(September-October 2022. The second Sequoia Paper for Josh. Outlined at a hot spring near Crouch, Idaho. Written primarily outside the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho. The first two cure sections were written in Wyoming near the Snowy Range surrounded by orange aspens. The final sections on imagination were written while broken down at the Summit Rest Stop, the highest point on I-80, under the shadow of a statue of Abraham Lincoln. This may be my greatest essay yet, bringing together a surprising range of my intellectual interests.)
American Nihilism and Its Discontents
Let’s face it— America has entered the new millennium soaked to the bone in nihilism. Everyone knows it. Although they may not have the word for it, deep down everyone can feel it— the meaninglessness, hopelessness, despair, disconnection, distrust, cynicism and criticism, fear and loathing, irony and emptiness, loneliness and impotence. Everyone seems to think that history is over, or on autopilot; everyone seems to feel that the purpose of life and the pursuit of happiness amount to little more than painkillers; everyone acts like the world is ending while there’s nothing they can do about it.
Americans, if asked, wouldn’t say they’re nihilists. Yet based on people’s attitudes and actions, and given the way choices imply values and ideas which people believe about the world, most Americans exhibit flavors of nihilism. Republicans and Democrats are nihilists; capitalists and anti-capitalists are nihilists; televangelists and atheists are nihilists; former coal miners and university professors are nihilists. How did this happen? What on earth should we do about it? This essay will explain what nihilism is, both on a philosophical level and on a biological level. It will explore the many concrete sources of American nihilism and their consequences. Then, it will hopefully offer some genuine, actionable cures for our nihilistic culture, and ways of individually reconnecting with meaning. Along the way we will take some delightful detours into the sociobiological origin of meaning, the way our mediums shape our minds, the essence of imagination itself, and beyond.
What is Nihilism?
(If you already know what nihilism is, feel free to skip to the next, much wilder section.)
Philosophically, the core of nihilism is meaninglessness. This comes from a felt belief that life is inherently meaningless, that there is no transcendent grounding of meaning in the universe. It is the belief that belief itself is bullshit. Nihilism is often traced back to Nietzsche’s famous declaration in aphorism 125 of The Gay Science, when the Madman declares that “God is dead, and we have killed him!” We have untethered the earth from the sun, and are now floating in an endless abyss with no direction or center. Nietzsche was, of course, not a nihilist himself, or at least he tried to overcome nihilism. He was simply acknowledging the reality of the post-Enlightenment situation, in which man finds himself atoms in darkness. It was not just the classical Christian God that was metaphorically dead; the Enlightenment killed all Gods, all former external grounds of meaning for humanity. The more we learned about the world, the more we came to realize that we are tiny, meaningless specks of dust floating in a vacuum of infinite space. Whoops! Not only was man no longer the center of the universe; now it seemed as if the universe had no center and no direction. How can we believe in anything, what can determine our values and morality, what is the point of living?
There are multiple practical ways people react to the nihilist situation. One is, of course, suicide. This is an increasingly popular option in developed countries, but still marginal compared to the popularity of other avenues. Much more appealing is the “run as fast as you can” method. Picture a man in eternal freefall in endless space. He is running in place as fast as he can, his feet pumping away in a vacuum, pushing off nothing, arms swinging and sweating with no impact on the rate or direction of his falling. He looks left, right, up, back— but not down, never down. Down is the one place you can’t look, because then you would have to face the fact that down is the same as up, that you are falling, the fact of the abyss, the fact of nihilism. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so too do humans react with horror to the abyss of their own meaninglessness. So we distract ourselves. We grasp at ghosts to slow the fall. We watch TV, then get bored and open TikTok. We eat a salty snack, we eat a sweet snack, we masturbate, we fall asleep. We buy a new thing and then want to buy a new thing. We move from one dopamine source to another, one stimulation to the next, to distract ourselves from thinking about the fact that it’s all entirely meaningless. Endless consumption is an adaptation to nihilism at which Americans particularly excel. A related reaction is the painkiller reaction, the effort to deaden our confusion and pain through drugs, entertainment, and other things that fulfill us on basic chemical levels without need for “meaning.”
The Evolutionary Root of Meaning and Some Really Meaningful Social Theory
A potentially more useful understanding of nihilism can come from a sociobiological angle. Understanding nihilism as a sociobiological phenomenon means identifying the essence of nihilism as the feeling of disconnection— disconnection from other people, disconnection from the community, tribe, and species, disconnection from our environment. Nihilism, understood in this way, is a physical phenomenon, not philosophical; meaninglessness is the feeling an individual experiences when they feel disconnected.
After all, meaning is an intrinsically social phenomenon, born of the collective and borne by individuals. Meaning is a byproduct of man’s species-being, the fact that the human collective is prior to the human individual. As Emile Durkheim explains in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life, all abstract categories of thought can be traced naturally to humanity’s social nature. Humanity is unique in its ability to conceive of the ideal and add to the real— this is a species-level adaptation, the superconsciousness of consciousnesses which raises the individual consciousness beyond itself. We intersubjectively triangulate reality together and make it mutually intelligible in ways that connect the individual to the collective superorganism. We have the concepts or categories of ‘time’ and ‘space’ because, at some point, the tribe had to intersubjectively understand to meet back here (at, say, this particular really cool rock located relationally to all other things in a shared group concept of objective space meaningfully understood by different individuals) at a certain objective (intersubjective) time (say, the next time the moon gets all bright, which we can all see from separate perspectives yet understand as a meaningful part of a shared world.) We have the concept (or Kantian category) ‘causality’ because it’s evolutionarily useful for the group to be able to share an understanding that this-and-that are connected, that this means that. Intersubjectivity is the lens through which life longs for the view from eternity. We approach the contours of the world, yearning for unity. Even eternity, unity, totality, God— the ultimate concept— are abstractions of the concept ‘society.’ As individuals we are dimly aware that we are part of some ‘whole’, society, a power far larger than our own, and that partaking in it increases our own power beyond ourselves. We are born of the tribe, and the tribe living on long after us is our afterlife. We instinctively feel that society stretches beyond us, integrating through intersubjectivity towards infinity far more than we can imagine as individuals. It points beyond itself— it means something. It means— everything. The intersubjective superbrain of society is the very real material, scientific, evolutionary phenomenon that gives rise to our entire ideal world, our world of language, our world of meaning.
Another evolutionary way to understand this is through the concept of eusociality. Eusociality is an evolutionary phenomenon that occurs in only about 20-something species of life on earth out of the billions of species that exist, including bees, ants, termites, certain naked mole rats, and humans. It refers to the emergence of a superorganism composed of individual organisms— a hive, colony, or tribe. This superorganism unlocks a new ‘level’ of natural selection forces; not only do individuals evolve and mutate to compete and survive and reproduce; eusocial superorganisms are naturally selected and adapt on the group level. The classic example of this is that, while selfishness is selected for in the survival of individual humans, altruism is a group-level adaptation for the survival of human tribes; a more altruistic tribe will be more memetically united and kill a neighboring tribe composed of more free riders. This tension between one evolutionary pressure for selfishness and another level of evolutionary pressure for altruism forms the core of the human condition. A key signifier of a eusocial superorganism is the creation of a physical structure such as a hive or city which forms the ‘body’ of the superorganism. I could extend this concept to argue that the superstructure of meaning that human tribes create is itself a sort of hive, an extension, representation, adaptation of the superorganism which grows through and around the individual bodies as carriers. Another core attribute of eusociality is the willingness of individual bodies within the group to sacrifice their individual reproductive success on behalf of the reproductive success of the superorganism, a profound subversion of the typical rules of evolution. This is the willingness of the worker ant to die for the queen, or the willingness of the human soldier to die in war on behalf of his tribe, religion, or nation. This is where ‘meaning’ really comes in handy, evolutionarily, on the group level. The soldier believes something is deeply and supremely meaningful, and is willing to risk or sacrifice his essential drive for individual life and reproduction due to his meaningful belief in his tribal god, his Christian or Muslim religion, his queen or his ideology or his nationalism. Meaning is what allows humans to bear tremendous suffering, more complex forms of suffering than any other animal. To paraphrase Nietzsche, human beings are the greatest sufferers, because we alone can create meaning to justify any suffering. Other animals experience pain, but only humans experience the deeply meaningful pain we call tragedy.
From the dawn of man, there has been a part of the individual’s mind which belongs to more than one person; it belongs to the social whole; it raises the individual beyond itself; it confers special powers; it uploads and downloads an increasingly massive store of species memory, wisdom, stories, development, building blocks, shortcuts; it adds abstracts, categories, ideals. It is the seat of meaning. This part of us, largely based in our outermost cortex, is the carrier of the eusocial superorganism in the bodies of individuals as a sort of hitchhiker. It is where the superorganism finds its home in individual bodies, the primary mechanism by which the superorganism exerts its own agency, which is a gestalt greater than and different than the mere sum of its individual parts.
Furthermore, we can conceptualize the social world as an environment of its own, a sphere that surrounds us, our primary adaptational pressure. As individuals we are subconsciously aware of society as this force far larger than our individual selves, a force which we are empowered by and contribute to, a force which gave birth to us and could kill us, a force which entirely surrounds the individual as an environment even more salient to one’s survival than lions and rocks. As humanity has evolved the social reality increasingly became the primary means by which we procured food, sex, and other resources, and the primary environmental threat to our safety; resources and threats are the core realities living things must evolutionarily deal with. Society forms an environment around us within the larger physical environment, and our access to understanding the larger environment must go through this social reality. We can hardly perceive a tree without perceiving it through the social lens of meaning which inescapably colors our reality. Society is our primary world, and the lens through which we understand the wider world.
Symbiosis and Existentialism
Rare is the solitary philosopher who carries the species alone into the forest for a while, throwing the eyes of the species against the shadows of the trees to find or make new meanings. The smithy of the individual human ‘soul’ is where mutations in the memetic makeup of the species are born. To refine the language of the species, to reach some sort of democratic reconciliation between the many voices that make up one’s voice, and then to bring this concentration into agonic dialogue with the world alone, unmediated, unwatched… that is the highest role of the individual as a locus of social experience, as an emergent node of nodes. That is how the poem of life speaks. Poesis… dialectic… creator and creation one… where language meets larger nature… how meaning moves… this is the pumping blood of the meaning of life.
Meaning connects us to a mutually intelligible world through the eusocial faculty of language. Saying something means something else is the essence of language. And language means the species.
While the philosopher in the forest from earlier may use the species’ gift of language to write a beautiful new poem in the silence of her interaction with nature, creating whole new meanings for her world, she will still be very lonely. Some sort of mutual symbiosis with the species will not have been authentically honored— unless she completes the hero’s journey and returns to the tribe with the boon she won on the other side of the unknown. While the descent from the clear mountaintop back to the myopia of society comes at costs, what is gained is far more priceless. Society gains meaning, gains an evolutionary mutation in the memes, the intersubjective genes. It is invigorated, it adapts to a new world, it becomes more connected to itself and to the environment which surrounds it; in a parallel way, one layer of reality inwards, the individual bearing the adaptation becomes more connected to itself in the form of a new, unique, individual integrity, and becomes more connected to both layers of reality surrounding it. This process of meaning-genesis is evolutionarily, symbiotically beneficial to both the society superorganism, which grows smarter, and the individual-philosopher-body-organism who returns from the forest to share what she learned with the tribe. The individual authentically honors the species in gratitude for its gifts, and in exchange becomes less lonely, more happy, and more connected. The individual’s life feels more meaningful. Contributing to the society which made us makes life feel meaningful.
In the Scarlet Letter, Hester admonishes Pearl that “We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.” But that is exactly wrong; the generative symbiosis between the individual human’s natural selection and the tribal superorganism’s natural selection is precisely this bringing of wisdom from a body’s individual, original, raw adaptation to the world back to the tribe. Emerson understood this. The essence of American philosophy has always been based on the individual’s journey into the unknown forest and their return to share what they’ve learned with the town. While in an abstract sense this has always been the essence of the universal Hero’s Journey, the unique setting of European language as an invasive species at an explicit frontier with a wild land made this essence much more starkly visible in American thought. Even the hyper-individualistic, probably-autistic Thoreau still found meaning in linguistifying his precious inner experience in order to share Walden with everyone.
Within this dialectic between the meaning-generation of the individual and the meaning-propagation of society lies the clue that can lead us towards a solution to nihilism. The classic philosophical solution to nihilism is existentialism, the idea that given a world without some external source of meaning like God we instead need to choose to create meaning ourselves. Easier said than done, of course, but the existentialist attitude has helped many artists create beautiful things. The major flaw of some of the most famous existentialist thinkers such as Nietzsche is their individualism. Being highly individualistic philosophers themselves, they overstate the loneliness of the existential situation. They accept the Cartesian trap of disbelieving in other minds. They identify the core of our existential situation as deeply lonely, free to create meanings while living and dying alone. While the Being-towards-death of the individual is undoubtedly a key driver of the existential quest for meaning, our existential picture is incomplete without taking the social layer of ourselves into account. You live and die alone, yes; but you also live and die together as part of a eusocial tribe. The creation of individual meaning is incoherent without reference to the social superorganism that gives us the power of meaning-making in the first place. We are thrown into life without choice, yes; but we are thrown together.
If we want to pragmatically navigate the world, create meaning, and be happy, then we ought to stop entertaining ideas of solipsism and start from an assumption of our shared social reality. This is something that great American philosophers like Walt Whitman and John Dewey, inspired by an ideal of democracy, have recognized far more readily than some famously lonely European thinkers. Philosophically transcending nihilism requires us to pragmatically accept and believe in our inherent interconnectedness, the fact that individuals are actually highly dividual and inextricable from their social contexts. We need to create meaning together, individually, and then together again. Any workable solution to nihilism requires embracing what I will call our ‘existential sociality.’
Sources of Nihilism in America
Our deeper evolutionary understanding of nihilism as disconnection can now help us more clearly explore the situation of nihilism in America, and then later lead us to some pragmatic solutions. Crucial to the rampant nihilism of America is the way in which modernity, technology, capitalism, and other large-scale civilizational developments radically altered the way humans live. After all, our meaning-making DNA evolved for most of human history in the context of small bands of hunter-gatherer kinship groups of maybe 20 people. That is what’s hard-wired into our psychology; our meaning-making capacities are meant to be used in order to bind together a small tribe of related nomads. When you throw that programming into 21st century America, the world doesn’t click with what our DNA expects of it. The world is radically different, and doesn’t fulfill or match with our meaning-making programming in the way we evolved to enjoy. We have ingrained desires for tight-knit communities of meaning that modern society doesn’t meet, and like salmon who can’t seem to reach their spawn, or sows in a factory farm who can’t socialize with their piglets, we feel negative emotions at this mismatch between what evolution wants for us and the reality of our new environments.
Four key aspects of modern America that contribute to nihilism are scale, complexity, speed, and stuckness. Scale refers to the massive size of modern society. Not only are there billions more humans alive than at any previous time, they are also interconnected, meaning the world is inescapably one large tribe, connected in many ways, but not in the deep ways that our brains evolved for in the African jungle. A brain designed for navigating intimate 20 person kinship groups inherently struggles with establishing meaningful tribal connections in a world of 5000 person Facebook friend limits. Complexity is a natural correlate of scale; the modern social world is unbelievably complex, too complex for any one person to get a real handle on all of the forces and relationships that impact him. In a 20 person kinship group, everyone knew their role in the tribe and the value of that role. They felt integrated, agentic, connected, and competent. This is much more difficult in the complexity of the modern world. The modern world also moves at a high speed, with technological and cultural shifts and revolutions occurring at an ever-faster rate, making it difficult to establish long-lasting sources and structures of meaning. Conversely, human brains evolved primarily in nomadic hunter-gatherer contexts; the shift to agriculture led to a steep decline in life happiness, and the modern world continues this tradition of stuckness, attaching people to tiny plots of land and various inertial institutions and relationships, trapping them in one place at one job for life in a way that makes life feel small and stifling. Our brains crave the novelty and freedom of nomadic life. When one feels trapped, they are liable to feel nihilistic; meaning is strongest when it moves.
The physical way we’ve built America also contributes to disconnection. Land use, architecture, the way we design the physical structures that support the social world and our everyday lives— these physical choices partially determine the kind of society that can grow atop them. And 21st century America trying to grow genuinely connective communities is like tiny green weeds trying to grow in the cracks between asphalt. The entire social architecture of our society is based on cars rather than human bodies. We live in spread out suburbs with no walkable streets or ‘third places’ for community-building. People live in isolated little family homes, a far cry from the close-knit intergenerational communities living together that once were the norm. Giant impersonal concrete scars physically separate neighborhoods and make walking around feel unsafe. And everything in our society is based on driving cars. Cars require us to design everything with way more space between things, way more separation, thereby also separating humans from one another.
I would even argue that the phenomenology, the experience of driving cars all the time itself subtly impacts our modes of thinking about navigating the world with other humans. When you walk around a crowded city street, you are immersed in a world of soft bodies like you, and it feels human to be in their presence. The proximity of other flesh has all sorts of biochemical effects on us, meant to forge us into a community. You can get really close to other bodies and navigate nimbly around them as you walk along. Worst case, if you bump into one another, it’s no big deal. Bodies are soft and forgiving. Meanwhile, cars are large, with hard edges. Contact of any kind with another car or person is a huge no-no; it would be a massive issue resulting in injury, damage, monetary loss, and probably lawsuits, insurance, or involvement with other institutionalized intersubjective powers. The rules of navigating life, as you learn them in car-game, is that you absolutely cannot touch anyone; everyone needs to maintain their own little sphere of individual space which nobody else may enter. We must stay separate from one another, as far apart as possible, even though we’re all moving in the same direction. I believe the psychology that car-based life engenders is an underexamined source of nihilism and disconnection in the American psyche. And, in a broader sense including all of the physical sources of nihilism mentioned in this paragraph, I believe these land use and transportation choices based on the automobile lifestyle in America are some of the core reasons elevating, defining, and separating American-style nihilism from nihilism elsewhere in the world. No other country knows how to spread itself out like America, and that’s a big part of why Americans are so lonely.
Another name for the feeling of disconnection is alienation. This term has a strong history in the Marxist tradition. Marx says that the division of labor inherent in industrial capitalism produces alienation. In a small hunter-gatherer tribe, one’s work would feel directly connected to the tribe and one’s role in it; you would make a new axe for Uncle Bill because you love him and know he needs one, and the labor would thus feel meaningful. But if you spend all day poking holes in endless pinheads on an assembly line while your boss steals the surplus value of your labor and pays you pennies, you may understandably feel like your work is disconnected from the meaning of your life. This is alienated labor. As living things, we must work to live; most work over human history connected us with the natural world and connected us with other humans. But if we are disconnected from the full process of production, disconnected from the products themselves, and disconnected from the full value of the work, we are highly liable to feel alienated, which engenders nihilism.
The flip-side of alienated labor would be alienated consumption, which is today an inescapable duty of the masses and a major part of social life. Once our particular economic system solved our basic survival needs, it had to turn to manufacturing new needs in order for the system to keep growing. Our survival is no longer based on a relationship with nature, but rather fully takes place within the social sphere, now as an ‘augmented survival’ which must be carefully balanced by the system so that you keep needing it. As Guy Debord writes in The Society of the Spectacle, “The economy’s triumph as an independent power inevitably also spells its doom, for it has unleashed forces that must eventually destroy the economic necessity that was the unchanging basis of earlier societies. Replacing that necessity by the necessity of boundless economic development can only mean replacing the satisfaction of primary human needs, now met in the most summary manner, by a ceaseless manufacture of pseudo-needs, all of which come down in the end to just one— namely, the pseudo-need for the reign of an autonomous economy to continue.” Once, American capitalism had an endless frontier of resources to burn, and people began to believe that a certain rate of growth was natural and eternally sustainable. The system became dependent on such growth to survive, as addicts become dependent on larger and larger hits. But eventually the frontier closed. For the system to survive, it opened a new frontier—the human body, the potentially ever-proliferating desires of American consumers. For years, Americans have had endless holes poked into them, followed by endless band-aids sold to stop the newly bleeding pseudo-needs. They’ve been effectively bombarded with propaganda and trained to be excellent consumers. Consumption is alienating and nihilistic; it is the opposite of creation, which is connective and meaningful. Consumption tells us all our needs can be met without community, without other people; we have no need to create anything for ourselves or for other people. We do not need to work the earth, raise a chicken, or ask a neighbor for help; the impersonal system will take care of everything; you don’t need agency or creativity or connection. To create is positive, generative. To consume is to make up for a negative, to fill endless holes, to be forever bailing out a sinking boat with buckets. It leads nowhere but to what we thought we already had, our baseline satisfaction. A culture of alienated consumption breeds nihilism, which is good for the system, because nihilists become better consumers.
Technology can be a related source of nihilism when it is used by the self-consumptive economic system described above. While there is no doubt that technology can be used in ways that are creative, empowering, and meaningful (some forms of which will be addressed later in the essay when we get to the cures for nihilism), technology is also often used in ways that are isolating, agency-sacrificing, community-replacing, and disconnecting. Because the reigning economic system is based on isolation (isolation as division of labor, isolation of workers from one another to prevent unionizing, isolation from the full production process and the fruits of it, etc), the technology it produces for consumers often encourages isolation, the automobile from earlier being a prime example. Technology as consumption seems often to amputate our agentic limbs and replace them with prostheses. Something we could once meaningfully do for ourselves is now done for us. Even more conducive to nihilism is when technology replaces a need that would once be fulfilled by community. Here we can see a path from doing laundry in the home, to a community member doing people’s laundry for a living, to the shared laundromat, to the washing machine in every home. While technologies like DoorDash seem to promise a future where all our wants can be met without having to interact with another human being, would our ancient brains craving simple community and agency really feel meaningful happiness in such a future? The last man blinks.
However, by far the technologies most implicated in the rise of nihilism in America are the technologies which determine the shape of our cultural discourse: communication technologies. The spread of cultural values and ideologies, like nihilism, depend even more on our communication infrastructure than they do things like suburbs and cars. All communication technologies are inherently amoral, with their own structural biases, strengths and weaknesses, susceptibilities to abuse, and potential for positive impact. But for this part of the essay I would like to focus on a single technology that has been used as a core driver of the uniquely American brand of nihilism. The culprit? Television. Let’s start off with the basics. Television makes us lonelier. Statistics show that, for decades, Americans have been spending more time per day sitting in front of a television than hanging out with friends. We replaced social connection with spectatorial, safe, and hollow pseudo-connection. Television has been made addictive enough to keep people watching for hours a day, hours spent sitting and watching passively rather than actively connecting with the world or with fellow human beings. This alone is certainly a core driver of loneliness in America, and therefore a core driver of nihilism.
But there are deeper connections between television and nihilism. The most profound and well-argued book of media theory I’ve ever read is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which explains undeniably the ways in which television has deteriorated the serious discourses necessary for a functioning society. The mediums through which we learn about the world shape the ways we can think about the world. In the 1960s, a major shift happened in America from typography-brain to television-brain. Prior to the 1960s, typography, the written word, was the primary medium where serious discourses occurred. The medium of typography teaches rational thought; it teaches readers to engage agentically with the medium in order to imagine what is being described themselves; it teaches readers to wait and gain context before reaching final judgment; it teaches readers to think in sentences, paragraphs, chains of logic and association building whole complex structures of thought; it teaches readers that the world itself is a contextual place that the reader has the agency to make sense of and use to act. In other words, the medium of typography, of language, teaches people that the world is a contextual, meaningful place that they are connected to and can therefore take action within. Serious discourses like politics, commerce, religion, and science were based in the kinds of thinking engendered by typography. One might even argue that the rise of democracy is directly related to the rise of literacy, that democracy as we know it is based on the typographic mind, and in the idea that we can all contribute thoughtfully to the grand discourse of the tribe.
Around the 1960s, television surpassed typography as the ‘meta-medium’ of American society, the medium with the largest and longest audience attention share, the primary medium through which society discourses, the medium which all other mediums must remediate through in order to reach people. This dominance only increased in decades since. It is not television as entertainment that Postman has a problem with; he’s fine with the Real Housewives. No, the problem comes when television tries to be the medium for serious discourses that evolved under conditions of typography. Then, the peculiar ways in which the medium of television works (especially how it has developed in relation to our economic system) warp and degenerate the actual content of those serious discourses in devastating ways. Television treats raw attention as a commodity, and the semantic quality of the information portrayed is not a concern. Entertainment is its one goal, so all discourses become warped into entertainment, even discourses that need to be serious. We devolve religion to televangelism. We devolve commerce to images and music designed to stimulate the simplest parts of us, void of nuanced information about different products. Most problematically, we devolve politics from a rational debate about the pros and cons of various policies to a form of entertainment, a beauty pageant. Is one’s ability to make good impressions with looks and 30 second soundbites on a televised debate stage really the best selection criteria for becoming the most powerful person on earth? The office of the Presidency requires very different skills than that, yet that is how we select them. Thinking does not play well on television. Substantive, thoughtful, serious political debate is impossible via the medium of television as we now know it. And yet it is where that debate primarily takes place— as a form of entertainment. Eventually, we grow to expect entertainment as the natural form of all experience. Entertainment tells us that things aren’t that serious; that we don’t need to care too deeply about what happens on TV, because it’s just entertainment, it’s somewhere else, it’s not connected.
As television became the meta-medium of society, television-brain trains us to see the whole world through its lens. In this way, TV news teaches us nihilism. The requirements of the medium force TV news to be entertaining, move fast, provide rapidly shifting bits of novelty, keep attention for seconds at a time. If they don’t do this, the market will kill them. The result is TV news dominated by what Postman calls the “Now… this” phenomenon. “‘Now… this’ is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see.” As our lens on the world, it teaches us that the world has no order, meaning, coherence, context, or consequences, and is therefore not to be taken seriously. Whereas language teaches us the world is contextual, television teaches us the world is discontinuous. In a contextual world, you are connected to the world, you have agency and can take action. In an incoherent world, you are disconnected; the stuff on TV is happening ‘out there’, and there’s nothing you can do about it; it has nothing to do with you, save to entertain. “And now… this” seamlessly melds together imminent nuclear war and a commercial for Coors, implying that they are equally important, which is to say equally meaningless. I remember the recent viral video of a CNN live newsfeed of bombs going off in Ukraine at the start of the war; suddenly the live feed goes to a small box in the corner as country music twangs into the start of an Applebee’s commercial— “Just a little bit o’ chicken fried… Cold beer on a Friday night… A pair o’ jeans that fits just right…”— cue a corny looking cowboy in jeans doing a stupid little dance, right next to the live feed of air sirens in Kiev. Equally meaningless.
Once context and coherence are out the door, nihilism can creep in. A sense of agency is the essential way one feels meaningfully connected to the world— but how can one feel agency in an unserious, incoherent world disconnected from the world of meaning in one’s life? In the past, if one read a story in the local paper, they were an agent in the sense of interpreting the text in the act of reading, and they could be an agent by marching down to the local courthouse to write something in response. But the TV spectator feels no such agency or connection to the entertainment on the screen. Once television’s trivialization of public information became the paradigm for our understanding of public information as such, we began to lose a sense for what it means to be genuinely informed, and lose a sense for the reality of the world we are connected to. Irrelevant information can be just as entertaining as relevant information. The zone gets flooded with shit. Even logic begins to deteriorate. Contradiction is a basic building block of all logic, but it is defined by context, as two things that can’t both be true in the same single context. “Contradiction, in short, requires that statements and events be perceived as interrelated aspects of a continuous and coherent context. Disappear the context, or fragment it, and contradiction disappears.” This makes it useless as a test of truth or merit, and therefore politicians-as-entertainers are able to get away with flagrant contradictions and disregard for truth. Of course, all this only feeds back into the ever-deepening cycle of nihilism reinforcement. We know deep down we’re always being lied to, and develop attitudes of cynicism, resentment, impotent anger, distrust— all attitudes which easily support nihilism in all areas of life. “I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia; in the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.” Television teaches nihilism, and we take that lesson far beyond television, since it is a primary lens through which we understand the world.
I’ll permit myself only one more paragraph on television, nihilism, and media theory, although I should make this its own essay one day; for now I will close with the argument that television cultivates an ‘aura of irony’, and that this irony spreads nihilism. David Foster Wallace convincingly argues in his famous essay ‘E Unibus Pluram’ that television as a medium uniquely adopted an attitude of irony which, by the time he was writing in the 90s, had thoroughly pervaded society. He starts this argument by tracing back to the 1960s, when early postmodern writers used irony as a tool to expose hypocrisy. Irony, put simply, is the distance between what’s seen and what’s said. So, for example, Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest uses irony to highlight the messed up nature of our attitudes towards mental health and the institutions devoted to it (wait a minute, so the patient is SANE and the nurse is CRAZY!?) Then irony becomes ‘cool,’ becomes a hip attribute of youth culture. Television execs catch on to this, and start incorporating more irony in their television shows. Luckily for television, it is a perfect medium for irony, because it is a bi-sensual medium, composed of audio and video, and irony is the distance between what’s seen and what’s said. Character walks in soaking wet— “Beautiful day, huh?” Cue laugh track. What’s said undercuts what’s seen. Television is the perfect irony box. It slowly taught generations of Americans an attitude of pervasive irony (which we typically associate with Gen X, but in fact is far more widespread.) The ironic culture expects everything to be made fun of; nobody wants to be caught on the wrong side of the laugh track. Sincerity, honesty, single-entendre beliefs and values, these all make you a sucker. Don’t you know the world is meaningless bullshit? You shouldn’t even try. So we get a world of spectators too scared to take agency, who treat meaningfulness itself as suspect. The culture of irony is still alive and well in America today, and I’m sure I don’t have to explain to you how it’s another source of nihilism.
Consequences of American Nihilism
Many of the aspects and causes of American nihilism mentioned thus far in the essay are also consequences of that nihilism, because nihilism tends to launch vicious cycles that deepen nihilism’s grip in the souls of the people. Nihilism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pessimism, cynicism, irony, decadence, consumption, distraction, television, isolation, alienation, meaninglessness, separation by technology and lifestyle, impotence— these are caused by nihilism, and they are also consequences of nihilism. Experiencing these things reinforces the overarching feelings of nihilism, makes nihilism more powerful, more inescapable. Belief in nihilism causes actions and experiences which only make nihilism seem more true.
The upshot of this vicious cycle is the total breakdown of the American social fabric. Bowling Alone famously identified the breakdown of the American social fabric over the last 60 years using statistics and social science, showing the decline of various types of communities, organizations, social groups, etc. It also identified declining social capital, and concomitant increases in inequality. Democracy is predicated on meaningful community connections, and meaningful democratic dialogue based ultimately on a shared sense of being ‘in it together,’ a sense of shared social trust. But the environment engendered by nihilism teaches people that they are not connected to a meaningful social whole, that they are in it only for themselves. Distrust is the death of democracy. Other people cannot be trusted to share in a democratic society, and therefore belief in that democracy breaks down. We are seeing this all over the country, with faith in the democratic system at an all time low. The news media spurs this along by playing on people’s base psychology. Fear sells. Fear of the other proliferates. Fear makes people do crazy things, and act in ways that further degrade the social bonds that democratic society is built on.
The saturation of nihilism creates fear and anger, frustration and confusion. Due to the nihilist situation clouding facts, context, complexity, and connection, often these emotions do not know where to go or what to do. So they turn into violence, either outwardly or inwardly. People will often turn to violence against others out of frustration, or out of a nihilistic belief that these others are in some way responsible for their suffering. This violence is an explosion, a grasping for some sense of agency in a confusing world that has denied people a more meaningful and productive form of agency. We can already see this bubbling up today with the growing problem of domestic terrorism. People who feel they have no meaning and nothing to lose can do crazy things. The inverse of this is violence against the self. People who feel disconnected and meaningless are quite liable to suffer from depression. In fact, I would go so far as to say depression is what physically tends to happen to certain personality types when nihilism sinks in. The current mental health crisis is an expression of deep-seated cultural nihilism and pessimism. Suicide is the ultimate end of this trend. Individuals kill themselves when they feel disconnection and meaninglessness. Perhaps societies can also act suicidally on a more abstract level, given the same feelings on a national scale.
Absent higher meanings, humanity devolves into ‘might makes right’ thinking. Power expresses itself without any values to guide it. The forbearance and tolerance essential to democracy go out the window— they are just beliefs, after all, and only have effect when people believe in them. When you do not feel connected to other people via meaningful networks of trust and interdependency, you are free to treat them like objects in zero-sum power struggles. Democracy gives way to imperialism. Consent gives way to domination. The unforced force of agent-aligning communication gives way to language as pure power. The liberal cultivation of freedom gives way to unfettered market forces reinforcing advantages. Inequality runs rampant, at the cost of a broader human happiness and generativeness. Liberalism gives way to neoliberalism, allowing corporations to do whatever they want to people regardless of morality and regardless of the total well-being of society. Conservatism gives way to neoconservatism, and those who hollowly believe they represent the right ideas attempt to spread those ideas by force, invading other countries in order to evangelize them. The strong crush the weak, and it means nothing. When life is meaningless, the most basic rules of the game come to dominate. Meaning, values, ideas, beliefs lose their ability to guide humans to higher forms of action and freedom. This feeds into the vicious cycle as people come to realize that all the old ideals are hollow, and that now everyone is trying to take advantage of everyone else. A culture of fear, anxiety, pessimism, and selfishness takes deeper and deeper hold. And people feel they can’t do anything about it, they can’t change the broken system, because nihilism vitiates agency. There’s nothing anyone can do to make things better, so why bother? It’s all meaningless anyway. Better to just join the rat race, do what you can to keep your basic hedonic treadmill running, and survive in a life who’s only meaning is survival.
If left unchecked, this vicious cycle of nihilism will tear apart America and the world. Life will feel increasingly meaningless. People will feel increasingly disconnected, powerless, fearful, and depressed. The few people and corporations and entities with power will increasingly leverage that power against the people, making those entities even stronger and the people’s lives even more miserable. A future run by extremely powerful nihilists is a dangerous thing. How will a nihilistic Amazon treat its workers if there’s zero resistance? How will a nihilistic China use bioweapons if it feels that its geopolitical rivals are also acting in a zero-sum, realpolitik, might-makes-right mindset? How will a nihilistic Russia handle nuclear weapons if it feels all hope is lost? And if nihilistic American engineers succeed in creating a superpowerful artificial intelligence, would that AI not in some way bear the fingerprints of its creators? Would the values, beliefs, and attitudes of its creators not influence the values, belies, attitudes, priorities, and processing of the new AI? And would the AI not take the destructive nihilism of humanity into account when it decides what to do with humanity? Technology may be amoral, but the humans creating and using it are not. If the vicious cycle between ideals and materials reinforces nihilism deeper and faster today than ever before, with today’s increasingly powerful technology being used in increasingly nihilistic ways, what will happen as this process continues to speed up? We must get our human ideas right before it’s too late. We must pull ourselves out of the vicious cycle before it’s too late. We must solve the problem of nihilism before it’s too late. This is as meaningful as the species itself. So, the question now is, what on earth can we do about it?
Cures for Nihilism
To cure nihilism, we must pragmatically embrace our existential sociality. We must start from the fact that we all experience this social phenomenon of meaning-making as individuals, and that if we use it well it feels good. Regardless of whether the universe is inherently meaningful or meaningless, being human is defined by our undeniable experience of meaning, and we ought to use this fact to improve our experience. But we can’t just snap our fingers and have the right ideals. We need to act, and our actions will make our ideals real. We have to set up virtuous cycles to counter the vicious ones; the spiraling-forward motion will come from the dialectic between ideals and materials, belief and actions, meaning and building. In the same way that human creations, actions, and technology can instantiate, affect, and speed up nihilism, they can also speed up anti-nihilism. Since nihilism is based on disconnection, we need to set up virtuous cycles of reconnection. We need to reconnect with other people, reconnect with nature, and reconnect with our sense of imagination.
Cure One: Reconnecting with Society
The first and most important thing we must do is reconnect with one another. We have a deep biological need to feel connected to tribes of other humans. We must work on cultivating this sense of connection in ways that feel good for our evolutionary biology. We need to make the modern world match our most basic mammalian needs of love, connection, and belonging. We need to strengthen the ties of modern tribes in authentic ways, and counter the alienating sources of nihilism in our society discussed previously.
One way to do this is to cultivate a new, positive national pride attached to a new, positive national myth. As the world grew more complex, larger and larger tribes were formed in order to foster a sense of belonging in this ever-wider world. The rise of nation-states is a result of this. Nation-states, like all tribes stretching back through history, are based on a shared story, a shared myth. Belief in national stories is what binds nations together. Positive identification with a nation has historically been a very powerful force for meaning-making; after all, how many people have so deeply believed in their nation that they were willing to die for it? National pride can be anti-nihilist. The root of it is the fact that nations are essentially modern tribes, and can fulfill the same biological needs for group connection. Participating in the life of the national superorganism can make life feel more meaningful, like you are a valuable part of something larger than yourself. And this meaning-making power does not require inter-tribe war to activate. Just believing in a shared set of myths, stories, cultures, histories, symbols, and so on is enough to create the effect. By identifying with the nation, all your successes become the nation’s successes, and all the nation’s successes become your successes. The value of inter-tribe conflict can even be reappropriated from war towards more positive purposes in sporting competitions like the Olympics and the World Cup. This is one way that we can hack our evolutionary psychology for tribal satisfaction without some classic downsides. Another way national pride can fight nihilism is if people engage in the nation as a project to participate in and improve. Then, national improvement becomes self-improvement, with powerful downstream impacts on the lives of everyone involved in the nation. This feels like an existentially authentic way to embrace the reality of nations, and to use national identity as a way to connect more deeply with the world and with one another by agentically engaging in meaningful progress for the tribe.
However, it is important to note that sustaining a powerfully salient national myth is much more difficult than sustaining a tribal myth in a kinship group of 20 people who all speak together daily. We’re talking about uniting millions of different people spread across vast distances with varying backgrounds. Sustaining a national myth requires cooperation from universal education, news media sources, entertainment, infrastructure, national rituals, and commitment across all levels from local to national. There is no doubt that the American national myth is weaker now than it has been in a long time. There is widespread doubt about what America really is, means, or represents. Its ideals are questioned, its history is debated, and it is torn in two by rampant political polarization. Many Americans do not feel as though they can identify with a unified American myth these days, and American nihilism is both a source and symptom of this. The 21st century demands a new American myth, a new national fiction, in order to rebuild an authentic, prosocial, positive national pride. If you are interested in this idea, you should read my essay “The Unfinished Fiction of the Nation.” (https://beatinpaths.com/2022/08/05/the-fiction-of-the-nation-unfinished/)
Small tribes bond more easily and tightly than large tribes because humans have natural limits on the number and quality of personal connections they can maintain. Furthermore, on the local level, people’s interactions and labors take place in a context of agency; you can see the impact of your work on your neighbor, and a discussion with your neighbor about local gossip involves a rich web of shared context that connects you both to the world, the neighborhood, and each other. As we have shown, agency and context are both anti-nihilist. Thus, nested tribes within larger and larger nested tribes seem to be a strong way to ensure that a large national tribe remains cohesive. A large tribe like America can more easily embed its members in its national identity if they identify strongly with a town, county, and state which then identify as part of the larger whole. On the local or state level, people have much more context and much more agency; someone who runs for city councilor is bound not only to feel more agentically connected to the city, but also to the larger units of which the city is part. A nested structure of tribes allows agency to work its way upwards and the feeling of connection to work its way downwards. America’s federal structure was intended to apply this from the beginning, but over time many forces have ensured the growth of federal power at the expense of local and state power— not only in politics but also in culture and economics. Holiday Inn is inherently more nihilistic than a local bed and breakfast. A useful building block for a society based on the nested structure I’m proposing is the ‘Dunbar Unit.’ The Dunbar Unit is the number of meaningful connections the average human being can apparently maintain at one time, around 150, and it’s backed by a fair bit of social science. In reality the amount of relationships a person can manage fluctuates according to personality and circumstances, but in practice the Dunbar Unit is an excellent way to ensure social integration within, say, a neighborhood of New York City. The future of democracy very well may use Dunbar Units to organize nested groups of people in ways that maximize a sense of connection and local agency.
The ultimate goal of this overall anti-nihilist social reconnection to other people is the reweaving of the fabric of modern society. Nihilism has torn our social fabric apart, and as Robert Putnam studied in Bowling Alone, the primary casualties (and reciprocally, therefore, drivers) are voluntary community associations: bowling leagues, Elks Clubs, poker groups, etc. The research shows that with these have fallen social trust, belonging, and both the width and depth of social ties. Putnam followed up Bowling Alone twenty years later in 2015, and the trends he had observed in the 90s had mostly worsened. Graphing whether people in different generational cohorts believe that ‘most people can be trusted’ in Bowling Alone revealed that those born before 1930 agreed at a rate of about 75%; those born after 1960, the youngest cohort at that time, clocked in at about 50%. In Putnam’s 2015 book Our Kids, those born around 2000 felt people were trustworthy at a disturbing rate of 20%. ‘Social capital’ refers to the value given to individuals by the breadth and quality of their social network; both ‘strong ties’ within groups and ‘weak ties’ between people in different groups create social capital. Both have fallen in the last half century, although ‘weak ties’ have suffered the most. Weak ties ‘bridge’ different groups. Weak ties are what knit many small groups into a larger whole; they are what allow you to feel connected to groups beyond kin, neighborhood, race, religion; they introduce a white kid to a black kid, a poor child to well-connected adult mentor, a budding young scientist to an old man who can write him a good recommendation. The collapse of weak and strong ties both lead to nihilism, and we need to strengthen both; however, the collapse of weak ties also leads to intergroup distrust and violence, which further speeds up the cycle of societal breakdown. Voluntary community associations are the main driver of weak ties, since they bring together people who don’t necessarily live, study, or work together. They are not forced, but united by common interest. We need more participation in PTOs, soccer clubs, litter clean-up events, annual festivals, local parades, Girl Scouts, political activism, farmer’s markets, random Facebook events, pub trivia nights, and informal ping-pong tournaments.
Both formal and informal ties are important; we need to cultivate a more richly connected society both through the propagation of formal groups and through encouraging simple friendship and interaction on a larger, more diverse scale, while also encouraging the deepening of connections. This is the sinew of a strong society. There are undoubtedly information theory and network theory correlates to this, and ways to map such complicated social connections in order to better learn how to strengthen and develop the growing social whole.
To combat dissolution and increase community ties, we need to cultivate certain memetic ideas and then instantiate them in concrete projects; these projects will inspire, strengthen, and spread the ideals, spurring a virtuous cycle. We need to cultivate a culture where community participation and group formation, both formal and informal, is encouraged. This will involve spreading positive memes that encourage this social behavior. We need to consciously engage in a cultural project of thickening the social fabric, and work to spread this as a cultural value. Two high-level memes, if properly cultivated and mimetically disseminated, can have the desired downstream consequences. One is the meta-meme of the New World, discussed in “America and the Shape of the Far Future” (https://beatinpaths.com/2022/09/28/america-and-the-shape-of-the-far-future/). This is the meme of newness itself, of one’s ability to participate in agentically creating a New World. This meme treats progress itself as the goal; it is a meme that encourages new meme creation. Those who adopt the meta-meme of the New World feel as though they have the agency to co-create reality with others; they create art, technology, or social institutions that attempt to improve the shared world. This creation fights nihilism both by encouraging agency and encouraging a sense of connection with others and our shared world. Individual instantiations of this meme encourage its spread in a virtuous anti-nihilist cycle.
The second high-level meme that can cultivate a more connected society is the ideal of democracy, discussed in “The Unfinished Fiction of the Nation.” The ideal of democracy has a rich philosophical history, especially in America, and it goes far beyond any imperfect political system. The ideal of democracy implies a metaphysics of the interconnectedness of all things, the idea that all things have their ‘vote’ on the shape of the universe, and that each thing is inextricable from everything it touches. A deeply felt adoption of this philosophy obviously has anti-nihilist implications similar to belief in an all-loving God or the belief that Brahman is Atman. One philosophical level lower, and the ideal of democracy implies a human ethic of social interconnectedness. It implies the dream of embracing our eusociality and making evermore everlarger tribes, until one day the species is made into a tribe. It implies optimizing our connectedness and individuality in ways that maximize overall human flourishing and freedom. It implies, more concretely, behaving in ways that recognize and increase our interconnectedness for individual and collective benefit. This means joining soccer clubs and volunteer organizations; it means inviting the neighborhood to a potluck on your front lawn; it means holding the door open for an old lady; it means talking to the checkout guy like an equal; it means going to a protest; it means embracing the true saying that ‘it takes a village’ to raise a child; it means supporting public libraries, parks, and other gathering-places; it means taking informal votes on decisions that affect other parties, and inviting open discussion of community issues whenever possible; it means taking responsibility for the lives of those we touch, and taking actions that recognize that this responsibility goes both ways. The greatest prophets of democracy, like Walt Whitman and John Dewey, have long recognized that true democracy needs to be a sort of civic religion in order to truly flourish. To be a civic religion implies that everyone will feel that religious connection to a power larger than themselves (society) and derive a sense of meaning from ritual participation. We who wish to combat American nihilism must do everything we can to evangelize for the spread of this civic religion.
Speaking of religion, there is a role here to be played by existing religions. Religions of all kinds are powerful anti-nihilist forces, both through convincing people that they are meaningfully connected to the universe and through more practically bringing people together in religious communities. Throughout American history, religious groups have been a key driver of social capital, a primary way of bringing different people together and forming strong senses of belonging. While all religions are capable of this, in the American context Christian churches have been by far the most important. Christian churches were, for a long time, the heart and soul of many communities small and large spread across the American continent. They brought people together outside of business or family relations. They activated the social parts of our brains, and created the binding religious force Durkheim called ‘collective effervescence’— the ecstatic feeling of participation in a larger whole aroused when people sing a hymn together, perform a ritual together, or headbang at an EDM concert together on MDMA. Activating this religious feeling puts our group-formation psychology into overdrive. It feels ancient, tribal, and alive. It feels meaningful. It feels amazing. While I would like an American religion of democracy to be able to provide this, existing Christian groups can also provide this, and still do, although church membership has drastically declined along with every other kind of organizational membership since the 1970s.
However, modern Christian organizations in America have been warped by abuse, televangelism, decadence, co-optation by partisan politics, and the nefarious and un-Christian influences of money and power. While Christian groups still powerfully bind tribes together, as of right now the dominant strands of Christianity in America embrace a toxic in-group/out-group mentality. They have been convinced they are in a holy war against the un-Christian aspects of the rest of America. They are wielded as a weapon of cultural politics by the wealthy to secure tax cuts. They have even gone far enough to reject democracy in favor of a more limited populism, and now many of them question the legitimacy of democratic elections, which is very dangerous for the health of a democracy. It is impossible to ignore the threat posed by the rise of Christian authoritarianism in America. The positive effects of church tribal formation are being cut off at hard boundaries in opposition to an outgroup, rather than being used to weave threads of connection that can form a larger tribe in alignment with the ideal of democracy. This is a deep perversion of Christianity by powerful institutions, since Christ’s authentic teachings emphasize love, sharing, opening, nonviolence. This perversion can be compared to the devilish alignment of Christianity with the Roman Empire under Constantine, despite the fact that early Christianity was an explicitly anti-Roman, anti-imperial development. Modern American Christianity seems to mirror the Christianity of the Crusades rather than the Christianity of Christ. Politicians act like the Pharisees that Christ denounced, and televangelists are akin to the sellers of indulgences in pre-Reformation Europe.
American Christianity is in clear need of a Reformation. A new kind of Christian revival in America, a new Great Awakening, would be a potent force in the fight against nihilism in the 21st century. As large numbers of Americans already identify as Christian, a reformation of this identity group could be a powerful anti-nihilist force if done well. This would require new, thoughtful Christian leaders to arise and to change peoples’ minds about what Christianity is all about. Christianity needs to re-align with the ideal of democracy, so that the strong group ties engendered by Christianity become a force that feeds greater societal harmony and connection, rather than an antagonistic force against other tribes. Luckily, simply engaging authentically with the Bible can provide most of what is needed. Christ’s genuine teachings align with the ideal of democracy; in fact, an argument could be made that the core Christian ethos of ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ was essential in the rise of Western democracies. Developing this idea leads to the realization that all people are your neighbors. Another bit of luck is that the American tradition already includes many powerful examples of figures aligning a genuine Christianity with the ideal of democracy. Most famous is Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent commitment to the emergence of what he called the ‘Beloved Community,’ one of the most pragmatically successful examples of the ideal of democracy in action.
Another way to reconnect people is to recreate the infrastructure that forms the backbone of society. We need to reinvent how we design cities in order to foster more pro-social outcomes. As we diagnosed earlier in this essay, American infrastructure— with its focus on cars and atomizing suburbs— encourages nihilism. We need to build anti-nihilist cities. Anti-nihilist cities will be human-centered rather than car-centered. They will feature walkable neighborhoods and diverse transit options, so that people can live their daily lives without even needing cars. They will be dense— more humans living in closer proximity produces more community, more spontaneous connection, and more creation. Dunbar Units may come into play in the formation of tribes within the city, informing the size of a certain building or neighborhood. Anti-nihilist cities will be pretty— the depressing concrete wastelands of the second half of the 20th century are aesthetically nihilistic, implying that the infrastructure around where people live has no higher purpose or value beyond mere utility. Anti-nihilist cities will focus on providing an abundance of ‘third places’— places like parks, coffeeshops, libraries, anywhere people can gather that is neither work nor home. Many studies have shown how essential ‘third places’ are for community building. Relatedly, these cities should also emphasize providing places for active community participation and collaboration. Working together is a powerful anti-nihilist force, since it both connects us and encourages our sense of individual and collective agency. The community garden is a great example of such a space. Even the spatial layout of city blocks, streets, intersections, and more can be optimized for maximum human interaction. Anti-nihilist cities should also create cultural memes, holidays, rituals, or events that bring people together, bolstering the sense that one is an active part of a uniquely meaningful community.
Another societal remedy for American nihilism that I would like to propose is a new kind of social media. It is undeniable that the media we use to engage in public discourse profoundly shape that discourse. Democracy is thus very dependent on the media. We understand intuitively that we need our discussion media to be as free and open as possible. Currently, our world is being reshaped by the internet, and particularly by social media. However, it appears that our current social media platforms often drive nihilism just as easily as they enable connection. This is due to the perversion of the profit motive under our current political economy. Facebook is not incentivized to provide the most fair, open, reasonable discourse possible; it is incentivized to get your eyeballs on Facebook as much as possible in order to increase ad revenue. To accomplish this they will pervert your experience as much as they can get away with— they will use your data to show you exactly what you want to see, they will try to play upon your most simple psychology to get you addicted, they will try to get you angry at something outrageous about the other political party or outgroup, they will try to keep you pining after your ex, they will try to show you the most deranged and entertaining comment section on earth, they will try to make you feel like all your friends are hanging out without you and that you don’t have real friends at all (only Facebook friends, so you should keep scrolling Facebook to unsatisfactorily fulfill your desire for a tribe). While this arrangement is very good for Mark Zuckerberg, it is devastating to the psychology of billions of people, and disastrous for the social fabric of society, as serious discourses such as politics devolve into nonsense, and various tribal identities become algorithmically reinforced and therefore further divorced from a sense of shared contextual reality, dissolving collective agency and decreasing public trust. If this trend is allowed to continue, America and democracy are quite doomed, and nihilism will continue to deepen in American hearts.
We anti-nihilists must work towards the creation of a new kind of social media, one that is insulated somehow from the profit motive and instead designed with the ideal of democracy in mind. Such a social media site would attempt to create the ideal ‘public sphere’ dreamed of by Enlightenment philosophers through Jurgen Habermas. It would need to prioritize productive discourse subsumed under an assumption of shared reality, shared needs, and shared goals. It would need to prioritize education, prioritize facts, prioritize expertise, while also being open and accessible to all. It would need to foster optimal discourse for the full play of all ideas to come into generative conflict, a conflict that takes our shared single tribe and shared destiny as a given. It would need to balance the ideals of liberalism and the ideals of democracy. It would need to encourage participation, encourage listening, and encourage the creation of consent. It would need to be the ultimate infrastructure of democracy itself. As we have hinted, the ideal of democracy is one our greatest antidotes to nihilism. A new kind of democratic social media will be a powerful weapon in the fight against nihilism.
Cure Two: Reconnecting with Nature
Reconnecting our individual bodies with nature is another potent antidote to nihilism. The edge of experience is always where self meets world, where life meets environment; this is the quick of reality, the edge of the universe, what it feels like to be anything. Recall the two-layer model of human reality described earlier. People’s primary environment is other people, the intersubjective world— a world of symbols, laws, social forces, mothers who nurture us, Wal-Marts to buy groceries necessary for life, morals that keep us in the group, ideas from outside that threaten us, scary men behind us on the sidewalk at night who could end our lives and end our little experiments in evolution. But around this most salient environment in which we swim is an atmosphere in which we can always breathe, and which always sustains us. In fact, it is this environment which sustains the social world, the environment that birthed us. The social superorganism is another wonderful innovation in the emergencies of nature (sometimes, complex organizations in nature come together just right, emerging in a way that in that moment creates or discovers (does it matter?) a new kind of just right, a development that is not additive in Muchness but rather more like multiplicative (although actually different from, and more than multiplicative (in the imaginary math of Muchness (maybe the quality of quantity and the quantity of quality?) emergence)))). When this constellation comes together just right you get a sort of level-up in evolution, you build a sort of crane or catapult. The gestalt explodes with new power. Two weird unicellular dudes accidentally/on-purpose coming together to form the incredibly successful cell-with-mitochondria tag-team is one such example of a complexity upgrade. So is the way that organelles form cells, cells form tissues, tissues form organs, organs form systems, systems form humans, humans form Humanity. The origin of life, when probably some lightning bolt of God zapped just the wrong chemical soup and got stuck somehow, condemned to zap through soup striving for eternity, is likely another such example, the etiological source or seed, the first word that formed the voice.
While it is the social world which typically most excites us, we experience the world of nature more universally, more deeply, and more constantly. We get caught up in the social world and learn to automate, ignore, or take for granted our direct contacts with nature. And, increasingly, our social world is reified all around our physical environment along concrete roads and inside wooden houses, decreasing our daily contact with the natural world (or, more accurately, the more fundamental layers of the natural world.) But despite our increasing separation, or disconnect, we are always breathing the air in and out, in dialogue with nature around us and within us, engaging, adapting, at home. We forever need water to become our blood, for sunlight to keep the spark zapping happily through our soup. This is our most essential connection with the world.
Leaning into our connection with the full environment of nature makes us feel inextricably in relationship with nature. Nature is us and we are nature. Reconnecting with nature means recognizing this and embracing it; this heals the disconnected feelings of nihilism by fostering an internalized sense of one’s embeddedness in a larger whole, the source of meaning. Meaning is, of course, an evolution of nature, an adaptation of the superorganism society. In a similar sense to the way that society ‘means’ everything as the source of meaning, nature ‘means’ everything, but one abstraction deeper. Meaning is a form of relationship, an indication, the way all things touch, the way something means something else, the way something means everything else. Nature is the sum of meaning, and meaning is the sum of nature.
Acting in relationship with nature is meaningful in the most essential way. To climb a tree, harvest a mushroom, dig a hole with our bare hands, cross a rocky river barefoot, grow a garden, eat a delicious fresh-caught fish, watch a sunset from a high place or a low place— this puts us in direct and meaningful conversation with the world, with all that is true and good and beautiful. We take our place in the order of things; we fit; we feel like we evolved to love feeling. The meaningfulness of unalienated labor comes from this direct relationship between man, their hands, the dirt, and their dreams.
Consciously acting in relationship with nature is also meaningful in the social way, and this is where we get our lonesome philosopher speaking with the woods. To take the ear of the impartial composite spectator, which lives in each of us as emissary of society, and tilt it to listen to the language older than words— this is how individuals create or translate meaning from larger reality into social reality. The individual takes all the powers and gifts bestowed upon it by society and leaves society to face the unknown, armed but no longer protected by armor. The raw individual who leaves the town to go on a quest faces raw reality. They are forced to grow and adapt to environments most humans never will touch; the others will only learn about them, one layer of reality inward, when the hero comes back and shares the story. The hero willingly struggles to catch up with a shadowy and scary outer environment, because they have faith that it is always changing, ever-evolving beyond the story the moment the story is told. They know the environment is always being made new, so the evolving self which wants to survive and thrive must always make itself new to keep up. The individual goes to speak with the unknown gods of nature, bringing as many tribal ghosts with them as they can. The more experience the individual has within them, and the more stimulating the natural environment, the more novelty they tend to generate. Poetry is formed when language is held up as a mirror to reality, and the new image learns to speak.
The experience of raw nature is an individualizing experience, because its essence is the experience of the single feeling body. Hiking deep into the wilderness reminds you that, despite all of the tribal gifts you carry with you, you ultimately live and die alone as one small body. You are not only the eusocial superorganism experiencing group-level selection; you are also, inescapably, a body unto yourself, which wants to survive itself and reproduce itself, wants food, sex, power, which can kill and die and grow touching nature alone. Even if the unthinkable happens and the tribe casts you out, many a unique human being has lived years utterly alone, connected to and sustained by a rich web of natural meaning like the river from which they fish. Of course, life can be much more meaningful if the loner finds a new tribe with which to share all they’ve learned. Sharing meaning with the tribe is also individualizing; it introduces you as a source of unique novelty, of non-fungible value. You have a more distinct individual role in relation to the social whole. You have a meaningful role.
If we want to combat nihilism, we must reconnect with nature individually. Going into nature with groups is a great start to get a feel for the wild, especially with a friend whose environmental presence makes you feel safe in long silence. Listening happens best in silence. But we must, ultimately, go alone. It is important to go alone with intention; imagine the difference between feeling weird outside a house party, half-in half-out, and intentionally going to the shore to watch the waves and think. Emerson launched American philosophy by asking “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” One must go alone. This can mean going on a long hike, or a backpacking trip, or a short walk in the woods. It can mean gardening or fishing, climbing a cool rock or watching the loud waves roll in in silence. Bare feet is a good sign you’re doing it right; what is needed is contact. As Thoreau said from Mount Kitahdin, “Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,– daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,– rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?” The body’s contact with nature is the edge from which meaningful mystery expands in all directions. To live at this edge, at the quick of life, can feel wonderfully meaningful. Nature is a source of wild delight, and one day you will enjoy a perfect exhilaration alone in its presence. One of the American superorganism’s greatest intellectual threads, running from Emerson’s Nature through modern writers like Derrick Jensen and Mary Oliver, explores the meaningfulness of humanity’s individual contact with nature. Reading them can help us learn to listen better; but of course, the cool thing about this tradition is that it emphasizes the fact that ultimately you must listen and learn for yourself, and no books will ever be able to tell you what your moments at the quick will teach.
Deep and broad intercourse with nature teaches the ultimate feeling of connection to all things, the feeling which connection to the tribe merely indicates beyond itself. One who immerses themselves in nature begins to see and feel the connections between all things, the abstracts, the contours, the flows, the changes. They imagine nature flowing like a river over rocks. With the power of social perspective the individual begins to see space and time from many points of view, and vast visions are revealed to the body. One merges, one adapts to the widest possible environment. “Standing on the bare ground,— my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space— all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” The body that bears intersubjectivity to the throne of the universe approaches the God’s eye view. It begins to see that all things touch, all things are meaningful; all things touch you, all things are meaningful to you. The more of the universe we become aware of, the more of the universe we touch, the more pitifully silly nihilism seems. This is the feeling all religions strive for, and I needn’t tell you that nature is the source of religion.
The stars are the ultimate symbols and manifestations of nature, and I earnestly believe that modern Americans’ lack of time spent under perfectly dark and clear starry skies is a source of our disconnection. “To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.” While language is social, vision is individual. Your perspective on the stars is a unique vantage point into the universe, and sight is a form of touch. “The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.” Opening ourselves to the meaning of the stars teaches us the abstract behind the ways we can open ourselves to all the meaning of nature. The constellations are a metaphor for the universe. Learning to see the contours of nature meaningfully related to one another allows us to see more, to see deeper. The more abstract symmetries we stack up, the more meaningfully embedded the world feels. The map of the stars is the closest thing we have to a map of universal meaning from our perspective. The stars pull us into the world, and any serious anti-nihilist effort will have to make sure that people spend much more time with their heads tilted up in silence under the true night sky, unmediated by the noisy lights of society.
Cure 3: Reconnecting with Imagination
The stars lead us beyond ourselves, through nature and into the dark unknown; similarly, they lead us into my final cure for nihilism: imagination. Imagination is the synthesis of our first two cures, sociality and nature. It emerges somewhere between and above them. Somehow, in the mind of the human being, the species’ intersubjectivity mixes with nature to produce something indistinguishable from magic. Earlier we discussed how the superpower of intersubjectivity allows individuals to understand ‘objective’ concepts of space, time, causality, totality, language, abstractions, an essence called ‘yellow’, etc by amalgamating possible perspectives in order to approach some kind of God’s-eye view. We triangulate the world in order to better see it. The vision this gives us allows us to understand nature better, allows us to see reality better, expands what is known. But it can go even farther than that. Not only can we use our intersubjective superpowers to abstractly connect one experience in nature with another, like inferring that a burned tree was struck by lightning in a past time because we understand that things like that cause burned trees sometimes and can discuss this with other humans. We can go further; we can imagine possibilities; we can imagine (and really see in our mind’s eye!) that the lightning was blue or yellow; we can imagine that it was created by aliens, hurled by Zeus or Indra; we can imagine that it came as divine punishment, because the tree used to be a dryad who betrayed her husband to sleep with a naiad; we can imagine the lightning came with a loud crash of thunder, or we could easily imagine the lightning exploding to earth with a mouse’s squeak, really hearing and experiencing that possible image, despite how unlikely it is to be accurate to what happened. Imagination allows us to play with possibilities. It allows us to use our intersubjective powers to extrapolate from a real experience of nature and imagine an entire world of possibilities, possibilities we are able to imagine because of our previous experiences of nature and the social understandings we’ve layered on top of them. We can imagine using the orders of nature we’ve come to know, and we can extend the known into the unknown. We can experience more of reality, and we can explore an infinitely larger world of possibility-space. Our very imagining of a possibility makes it, in a sense, real. We have the power to extend nature. We can connect to a much larger universe of possibility.
What vision is to the individual, imagination is to the species.
Imagination can allow us to feel meaningfully connected to not only the present, but the future. The world of possibility expands through a notion of ‘time’ and allows us to imagine different possible futures. This not only makes us feel more connected to the future; it also gives us a sense of agency, because we can imagine different futures produced by different actions we could take. We can imagine possibilities and then move towards them guided by values. We can imagine possibilities and then take actions that actualize those possibilities, increasing our feeling of power. Our agency extends through the real world into a world of imagination, which we alone have the power to make into reality. Our agency, located in the present, has power over imaginary futures. We can imagine futures, and this allows us to create our future.
One way we can effectively counter nihilism is by leaning into our creativity. Creating something new in the world is the ultimate affirmation of both our connectedness to the world and our agency in the world. It implies that we are essential, that we have a valuable role to play in the universe, in fact that we are value-creating. As I said in the essay ‘America and the Shape of the Far Future,’ “The opposite of consuming is creating. Creating creates more than the thing created; it creates a superlative aura of agency… Building, making, innovating— genuinely creating new things is like an antiseptic to souls sick of nihilism.” The aura of agency confers benefits far beyond the initial thing created; it propels a virtuous cycle of anti-nihilism that encourages more creation, more connection, more agency, more meaning-making. Furthermore, the aura of agency is mimetically contagious. One innovation inspires another; one value-creation inspires another; a daring new bridge inspires a daring new adventure; a successful development in space travel inspires successful developments in art. This feeling that we all have the power to participate in the imaginative creation of a ‘New World’ is a powerful pro-social meme that lies at the heart of what has made America great. It implies that history is not definitive, and that the future emanates from our hands. “We need to propagate the agency that creating engenders in order to combat cultural pessimism and replace it with a new cultural optimism, an optimism for the utopia of the New World in the future. This optimistic orientation towards the possibility of utopia is the dream that has inspired all other dreams, the dream that has underpinned all genuine progress in this country.” The meme of the New World is a meta-meme, a meme that encourages the creation of new memes. When it is successfully spread, it teaches us all that we are meaningfully connected to one another and meaningfully responsible for the emergence of a better future. It provides a modernist grand narrative to a world adrift in post-modern difference; in fact, it is meta-modernist in the sense that all post-modern difference becomes part of the grand narrative of ever-emerging novelty in the universe. By being imaginative and creating new things in the world, we act as agents of evolution, we align with the universe’s desire to expand. We can rightfully believe that, due to the density of accumulated experience incidentally collected in our massive individual minds, we are capable of contributing something genuinely unique to the universe. We can feel as though we have an essential role to play in the growth of the world. Thus, we can feel that the universe does have ‘meaning’, and that the meaning is ‘evermore.’ The meaning of life points beyond itself. This is a universal thing, but America has historically accessed this feeling on a wide scale most successfully, due to its sense of an ever-expanding frontier. Now, in the fight against nihilism, Americans are responsible for rekindling this meme and spreading it.
Imagination is a function of the interaction between the known and the unknown. Thus, it can fight nihilism by making us feel connected to even the unknown. If we can feel integrally connected to even the unknown, the scariest thing in the universe, then we can feel connected to anything. Familiarizing oneself with the abyss defangs it. The fundamental mammalian fear of the unknown dissolves into faith. How can falling through the endless abyss of nihilism scare us, when we recognize the abyss as part of ourselves? When we see that we belong as much to the darkness as to the light? When we understand that we are touched by the unknown even more than we touch the known? When we know that we can have faith in the unknown as our home and as the source of our growth? When we feel that the unknown can be even more meaningful than the known?
When this happens, the same abyss that could spark nihilistic cries of terror and sadness can instead incite laughter. There is a certain human ‘peak experience’ reported by countless people throughout history, typically incited by a near-death encounter, a religious ecstasy, or use of psychedelic drugs. A person suddenly feels the reality of the abyss, the feeling of our groundlessness and contingency, the absurdity to be anything at all. This experience can be interpreted by the person in one of two ways: fear in resistance to losing oneself, or laughter in letting go. Both reactions are equally ‘true’, equally authentic, equally valid reactions to the situation, equally meaningless or meaningful. Psychology has taught us that our emotions are highly interpretable; the chemical excitement of fear walking over a bridge can easily be reinterpreted as sexual excitement if the experimenters place an attractive person of the opposite sex on the other side of the bridge. As William James said, we do not run from the bear because we are afraid; we feel afraid because we run from the bear. We can use this phenomenon to hack ourselves and be happier. We can interpret the groundless essence of life and death with fear or faith, terror or love, tears or laughter, and either way we will be right. The twin masks representing theatre, tragedy and comedy, also represent the heart of what it is to be a human being. Life is tragicomic. We can choose which interpretation we lean into. Why not choose laughter over tears?
Imagine a large college dorm room; the lights are low, and a dozen people are on acid. One boy, who also loves Nietzsche, is visiting from another school. On acid for the first time, he lies on the floor, hyperventilating, crying; though he seems to be flat on the floor he is falling through the abyss, falling through the empty space within atoms. The others around the room don’t know what to do, or try to ignore it. But I had felt what he was feeling before. I knew the absurdity of seeing through the bottom of the universe to find nothing. I lay down next to the boy. We do not need to speak. I start syncing my breathing with his, entering a rhythm with him, joining him in his experience flying through the abyss. I hold his hand and breathe deeper, louder, meeting him halfway between chaos and intense calm. He wails and I wail, breathing into the darkness together. He cries, and I… laugh. We keep breathing together and wailing together in massive breath releases of tension, but my wail is laughter. I am not laughing at him but with him. It sounds almost exactly the same, it is almost exactly the same, but it is as different as can be. I laugh with every cry, and nobody around the room can tell the difference. I laugh a little louder than his next cry. I stay with him. I pull him with me, laughing louder at the very same thing he cries at. I pull his releases into the tone of laughter. He laughs with me. We laugh and laugh ecstatic at the release from absurdity. We cackle wildly like madmen. We are a tableau of the human condition and the choice to be made. We are friends forever.
This is why the branch of existentialism known as absurdism is so essential and so popular. However, absurdism is often misinterpreted; people often imagine the laughter of absurdists as bitter, tragic, ironic, cynical, a cope for those who concede the nihilist point of view. But laughter at the absurd can be sincere, joyful, seriously unserious. To embrace genuine humor at absurdity is one of the most authentic ways we can make life not only bearable but enjoyable. Laughter seems evolutionarily built into us as some kind of social adaptation related to meaning-making; laughter is bonding and connective; laughter alleviates suffering; laughter is like a release valve from all the tension of life as a human being. How many horrible things have felt okay after your friend makes a joke about them? The only meaningless, unbearable life would be a life without laughter.
If you think it sounds trite and childish to say that imagination and laughter are serious cures for nihilism, you’d only be half right; it is profound and childish. The greatest anti-nihilists in the world are children. Children are incapable of nihilism; that disconnect is something we can only develop later, when our minds experience the world less raw, more mediated by society and prior experience. As adults we are liable to get stuck, cling to what we know, fear change, feel disconnected. Not so with children; they never feel disconnected for a second. They are full of that raw vitality at the quick of life, that sense of being at the edge of the universe, that feeling of being something very small and wonderful in touch with something very large and wonderful. Children explore the world, and take it as inherently meaningful in the truest way. After all, every new thing means many more new things. When you’re learning rapidly, everything feels meaningful. The fun thing is that the more you learn, the more there is to learn; the more you experience, the more there is to experience. The great game just keeps getting larger. Children are natural explorers, natural adventurers, natural experimenters. They play the game of life sincerely, with joy. Life is play, life is silly, life is a series of games. And if you break the rules of a game, and the floor falls out from underneath? The toddlers collapse into laughter at the silliness of it all. Laughter releases the seriousness of the game. It is the natural way to embrace flux and change, which is the true essence of the universe, despite how much adults may want to nail things down.
Maybe the ultimate medicine for nihilism is becoming more childlike. Maybe playing the adult game for too long is bad for you if you end up believing in it too much, or not enough, without laughing. Children represent some of the most special things about our species, and too often we renounce these things in our coming-of-age rituals. But children are so much closer to the quick of life, to the feeling of meaning in life. Children are raw with the world, sensitive, imaginative, moving through the world at a whole different speed. Children have less experience to smash together in the smithy of the soul, but their smithy runs hotter, and little experiences burn farther. They are the freshness of evolution. They are novelty-generators at the edge of the universe, with imaginations that can catch the wildest of boomerangs whirling back out of the abyss from a wide diagonal. With the most powerful imaginations of the species, the young are more in touch with the unknown, more connected with possibilities.
Becoming more childlike involves reconnecting with nature and reconnecting with other people in raw, open, youthful ways. With their sensory experience unmediated, they are more connected to nature; the first frost bites the most. Every experience explodes with meaning. This is why Emerson says ‘The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood… In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.” To truly open oneself to nature is to reaccess what it feels like to be a child again. Merely going into nature oneself with intention, or with friends with playful intention, is enough to reactivate this; meditation or drugs can help; but the most important thing is to face nature as if you are meeting it for the first time, with the wide eyes of a child. Imagine you just spawned into this video game out of nowhere, and know nothing. You must learn what touches you as if brand new. Climb a tree, build a tower of rocks, follow a trail of ants, run back and forth with the shoreline chasing you. To embrace this spirit of youthful play with your friends, free to laugh and be silly, is another powerful antidote to nihilism.
Furthermore, how can you feel disconnected from the tribe when your parent takes care of you? A baby that can cry, knowing mom will come to love it, undoubtedly feels that its life is meaningful. Its existence is meaningful to the tribe. How can you feel disconnected from society and nature at your mother’s breast? How can you feel nihilism when you know you are deeply loved? How can you feel the world is meaningless, when every day on the playground you and your friends invent new worlds? How can you feel a lack of agency when every day you learn big new things, all connecting in the Ultimate Game, the learning of the map of this world, and you then put what you learn into action with your young body for the first time? Lord, to be a child— to feel the power and joy at slowly coming to discover oneself in a human body, by far the most wonderful body to have! To find out your hands were made for climbing, and to climb. To learn the story so far, and to imagine your character. To learn how to play the language game, and to share something valuable. To be able to step from game to game with light feet. To laugh at how lucky we all are to be.
We must learn to become more childlike. Humans are like trees— we have rings, and all our rings are alive all at once. Ideally, you could cultivate all young layers fairly as you grow, tending to the roots of your inner child while you still focus on your new branches and leaves. But that’s not how it tends to go for most of us. Life is messy, and the path from childhood to adulthood still, for many of us, involves a fair trampling of traumas. Sometimes we forget things that used to be beautiful. Sometimes we lock things up that deserve to grow free. Sometimes a tree ring is a burn scar. So, sometimes, instead of preserving an old ring, we need to regrow one. We need to relearn to be young. Young people try so hard to grow older faster, before they realize they wish they could grow younger. In reality, we always need to be growing older and growing younger.
To grow younger, you can play more with your imagination. You can laugh more at life. You can connect more with other people, and you can connect more with nature. You can explore, experiment, go on a great adventure. You can act like you know nothing and are learning everything. You’re new around here. All your molecules are different, really. You were born this very second. The world is raw, hot, rich with Muchness. Every new fact could be the key to the kingdom; every new experience is the best something yet. Every person you could meet will love you, and you have unlimited space for new friends. You can be trusting and courageous. Nothing has ever broken nor could ever break you. You can always play a new game.
Coda: The New Greatest Weight
I hope you have enjoyed this tour through American nihilism and its cures. This essay has ranged through far wider intellectual regions than I ever imagined at the start. Over the course of writing this essay I have come to believe that the fight against nihilism is the unifying, underlying thread beneath all the other important battles of our time. Nihilism undergirds all of our other problems, and makes us powerless to solve them. We must overcome the disconnection and impotence engendered by nihilism in our culture in order to foster a new culture embracing connection and agency. This connection and agency will allow us to come together powerfully to solve any and all of the issues that face us. We must reconnect with each other, with nature, and with imagination. We must learn again to feel like we are building a New World, and that each of us has a meaningful role to play in the unfolding epic of history. The opposite of nihilism is aliveness. We must teach America to feel alive again.
Before we end, I would like to offer one final thought experiment. Aphorism 395 of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science is titled ‘The Greatest Weight.’ With God dead, Nietzsche felt that the ‘weight’ of God which had given meaning and morality to life was now missing, and that such weightlessness could have terrible consequences. After all, with the weight of God watching man to send them to heaven or hell lifted from man’s shoulders, what could replace that weight and guide human morality? Nietzsche proposed the famous parable of the eternal recurrence. Imagine a demon comes to you at night and whispers in your ear that this moment, and every moment you ever experience, will occur over and over again forever and ever. You will live every detail of your life experience again and again for eternity. You eternally recur. Now, Nietzsche says that this idea can fill you with fear or joy. If the idea of reliving everything forever fills you with fear, then you ought to change your life to live in such a way so that thought no longer fills you with fear. Rather, you should live a life that you can take joy and pride in, so that you can be happy to run it back over and over again, embracing all the pain and joy and every feeling in between. This thought experiment is meant to give the weight of eternity to man’s finite life, in a similar way the idea of eternal afterlife once did.
I would like to propose a modern upgrade to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. Nietzsche’s tragic flaw was his over-emphasis on individualism and his de-emphasis of sociality. He was a deeply lonely man, and while this enabled him to think great things, he missed out on some important aspects of what it means to be a human being. We have quite thoroughly discussed the social nature of meaning in this essay. I would like to socialize the eternal recurrence. Imagine that not only you relive every one of your experiences over and over again for eternity; imagine if every subject experiences your life over and over again for eternity. Every feeling, every choice has universal consequences for every experiencing being in the universe. You can imagine this just as easily as the traditional eternal recurrence, extending it with a belief in the unity of all things, a sort of Emersonian Oversoul, universal Christ consciousness, or Vedic Atman-Is-Brahman.
But we can make this thought experiment stick even more strongly if we unite the philosophy with a little dash of believable sci-fi. Imagine if billions of future humans were watching your experience right now, were reading your story in full detail, were feeling how it feels to be in your head, were inhabiting your life in an immersive AI x VR experience. They have perfectly simulated the experience of you, reaching back through time and space. Endless great-grandchildren, the extension of you towards eternity in the tribe, the part of you that lives forever, are watching you right now. They are learning from you, feeling for you, judging you, and talking with other future humans about you. Your great-grandchildren can develop a pretty thorough analysis of your character. Maybe heaven and hell are how we live forever in the mind of the tribe; maybe heaven and hell are how your grandkids remember you, as a hero or a villain or, likely, something much more complicated and human.
Every one of your actions ripples through the fabric of the universe, and everyone will feel what you do forever. Your life eternally recurs, socially. You should act as if this is true. You cannot prove that it is not. You should live your life as if the viewers at home are everyone, everywhen. This is a powerful way to develop a rich intersubjective morality. But don’t worry too much; it’s no more serious than the games of children. The viewers who know you, feel you, and love you don’t expect perfection. They expect humanity, and growth.
You are living a story, and the story is for keeps. Your story touches everything. Remember to keep the story entertaining; everyone will be glad you did. Everything is absurd, everything is possible, and everything could be meaningful. Might as well have fun with it. Be a story worth watching. Be a story worth believing in. It is meaningful to a tribe larger than you can imagine.
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 