the purpose of morality. And that requires the honesty to recognize self-interest as the motive of morality, and the courage to crusade for it.

But it doesn’t require heroic amounts of honesty. How tough can it be to admit that it is selfish to practice what everyone recognizes as morality? That honesty is the best policy? That it is selfish to earn one’s living by fair and honorable means? That it is selfish to recognize courage as a practical necessity of life? That it is selfish to define your interests in terms of your real, actual, long–range good?

At the most basic level, taught by mothers around the world, how tough is it to admit that it is selfish to be nice to people—to remember your wife’s birthday, to be a good friend to your friends, and to greet customers with a cheery smile?

Nor does it require heroic amounts of courage to crusade for self-interest. You can appeal to the example of great philosophers like Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. They upheld one’s own happiness as the goal of a moral life, and one’s own virtue as the practical means of achieving it. How scary can it be to uphold a moral tradition of millennia?

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1. Including Hegel's, whose collectivism and rabid worship of the German state usually earn him the blame for German dictatorship and aggression.

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You needn’t despair at the state of the world—you can become a Quackgrass activist! Copy this article! Keep the original for future copies. Paper meetings with it! Paper your office! Leave a stack on your business counter! If you expect hostility, use stealth and cunning—it’ll drive your opponents wild! Be ingenious! Have fun!

Michael Miller is an engineer and Objectivist philosopher with thirty years of experience. He had been a member of Boycott Alberta Medicare in 1969 and of the Association to Defend Property Rights from 1973 on. He writes in-depth philosophical theory at his publication, Quackgrass Press, which can be accessed at http://www.quackgrass.com.

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The 20th century is one of wars and dictatorships.

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Most centuries were ones of wars and dictatorships. Much of human history is little more than a list of wars, conquests, and subsequently being conquered.

especially the nineteenth century, which was without doubt the most peaceful and least bloody of eras.

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As in our own civil war which cost more lives than any other in our history. The arrival of the German '48ers here fleeing from the wars in Europe. The wars in Asia.

The American Civil War had cost "only" (and I use this term in a comparative, not a utilitarian manner) 650,000 lives and was the bloodiest war during the entire nineteenth century. This is opposed to some 4 million total killed in WWI and over 45 million in WWII, along with several tens of thousands here and there in smaller conflicts such as Korea and Vietnam (and the colossal ethnic strife which goes unreported in Africa, claiming millions of lives in Sudan and destroying 750,000 people in Rwanda in 1994).

However, the 20th century's scale of death and destruction, as well as frequency and expanse of conflict, had by far outpaced any earlier time

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The only thing different about the 20th century was the increase in population meaning more people to kill or be killed, the reporting of the wars, and the technology to kill. War has been the general rule.

I saw an NPTV documentary the other night extoling the flowering of art and architecture in Egypt thousands of years ago and attributing it to various leaders. I had to laugh. It was all done with conquered slaves from conquered nations. Millions died to build thrasures and monuments for the few. It's the history of mankind.

What a lot of stuffed shirt baloney! The mass murders. The oppression. The misery. The brutality that man has for his fellow man has been discussed and written about by pointy heads for centuries. If you're so smart, why haven't you all figured it and let the rest of us in on it. Or, is it like gravity and remains just slightly out of your grasp.

Not merely does this article pierce through to the essence of evil, but I have also undertaken similar endeavors in other works. I will start you on an analysis of the most brutal society imaginable, that of Orwell's 1984, by giving you the link to the beginning chapter of my extensive commentary and analysis of its structures and motivations.

http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Collectivism.html

The essence of evil has been discovered by numerous philosophers; it is merely that ignorant ruffians have either shunned it with contempt or been isolated from it by the pop-culture and mass deception of mainstream doublethink.

I am
G. Stolyarov II

While your insight concerning Ancient Egypt is correct, please do not confuse it with the nineteenth century, the most economically free, politically humane, and culturally rational period of human existence, where it seemed for some time that the brutal impulse within man was on the verge of becoming tamed. It was cultural nihilism that had reversed the upright trends of the Gilded Age.

I will start you on an analysis of the most brutal society imaginable, that of Orwell's 1984,..

With all due respects, read that, been there, done that, by way of experience in Lyndon Johnson's conscripted "Army of His Re-election". That was "1984" in 1967. I don't think all this political analysis is rocket science, though there are those that would like us to believe so. Most of the supposed rational thought on the irrational thought of the "Thugs" of the 20th. Century is irrational.

The simple fact of the matter is, some criminals actually work their way up the ladder to be the heads of sovereign countries. The country's internal and external affairs are then run in the same manner as any other "gang". The only difference I see between Al Capone and Hitler, Stalin and Hussein, is one of degree. I see no grand intellect, no grand plan, no high theory that explains this phenomenon to my own personal satisfaction. Some people are born (or made into) SOB's and become, by total chance, the dictators of countries.

Why hasn't the US experienced dictators? We have. They only get as far as mayor or maybe US Senator. What stops them? The Constitution. God bless you, James Madison.

I am not sure what program you were watching, but the theory that the great acheivements of the Egyptians were a result of slave labor has finally been put into the trash heap of history. Recently in Egypt there have been extensive new finds of burials and city remains that explain the great Egyptian culture without such absurd notions as slave labor. (The mind does not accomplish great things by force!) I have waited for this find for sometime, for the explanation that people have held seemed to me as glaringly contradictory as anything imaginable. To say the pyramids were built by slave labor is no different than to say 'A is not-A'. Any how, the new finds reveal a heirarchy of social status from the most menial, to middle management as it were, all the way up to the Pharaohs themselves. These ancient people were ALL committed to some single purpose (What exactly that was we may never fully understand). They were not slaves. And the history of great accomplishments in the world since the very beginning is an inverse ratio to the history of freedom. The fallacy of ancient slavery must be put to rest once and for all, and this need no longer be accomplished through logic; we now have the empirical evidence to vindicate the theory.

Eudaimon

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Next you will be telling me the guys who labored building the monuments and edifaces belonged to the Teamsters Union. Either you're nuts or you think I'm nuts enough to believe your fairy tales.

While I do ultimately agree with you regarding how Kant’s philosophy should not be followed (he also voiced support for the French Revolution, even going as far as to consider it the crowning event of his life, apparently not even caring about the wholesale slaughter of us Christians DESPITE professing to hate war and all bloodshed), I disagree with you on your implication that selfishness isn’t nihilistic, or that one can care only for yourself and not be nihilistic. Let’s look at Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre, not to mention Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Marquis de Sade, all of whom embraced selfishness to the fullest and if anything embraced selfishness for nihilistic purposes and truly enjoyed hurting other people. In fact, one can even argue they were more Objectivist than even Rand, and NOT in a good way, obviously. I guess you can also look at how Kefka acted here, where he made clear that not only does he only place value in himself and his powers instead of anyone else, but he if anything finds harming and slaughtering people the only thing he truly enjoys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-cdwDnryY0

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