Friday, November 06, 2015

The Top Ten Commandments of Nihilism

Today is Friday, which is the day we trundle down into the knowa's arkive and see what we can find. Today I tripped over an old box labeled THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF NIHILISM. Here's the first, with much extraneous pnemuababble edited out for your convenience. Even so, I consider it all rather obvious, and therefore lame by our standards.

.... [T]he first commandment of nihilism is the converse of the actual first commandment. Instead of “I am your God and you shall have no other gods before me,” the parallel looniverse of the secular left begins with the commandment that “There is no Absolute and you shall abase yourselves before all of the sacred relativities we have inserted in its place.”

From this first commandment follow all of implications and ramifications of nihilism. You might say that the subsequent nine commandments are fractals of the first, in that each of them represents the first in miniature -- or shall we say, the first commandment applied to this or that more limited realm -- just as the real first commandment is the basis and foundation of the other nine (i.e., take away the first and the subsequent nine are drained of meaning).

Also, it should be kept in mind that the first five commandments apply to the vertical (i.e., human-to-God relations), the second five to the horizontal (i.e., human-to-human relations). But in the case of the ten commandments of nihilism, there is reversal, such that the vertical commandments become horizontalized, while the horizontal ones become verticalized.

The first commandment of nihilism is that God, the Absolute, does not exist, and that you shall have no gods before this. Therefore, the commandment affirms that the vertical does not exist, and that there is only the horizontal, or relative.

This redounds to the horizontalization of the vertical, which instantaneously creates an absurd universe. Whereas God created the universe ex nihilo -- i.e., something from nothing -- the devout nihilist creates (although it is really an act of destruction) nothing out of something.

One reason why we object to leftism is that it represents the political program of nihilism -- i.e, the horizontal implications of the vertical commandments of nihilism. However, since the nihilist's cosmos is literally upside-down, this means that that the nihilist's political program becomes absolute -- which is to say, totalitarian.

.... Man was made to know and to worship the Absolute. If you eliminate the Absolute, then you will simply insert something else in its place -- a false absolute -- which is what all statist, socialist, and collectivist schemes do.

In this regard, America's founding prophets were the diamatriarchal opposite of Hillary. In contrast to her, their philosophy represents the political program of true vertical insight and understanding. This is why they could say with perfect clarity that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.

This is just another way of saying that the Absolute exists a priori, and that our inalienable rights only exist in light of this fact. Take away the Absolute, and no rights can intrinsically exist.

.... If human beings are really nothing more than Darwinian machines that result from a random shuffling of genetic material, then obviously there can be no absolute rights, only human agreements. By definition, our rights cannot be rooted in anything transcendent or timelessly true.

Again, the only thing we ask of leftists is that they have the courage of their absence of convictions and admit that their first commandment pulls certain inevitable ramifications in its wake, including the absence of any meaning aside from what they make up -- which is the denial of meaning, precisely.

Liberty too can only be derived from the real first commandment -- which is why the first commandment of nihilism always leads to one or another form of slavery....

This is why surrender to God is the way of liberty, while surrender to anything less is the way of slavery. Therefore, St. Paul is simply passing along a metaphysical truism when he says Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

.... A nihilist thinks he is free -- after all, he has replaced God with himself, and is therefore the most exalted thing in the universe. However, there is a big difference between being "lost" and being "free." If I drop you off in the middle of the Sahara desert and set you loose with no means of communication or transportation, you are certainly free.

But one is only free in a meaningful sense if the freedom has a direction, a meaning, an end. Your freedom is only valuable because it is the existential prerequisite to arriving at a meaningful destination.

Secular leftists are not necessarily mentally retarded, but they are spiritually so by their own acknowledgment. Indeed, they are proud of their infirmity. They write books about it, teach classes in it, publish newspapers to propagate it, found political programs upon it. Their nonstop evangelization obviously implies that they want us to be like them -- which is to say, slaves: it's always back to Egypt for you!

9 comments:

julie said...

They write books about it, teach classes in it, publish newspapers to propagate it, found political programs upon it. Their nonstop evangelization obviously implies that they want us to be like them -- which is to say, slaves: it's always back to Egypt for you!

Notably, too, they back up their demands with threats and quite often, real violence by proxy. After all, to a leftist what else is the State for if not to punish those who don't get with the program dujour?

mushroom said...

Man was made to know and to worship the Absolute. If you eliminate the Absolute, then you will simply insert something else in its place -- a false absolute -- which is what all statist, socialist, and collectivist schemes do.

You can see that, too, in their extreme puritanism. They are less tolerant of heresy than the average snake-handling fundamentalism.

BZ said...

Thank you, I needed to read this today.

ted said...

Bob, as an audiophile, it's time to experience the sounds of the heavens.

Gagdad Bob said...

I actually have these more modest Sennheisers in my shopping cart. Stereophile gives them an A rating, and they're 1/100 the cost!

ted said...

Hmm, these look great. Good price. And Christmas is coming. :)

ted said...

Sad. Just found out that Rene Girard passed on this week. Still recall the insights from Violence Unveiled, which was inspired by his philosophy.

wild said...

If I was to make a criticism of your views Mr Godwin (as I mentioned before a spent many weeks reading your previous posts and found them very interesting) it would not be of your central claim - the reality of the "higher" - or your choice of enemy (those who seek to deny it) - or your interest in literature from a part of the bookshop I would not normally browse (we each find our own path) it would be your complete failure to address the shadow side of the tradition which your camp followers on here appear appear to champion - namely Christianity. A succinct way of describing it would be thus - all those things which you (I presume) dislike about Islam but which (as a matter of historical fact) directly derive from the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition. Conversely, how many of the things you like (such as the freedom to buy books from that section of the bookshop which interest you) were actively opposed by that tradition.

Gagdad Bob said...

I think you need to distinguish between what the revelation says and what humans do with it. For example, when Muslims engage in Jihad, they they are obeying Allah.

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