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Beneath liberals’ self-celebration, the despair of nihilism
In a June 2008 entry I wrote:
For the liberals, there’s no truth, no God, no inherent male or female nature, our country is a swamp of irredeemable guilt and deserves to go out of existence—but everything is “wonderful”: the latest “wonderful” movie, the latest “wonderful” vacation, the latest “wonderful” presidential candidate …
This “wonderfulness,” in the absence of truth, is the very definition of relativism, which is really another word for nihilism. And nihilism produces despair, regardless of how much people are enjoying their latest vacation.
Laura Wood replied:
In this and this story about lesbian couples tying the knot, notice to what lengths the women go to talk about their happiness. They sound as if they are drugged. Why all the bliss? Because the exact opposite is true. Beneath their words—perhaps beneath their own shallow field of consciousness—is unacknowledged despair. That’s why the lawsuits. That’s why the smiley pictures. That’s why the big parties. They need to convince not others, but themselves.
To which I replied:
Yes. The less truth there is in people’s lives, the more “wonderful” their lives must be.
Or, more precisely, the less truth there is in the world and in society, the more “wonderful” our individual selves must be.
- end of initial entry -
Ken Hechtman writes:
You’re missing something big here. Imagine how you’d feel if almost overnight the whole world came around and welcomed you and your ideas into the mainstream and admitted that you were right and they were wrong. That’s what it feels like to be gay right now. The turnaround in public opinion in the last five years is like nothing anybody my age has ever seen, and I pay attention to this stuff. So sure, there are some people putting out some over-the-top emotional declarations. It comes with the territory.
LA to Ken Hechtman:
I keep getting an error message when trying to save your comment. Maybe the truth is too horrible for the VFR site to handle it.
Ken Hechtman replies:
OK, you got me laughing at that one.
LA continues:
Nope. The comment is saved.
LA writes:
To return to the discussion, Mr. Hechtman makes a good point. But I should have made clear that when I speak of liberals’ despair, I do not mean that they are consciously, literally in despair. Of course, on the level of their conscious experience, they are full of themselves and their “wonderful” existence. They are soaring in an afflatus of triumph. They are in a state of ecstatic disbelief that Tony Blair’s pledge fifteen years ago to “sweep away those forces of conservatism” has come true, so fast and so thoroughly.
But just beneath their surface joy, there is ever-increasing disturbance. How do we know this? Consider the fact that the more power liberals enjoy over society, and the more conservatives surrender to the liberal agenda (e.g. on the issue of homosexuals in the military), the angrier the liberals become, the fuller of fear and loathing of conservatives they become, the more they feel that conservatives threaten them, and the more they want to silence, suppress, and punish conservatives.
What explains this ever-growing turbulence and hatred in the souls of liberals, at the very moment of their world-historic triumph? It is the fact that their entire existence is based on rebellion against the order of being, or, more simply, against God. As a result, the more power and fulfillment they have, the more they are divided from the order of being, and the more the tension within them grows. Therefore they feel increasingly threatened by—and are compulsively driven to crush—any remaining sign of the Truth which they have apparently defeated. In their minds, it is conservatives that symbolize belief in the hated God and the hated order of being. So it is conservatives (or rather the fantasy demonized image they have of conservatives) that the liberals must destroy.
If this explanation sounds implausible to you, ask yourself why, if liberals are so happy and victorious, they are becoming more fearful, hate-filled, and tyrannical, instead of enjoying and relaxing in their triumph?
Ken Hechtman replies:
You wrote:
If this explanation sounds implausible to you, ask yourself why, if liberals are so happy and victorious, they are becoming more fearful, hate-filled, and tyrannical, instead of enjoying and relaxing in their triumph?
That’s a good question. I will ask it in circles where nobody would answer you. You can have my own answer for free. I’ve been saying for a few years now that the take-no-prisoners attitude that got us on top will not keep us on top. All those fair-minded people who sympathized with us when we were one-down will sympathize with our conservative Christian opponents if we act the way they did when they were one-up.
LA replies:
If your fellow leftists heed your advice, that would disprove my theory. If not, not.
James P. writes:
Ken Hechtman writes:
“All those fair-minded people who sympathized with us when we were one-down will sympathize with our conservative Christian opponents if we act the way they did when they were one-up.”
If you act the way the conservative Christians did, then you will do nothing effective to oppose your enemies while they slowly but surely destroy everything you think is right, true, and good.
Somehow I don’t see the Left making that mistake.
So have no fear, you will not act the way the conservative Christians did. Your boot will stamp on their faces, forever.
Paul K. writes:
You wrote, “What explains this ever-growing turbulence and hatred in the souls of liberals, at the very moment of their world-historic triumph?”
I believe you’ve provided the explanation for this phenomenon previously. Since the goal to which liberals aspire is contrary to reality and thus unattainable, and since liberals believe the only obstacle to that goal is the resistance of non-liberal whites, it follows that as liberals become ever more dominant they find it increasingly necessary to blame their failures on non-liberal resistance. However feeble that resistance may be, it has to be endowed with enormous power and malevolence.
Gintas writes:
I was looking through some emails to you from last year about this time, I was describing the fireworks that happen around here. From an email on 5 July, 2011:
I live where there are Indian reservations nearby, and they do brisk business selling stuff that you can’t find elsewhere (that is, it’s illegal stuff). I know of one guy down the street who comes back with a pickup truck packed with fireworks, it has to be over $1000. So my neighborhood sounds like a war zone (from every direction), and the sophistication of things my neighbors are setting off is amazing. I don’t need to go anywhere to watch fireworks, I have a panoramic fireworks display right at home. I woke up at midnight because things went silent about then.
This year the fireworks were more intense than last year. It looks like a household in the neighborhood joined in with over-the-top fireworks shooting; that is, where no major fireworks had come from a certain direction, now there were; another noise front had opened. The further we get from the old America the more extravagantly we celebrate our “independence.”
July 10
Jim Kalb writes:
Re your exchange with Ken Hechtman:
Another statement of the same point is that liberalism is essentially negative: they don’t like differentiations, limitations, restrictions, or hierarchies. Since social functioning depends on differentiations, limitations, restrictions, and hierarchies, the result is that they can only be happy and relatively at peace acting as rebels or “progressive reformers” in a fundamentally non-liberal society. That means that the triumph of liberalism is necessarily the end of liberalism. Their views no longer make any sense at all, public discussion becomes impossible, and culture generally becomes mindless and usually propagandistic and crudely mendacious, like Soviet or Nazi culture.
I identify the ’60s as a key period in the development, not in basic principle but in its public effects. After the ’60s, non-liberal principles could no longer be held publicly. Coincidentally, culture and public discussion collapsed. The big outburst of creativity and non-commercial values that was promised turned out to be an regime of careerism and commercialism. Equality turned out to be increasing inequality. Feminism destroyed the feminine, black power destroyed the lives of black communities and black people, gay liberation liberated self-destructive behavior, and so on.
None of that can be admitted, we just need more liberation from differentiations, limitations, restrictions, and hierarchies, so the problem has to be all those right-wingers, who have to be eradicated.
Catherine H. writes:
You wrote:
What explains this ever-growing turbulence and hatred in the souls of liberals, at the very moment of their world-historic triumph? It is the fact that their entire existence is based on rebellion against the order of being, or, more simply, against God. As a result, the more power and fulfillment they have, the more they are divided from the order of being, and the more the tension within them grows. Therefore they feel increasingly threatened by—and are compulsively driven to crush—any remaining sign of the Truth which they have apparently defeated.
A brilliant and concise summation of liberal despair.
Unfortunately for us all, Mr. Hechtman’s advice to liberals will go unheeded. Liberalism is an all-consuming yet insatiable hunger, since it seeks only that which will never satisfy. As in the image of the snake swallowing its own tail, liberal society will pursue its ultimate desire—rational autonomy apart from God—even to the point of self-destruction.
Gintas writes:
You wrote:
Or, more precisely, the less truth there is in the world and in society, the more “wonderful” our individual selves must be.
The emptiest barrel makes the most noise.
Bruce Charlton noted that much of modern life in the West is the desperate attempt by people to numb themselves to the utter meaninglessness of their own existence.
LA replies:
I don’t want to sound contrary, but I think that’s going too far. People’s lives are meaningful to them. For example, when you’re in a diner or restaurant, observe couples sitting at tables as they talk quietly to each other. Look at the way they smile and respond to each other, enjoying each other’s company and sharing each other’s thoughts. Their lives are not meaningless.
To speak of the “utter meaninglessness” of people’s existence is too sweeping. It is the kind of self-indulgent, overstated cultural criticism which spoiled the late Christopher Lasch’s noted book, The Culture of Narcissism.
Now I am a cultural critic, and I certainly make sweeping characterizations at times, so perhaps I could be criticized for doing the same thing for which I’m criticizing Bruce Charlton (whom I haven’t read). But I don’t think I’ve gone so far as to speak of, e.g., the “utter meaninglessness” of people’s existence. Every person’s existence has meaning to him.
Also, to avoid misunderstanding, when I speak of nihilism, I do not use it in the conventional, incorrect sense of “not believing in anything.” There is no human being who does not believe in anything. If “not believing in anything” is the definition of nihilism, then there is no such thing as nihilism. No. Nihilism is the denial of objective moral truth. Our contemporary nihilists believe in and enjoy all kinds of things, but they don’t believe that there’s any objective moral truth backing up the things they believe in.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 07, 2012 10:06 AM | Send
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