God has died for them so they no longer have any way to demonstrate their piety to others. As a result we get the "woke" sub-ideology, so the super well off, in their guilt, have a new needle they can attempt to pass through the eye of. But woke is only a sub ideology, because they cannot even explain what its tenets are. Their sub ideol…
God has died for them so they no longer have any way to demonstrate their piety to others. As a result we get the "woke" sub-ideology, so the super well off, in their guilt, have a new needle they can attempt to pass through the eye of. But woke is only a sub ideology, because they cannot even explain what its tenets are. Their sub ideology is expressed in terms of what you are supposedly *not*. "I'm not racist!" and "I'm not bigoted!" and "I'm not a polluter!" and "I'm not a meat eater!", when in fact either the opposite is true, or the distinction is meaningless anyway. So "Anti-racism" is actually the most racist formulation imaginable.
This all leaves them in a constant state of negativity and fear, constantly looking over their shoulders for the next new thing they must all of a sudden all be against. It's a really miserable and unhappy state of being (which I guess means we all need to pray for them).
Dostoevsky said "If God is dead then everything is permitted". But this is like the current fad in parenting, "just let the kids do or be anything they can dream up". This of course makes kids miserable and unhappy, because of course they have no idea how they should try to behave - they're kids.
So the danger of nihilism is not that people will believe in nothing, it's that it lets people think they can believe in anything at all, no matter how absurd. Men can get pregnant. The border is secure. Biden is lucid. Or the ridiculous idea that mankind can co-exist peacefully without a minimum shared set of simple common values we agree on. The result? It becomes the jungle. Every man for himself.
And since culture is upstream of politics, the result is the chaos we are witnessing. We cannot even gin up proper awareness and discussion of the urgent and real mortal threats to our entire species, from Frankenstein viruses to bioweapons to nuclear bombs. This is because we have *no agreed moral basis, in other words no basic agreed concepts of right and wrong, upon which to base those critical discussions*.
(Apologies if this all seems obvious to the readers, it helps me to type it out).
God has died for them so they no longer have any way to demonstrate their piety to others. As a result we get the "woke" sub-ideology, so the super well off, in their guilt, have a new needle they can attempt to pass through the eye of. But woke is only a sub ideology, because they cannot even explain what its tenets are. Their sub ideology is expressed in terms of what you are supposedly *not*. "I'm not racist!" and "I'm not bigoted!" and "I'm not a polluter!" and "I'm not a meat eater!", when in fact either the opposite is true, or the distinction is meaningless anyway. So "Anti-racism" is actually the most racist formulation imaginable.
This all leaves them in a constant state of negativity and fear, constantly looking over their shoulders for the next new thing they must all of a sudden all be against. It's a really miserable and unhappy state of being (which I guess means we all need to pray for them).
Dostoevsky said "If God is dead then everything is permitted". But this is like the current fad in parenting, "just let the kids do or be anything they can dream up". This of course makes kids miserable and unhappy, because of course they have no idea how they should try to behave - they're kids.
So the danger of nihilism is not that people will believe in nothing, it's that it lets people think they can believe in anything at all, no matter how absurd. Men can get pregnant. The border is secure. Biden is lucid. Or the ridiculous idea that mankind can co-exist peacefully without a minimum shared set of simple common values we agree on. The result? It becomes the jungle. Every man for himself.
And since culture is upstream of politics, the result is the chaos we are witnessing. We cannot even gin up proper awareness and discussion of the urgent and real mortal threats to our entire species, from Frankenstein viruses to bioweapons to nuclear bombs. This is because we have *no agreed moral basis, in other words no basic agreed concepts of right and wrong, upon which to base those critical discussions*.
(Apologies if this all seems obvious to the readers, it helps me to type it out).
Well said AusYank, but your last paragraph is absolutely spot on and I wish what you say would be all too “obvious”!