"If in everyday life, you are asked about continued existence after death by one of those people who would like to know everything but refuse to learn anything, the most appropriate and approximately correct answer is: 'After your death you will be what you were before your birth.' For this answer implies that it is preposterous to demand that a species of existence which had a beginning should not have an end; in addition, however, it contains a hint that there may be two kinds of existence and, correspondingly, two kinds of nothingness."
-Arthur Schopenhauer
Nihilism is the theory that meaning beyond the imminent is irrelevant.
Nihilism is the foundation of objectivism. Through removing external value one sees what is actually there, which, given the workings of the universe, has equal value and is thus equally impermanent.
Nihilism is beauty.
Nihilism is not merely a flippant rejection of societal norms or an angry reaction caused by being powerless under the weight of a capitalistic society whose leaders alone determine values, potentials and human futures based on their economic reward to those in power. Rather, nihilism is a cautious and studied result in which every value asserted by society has been inspected and has never failed to ring hollow.
If the value of everything is arbitrary then are we not then free to determine these values for ourselves, free of coercion, and to then go our own course?
If the morals and values of the dominant class have no basis other than to reinforce their control and self-interests then aren't we free to ignore their concerns and instead do what serves us best?
Encourage others to freedom from the meaningless and arbitrary social dogma that keeps us focused at our expense on providing for the interests of our leaders rather than for our own.
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.
Many have noted that since the introduction of technology to the Western world, communication of raw information in society has shot up exponentially. Both in physical form - newspaper, book, radio, magazine, television, internet - and in mental form, we are constantly at the center of a vortex of impulse-reaction messages. Nihilism strips away this conditioning, and lets us once again relax and select the things we do value.
Where many philosophical systems wax political, nihilism does not; it simply is and explains what is without neurosis, panic, paranoia and overburdening contemplation. There is no necessary action to be taken as a nihilist. Most of what nihilism entails occurs entirely in the mind of the philosophical thinker, and thinking nihilists do not look or behave abnormally.
The nihilist differs however in his or her attitude toward events in the future, values of social experience and impact of change. A nihilist first accepts, and then analyzes; nihilism is not an anti-rational or anti-logical belief system, only one in which prejudgments, especially those of a social or religious nature, are removed.
Why Nihilism, A Practical Definition
As research probes further into the complexities of the human mind, it becomes clear that the mind is far from being a composite thing which is an actor upon its world through thoughts; rather, thoughts compose the mind, in the form of connections and associations wired into the tissue of the brain, creating circuitry for future associations of like stimulus. The schematic of this intellectual machine builds separate routing for situations it is likely to encounter, based on grouped similarities in events or objects. In this view of our computing resources, it is foolish to allow pre-processing to intervene, as it creates vast amounts of wiring which serve extremely similar purposes, thus restricting the range of passive association (broad-mindedness) or active association (creativity) possible within the switching mechanism of the brain as a whole. As here we are devout materialists, the brain and mind are seen as equatable terms.
The "positive" effects of nihilism on the mind of a human being are many. Like the quieting of distraction and distortion within the mind brought about by meditative focus, nihilism pushes aside preconception and brings the mind to focus within the time of the present. Influences which could radically skew our perceptions - emotions, nervousness, paranoia, or upset, to name a few - fade into the background and the mind becomes more open to the task at hand without becoming spread across contemplations of potential actions occurring at different levels of scale regarding the current task. Many human errors originate in perceiving an event to be either more important than it is, or to be "symbolically" indicative of relevance on a greater scale than the localized context which it affects, usually because of a conditioned preference for the scale of eventiture existing before the symbolic event.
Nihilism as a philosophical doctrine must not be confused with a political doctrine such as anarchism; political doctrines (as religions are) remain fundamentally teleological in their natures and thus deal with conclusions derived from evidence, where nihilism as a deontological process functions at the level of the start of perception, causing less of a focus on abstracting a token ruleset defining the implications of events than a rigorous concentration on the significance of the events as they are immediately effecting the situation surrounding them. For example, a nihilistic fighter does not bother to assess whether his opponent is a better fighter or not that the perceiving agency, but fights to his best ability (something evolution would reward, as the best fighter does not win every fight, only most of them). As a result of this conditioning, nihilism separates the incidence of events/perceptions from causal understanding by removing expectations of causal origins and implications to ongoing eventiture.
Understanding nihilism requires one drop the pretense of nihilistic philosophy being an endpoint, and acceptance of it being a doorway. Nihilism self-reduces; the instant one proclaims "There is no value!" a value has been created. Nihilism strips away conditiong at the unconscious and anticipatory levels of structure in the mind, allowing for a greater range of possiblity and quicker action. Further, it creates a powerful tool to use against depression or anxiety, neurosis and social stigma. Since it is a concept necessarily in flux, as it provides a starting point for analysis in any situation but no preconditioned conclusions, it is post-deconstructive in that it both removes the unnecessary and creates new space for intellectual development at the same time.
Nihilism remains one of the most controversial topics of the modern era, for a good reason: science has supported a form of nihilism by steadily revealing more of the underpinning behind natural processes, making things that once seemed to be unique objects appear as a collaboration of different effects. Slowly the post-animist ideas of the things we refer to with nouns being unique and of a consistent content are being exposed as structures of granular objects intersecting according to natural laws and constraints. This process threatens many of the social and emotional constructs used commonly in human society with a destabilization based not in the threat to the concept in question, but to the concept archetype from which those concepts emerge.
While thinkers like F.W. Nietzsche railed against the "nihilism" of older times, this nihilism existed before social thinking made humans as neurotic as they are now, and thus was used to refer to feelings of futility, fatalism and meaninglessness found in people who had rejected the static objectivist framework of "God" but who retained the imprint of that expectation from life, namely the desire to find some absolutist view upon which all else hinges. Nihilism does not refute objectivism but it does refute certain forms of symbolic categorization, including "God," which provide a static organizational system upon which people are supposed to base their lives and value systems. While for many the idea of "God" is comforting, it is an insidious virus in that its users presuppose a common causality to any existential events, thus by finding any eventiture they attribute it to "God" and from it prove the existence of God. These closed-circuit mental processes contribute to confusion and sentimental attitudes toward mortality, programming people for intellectual failure before they're even aware of their mental potential.
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