The Culture of Nihilism

I’m sure you’ve noticed it. The tailgating. The not stopping at red lights. The endless car accidents. The rudeness. The incivility. The outright nastiness. The hate crimes.

I live in one of nicest areas of The Silicon Valley: Sharon Heights, Menlo Park. The garage at my apartment building is filled with shiny, expensive, luxury cars: Teslas, Porsches, Mercedes, Lexus, etc.. Just outside of my apartment complex is a four way intersection. It’s almost impossible to get through it in an orderly way. Nobody waits their turn. It is a spectacle to watch people driving immaculate $100k+ cars cutting each other off, honking at each other and giving each other the finger.

What is going on?

Believe it or not, the disintegration of our culture is the culmination of a long historical process that has its roots in the deepest philosophical debates and how they have been resolved historically.

It starts with The Death of God. Nietzsche first announced it in his Parable of the Madman in The Gay Science in 1882. Science destroyed belief in religion leaving nothing in its place. The mad man goes to the marketplace to announce the death of God. But the people mock him. The mad man realizes that the people have no idea what they have done and what the consequences will be should they fail to find a replacement for Christianity, which grounded Western civilization for almost two millennia.

The 1960s were a critical transition period. Intellectuals started to address the injustices and contradictions at the heart of American society, especially slavery and racism against black people. Also the extermination of the Native Americans. Lastly, The Vietnam War.

To many, it all added up to a sense that America didn’t live up to its own ideals set forth in The Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal”. It was a hypocritical, even evil country.

In 1965, the immigration laws were opened up. In 1924, they had been tightened up but now that was reversed. The United States had been primarily populated by Western Europeans historically – but now that was all about to change. Asians, Latin Americans, Arabs all began to flood in. This accelerated dramatically under the presidency of Joe Biden in the wake of the pandemic.

Combined with the rejection of America as a morally exemplary nation, the changing ethnic complexion of the society led to a steady erosion of civility between different people. No longer a melting pot, America became balkanized, eventually descending into the war of all against all that we have today.

October 7 is important too. Hamas planned and executed a brutal terrorist attack on innocent Jewish civilians attending a music festival. They raped young women and took many young Israelis hostage who they proceeded to torture. Ironically, when Israel responded with force, which is their right of self defense, people worldwide turned on the Israelis rather than blaming Hamas.

The cause of this has nothing to do with supposed Israeli genocide. It is blatant antisemitism. Despised since the era of Christ, Israel and the Jews are an easy target for those with a deeper malignancy toward white people and Western Civilization itself.

The LGBT and Trans movements are an expression of this attack on Western values as well. The fundamental commitment of Liberalism is freedom. Individuals have the right to think and do as they see fit – as long as no one else is harmed in the process. With the breakdown of traditional values caused by the death of God and the sullying of America’s moral standing, many have turned against the bourgeois values that built Western Civilization and even against human nature itself.

“I’m a woman trapped in man’s body” is a rejection of the bourgeois as well as natural order of things. The LGBT and Trans movements take the idea of freedom to an absurd extreme, rejecting the biological distinction between man and woman and marriage and family as the foundation of Western civilization.

In The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, Gibbon showed that Rome wasn’t destroyed by barbarian invaders. First it was destroyed from within: it lost the principles and moral fiber that made it great. It became decadent and hollowed out from the inside. Only then was it vulnerable to attack from outside.

In his brilliant book The Suicide of the West (1964) James Burnham in essence argued that history was repeating itself. What happened in Rome was happening again as Liberalism turned against itself and eroded the foundations of Western Civilization.

It is the internal implosion, this decadent discarding of the principles and values that made Western Civilization great, that is the primary cause of the chaos and disorder we see all around us today in our everyday lives. And, like Rome, this implosion makes us vulnerable to our external enemies like China, Russia and Iran who are biding their time for the right moment to challenge us.

Like a frog that doesn’t notice that the water is slowly increasing in temperature until it’s past the boiling point, most us don’t realize what is happening because the process is gradual and cumulative. But at a certain point it will be too late and our culture will devolve into anarchy.

There will be a tipping point. Perhaps the bursting of the AI Bubble and the nasty recession that will follow it – much worse than 2008. Perhaps the conflagrations in the Middle East will escalate into World War III. I don’t know. What seems clear though is that our once great civilization is in the balance.