Neo-Nihilism & Transmutation
Untruths and the Path to Authenticity
ESSAY INTRODUCTION: I would suggest listening to the following audio where I give an introduction to the essay you are about to read.
‘Yes, the world is an illusion. But Truth is always being shown there.’
Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe.
A world of appearances has been in the making for a long time; much longer than the passing zeitgeists of various ideologies. Only that in each age, such appearances take on designated forms. And yet the more detached from reality is the age, the greater is the sense of abstractness, and thus meaninglessness or nihilism. The spectre of nihilism is but the head of a larger creature that represents a broader state of the human condition. The historian Oswald Spengler noted that nihilism begins when the vulgar rises and becomes more widespread than the decent elements in society. Spengler also famously announced a century ago that the Western world is ending, and we are witnessing the final season – the ‘winter’ – of its civilizational decline. If we are to believe Spengler, then the western world has been in decline for a solid one hundred years now. And yet, for many people, the world has never seemed more satisfying, with access to so much more content-rich lifestyles and social satisfiers. Yet, perhaps it is more the case that over the last decades, just enough of a trickle of meaning and purpose was provided by worldly living so that the spectre of meaninglessness has been kept at bay. Now, however, it would seem that the natives are becoming restless. And not just the natives of the West are becoming restless, but globally.
Spengler may have been correct in surmising that the western world has been in decline for the past century or more; certainly, in our current times, the geo-political Western block is fast losing its power base. Yet it seems apparent that something larger is in operation – a cyclic decline, perhaps? There is certainly an energetic shift noticeable across the planet, with increased dissonance, unease, anxiety, trauma, depression, nervousness, and more. Some of these conditions could be put down to a correspondence in the Earth’s decreasing magnetic fields and the increasing influx of solar and cosmic radiation. However, a grander psychic imbalance is in play through humanity’s collective psychology, and questions of meaning and purpose are arising.
The English philosopher Colin Wilson believed that modern existentialism – the alienation, nihilism, and boredom of modern life – results from a ‘fallacy of insignificance.’ In other words, a feeling that the human being is nothing, and has no role or true place in the world.1 Further, that the human sense of insignificance is not only a grand fallacy but that it is being promoted by increased materialism (hyper-materialism). Yet matters have changed dramatically in the world since Wilson produced his prognosis more than fifty years ago. Recently, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari has been announcing that the immediate future holds little hope for a new underclass of ‘irrelevant’ and ‘useless’ people. In previous centuries, says Harari, people revolted against exploitation, oppression, tyranny, etc; now, they fear becoming irrelevant.2
Huge numbers of individuals will find themselves living in a society that doesn’t need them anymore. It is a harder battle to struggle against irrelevance as there is nothing tangible to cling to or to reassure you against the encroaching insignificance other than your inner or innate sense of self. This leads to a psychological state of nihilism, for nihilism is ultimately a question of truth – a truth about oneself and how a person feels themselves to be within the experience of physical life.
Our external lives are filled with reams of relative truths; from scientific, to religious and the philosophic. Modern life has shifted from a position of overarching systemic ‘educated objectivities’ to a splattering of individual subjectivities. Whatever truths were peddled as part of the pre-existing consensus narratives (Religion, Science, etc.,) are undergoing a vast refurbishment whilst their replacements do not seem to be arriving any time soon. Almost every aspect of modern life has become questionable. Scepticism and disbelief (or non-belief) has replaced much of our civilizational questioning. Internal questioning has been substituted with a new form of cultural obedience – internal persuasion from without. When all major global, governmental, and human management systems are founded on untruths and blatant misconceptions, then the problem stems from the core of the system itself and infuses outwards into the people. Deception is the blood of the current cultural beast.
Within such a system, the only end to nihilism is tyranny and totalitarianism. Any revolution born out of apathy and existential angst will only feed the false Kingdom of this world. It has happened before. Tyrannical regimes such as Fascism and National Socialism exploited the sense of restlessness to feed into their own purposes and agenda of authoritarianism. It is because nihilism produces, or is produced from, an inner disquiet that people become unmoored from their grounding, start to drift, and are then much more susceptible to forces of mass formation and false solidarity (as so clearly shown by the work of psychologist Mattias Desmet). Furthermore, this itching sense of disquiet is often covered up through the seeking of activities and distractions that provide a temporary sense of well-being. This is the opportune time for certain pseudo-spiritualities – or ‘new spiritualities’ – to claim a sway of new clients. It is a time for magicians dressed in robes of quantum entanglement to proclaim the oneness and ‘cosmic connectivity’ of all. Anything to escape from the restlessness and meaninglessness of a materially empty existence. According to Seraphim Rose, the spectre of nihilism has already arrived at our shores:
... Nihilism has become, in our time, so widespread and pervasive, has entered so thoroughly and so deeply into the minds and hearts of all men living today, that there is no longer any “front” on which it may be fought; and those who think they are fighting it are most often using its own weapons, which they in effect turn against themselves.3
This nihilism has become pervasive because there is no longer any relationship – either tangible or non-tangible – to even relative truths. The religious, spiritual, cultural (even political) ropes of attachment have become irretrievably severed.
The only hope that has been offered in the place of the void is technological – a techno-materialism promoted as the machine of ultimate progress. The artificial construct is being praised as the ‘new authenticity.’ As philosopher Walter Benjamin would say, we now live within the age/cage of mechanical reproduction. There is no desire or wish for a return to the old authority systems. There is a fast grab for the replacement; and within this void of desperation, people will be almost willing for a new ‘great reset.’
The deepening materialism of the digital age/cage is constructing a false playground out of the increased dismantling of all the prior structures of morality and ordered meanings. The pandemic and post-pandemic pressure forced more and more people into online and digital lifestyles. The rising management systems of the carbon-controlled ‘green economy’ will further establish an architecture of monitored and curated needs. This emerging architecture of control is what I have referred to as the ‘machinic impulse’ and it takes the pre-existing forms of nihilism to a new level. The nihilism that existed prior to our current times was a rejection of moral and/or religious principles, and a feeling or philosophical perspective that nothing in the world has a real existence or meaning.
However, our consensus reality has been and continues to be manipulated so the ‘normal’ state of affairs is now a world of deep fakes, post-truth, and narrative manipulation until we are not sure if ‘the world has a real existence’ at the best of times. The nihilism that the encroaching era of deep materialism is creating is what can be called as neo-nihilism. Neo-nihilism can be viewed as constant uncertainty and untruths disguised as knowledge when it is nothing more than a power-control structure. This neo-nihilism is, I would posit, a loss of meaning and reality-grounding through a new technological world order that strips a person of any sense of inner being and triggers various unseen neuroses. Psychoanalysis tells us that neurosis is part of the humanization process – the limitation of experience; the fragmentation of perception; the dispossession of internal control. In other words, it is a ‘falling away from one’s being’ – a de-centeredness – a lack of a moral-spirit centre. This inner void creates disorientation. It is not a social-cultural or a political nihilism but a psychological one. It is a denial and (dis)belief centred around the same thing – a nothingness or zero-space. Out of this zero-space may arise a techno-mediated world of the absurd – a machinic rationality that becomes the new irrational form of narrative.
This new ‘irrational narrative’ would have the aim of becoming the next form of world structure. However, it is necessary first to dismantle the old narratives that held the old order together. In terms of a power structure, it would be better to crush the old narratives so that their remnants do not try to rise up to confront the new programming. This was seen with the National Socialism of the Nazis: it wasn’t only a physical new order but also, importantly, a psychological one. The new order must dethrone its imagined enemies to declare a new security state, or world order of security.
A new form of organization is coming into existence that represents this neo-nihilistic era of the dying cultural age. It represents a kind of lucid absurdity where technique and precision are paramount and displays an appalling insensitivity toward the human and the ‘being’ of humanity. This neo-nihilist form of organization corresponds to a terraforming and transformation of the earth and society by machines, artificial intelligence, and the inhuman ideology of social management and engineering that accompanies it. Its aim is to become a highly centralized power regime that consumes all forms of knowledge and truth divergent to its own ideological narratives: ‘For if there is no truth, power knows no limit save that imposed by the medium in which it functions, or by a stronger power opposed to it.’4
The ideological narrative, from the neo-nihilist power structure’s point of view, will be one of perfect rationality and technological progress that provides for a world of total liberation. Yet it shall be a materialist’s pseudo-utopia for, in truth, it will be the vastest, and most efficient, digital iron cage humans have ever known – for it will be pervasive and untouchable. Yet this is not the most worrying issue. The more disturbing aspect here is that there is a power-drive to establish the organization for a ‘new earth’ that is opposed to the cyclic evolutionary impulses. The core object of this project is for a transformation of humankind into a new planetary species body. It shall be a planetary species greatly reduced in number and highly segregated by status and servitude. And most importantly, it will be based on a collective humanized mass that functions at a lower vibration of being and self. In other words, a great planetary change is coming to the Earth as the planet – and human civilization – transits from one cycle into another. And a small number of wealthy and powerful individuals, with immense hubris, are attempting to manage and steer this transition to favour their materialistic goals at the expense of the many.
At the end of a grand cycle there is generally a sense of psychic malaise as well as a breakdown in mental cohesion and harmony. This phase accumulates a lot of psychic and emotional energy that can be utilized as part of the divergence (for better or for worse). The philosopher Nietzsche, who perhaps recognized this condition better than others, said that under certain circumstances, ‘Nihilism might be the sign of a process of incisive and most essential growth, and of mankind’s transit into completely new conditions of existence.’5 This sign of growth is because the human being – the new mutation – is rootless, discontinuous with a past that is being dismantled and destroyed, and is eager for the new apocalypse (i.e., ‘revelation’) to emerge in its place. And yet, there are simultaneously forces pushing to create the mass-minded collective as opposed to the individualized person.
The ‘new human’ of the devolutionary path will be a reduced version of themselves – the Robosapien that is the profane human being. Before human civilization arrives at that juncture (what some have termed as the ‘bifurcation’), there is the increasing danger of a rising incoherence that paralyzes people between the extremes of external power and an increasing internal powerlessness. This encroaching ‘lucid absurdity’ is like the emperor’s new clothes where very few people are recognizing the blatant incongruity of our mainstream narratives and so there is almost no one around to ask the question as to how we can transcend the perceptual limits of the world. It would seem that a certain form of inner truth is required for such an enterprise.
Such times of neo-nihilism – a form of ideological and spiritual purposelessness – is when things fall apart because they no longer have any centre to hold them together. And yet a form of daily life continues, similar to Bruegel’s depiction of the fall of Icarus which goes unnoticed.
The external events of any age are a projection of humanity’s inner state and psyche; only that, at certain times this collective condition becomes more visible upon the world stage. During the cycle of transition, or transmutation – of cultural death and rebirth – there are fewer commonly accepted points of orientation, and the compass no longer has a magnetic north. In times of changing magnetics, people are more eager to adopt the obedience to security as an easy external dependency. And yet, nihilism, insecurity, meaninglessness, and lack of purpose, are not the cause but the symptoms. The orientation of the individual is an internal question rather than an external one. The individual has to come to their own sense of coherence. In the words of Václav Havel: ‘The principles of control and discipline ought to be abandoned in favor of self-control and self-discipline.’6
The self/Self has to come to the fore, otherwise an individual is lost to the energetic forces of massification and external manipulation. As we enter these times of transmutation, we shall be called upon to exhibit our self-control and self-discipline if we are to recalibrate our own state of body, mind, and being. For these are vital times as we make the choice whether we physically and psychically extricate ourselves from the negating forces of chaos and step into a new cycle for humanity.
[This essay is taken from the new book by the author: ‘Is There Life on Earth: A Transmutation Octave’, published 1st April 2024]
References
1 Wilson, Colin (2018/1957) The Age of Defeat. London: Aristeia Press
2 Harari, Yuval Noah (2018) 21 Lessons for 21st Century. London: Jonathan Cape.
3 Rose, Seraphim (2018/1994) Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, p11.
4 Rose, Seraphim (2018/1994) Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, p79
5 Cited in Rose, Seraphim (2018/1994) Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, p91
6 Havel, Vaclav (1985) The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe. London: Routledge, p77
[i] Landscape with the Fall of Icarus currently displayed in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels.
Thank you for this essay, Kingsley. You are advancing in the pathways developed by Colin Wilson and Alfred North Whitehead...British philosophical luminaries of recent date. Your sense of cyclical time patterns and of historical interconnexions are revelatory of a mindscape most highly activated and deeply engaged. Yes, I must admit to having suffered an American education which did not provide those insights into nihilism as the skin boil of contemporary general consciousness...or the lack thereof...as symptomatic of these closing stanzas of the Epoch of Kali Yuga.
fantastic work.
As time shifts society goes nihlism is truth coming to those who ignored it.