The Left's Celebration of Nihilism

One of the biggest, longest knee-slappers of the progressive idiots at Lawyers, Gun and Money, and elsewhere, is their supposed superior "knowledge" of nihilism. The dolt "Malaclypse" especially loves to hammer the point about how "the dumb Donalde" doesn't even know what nihilism means! Doh! The problem? Well, the idiots themselves don't actually know what it means, can't describe or explain it, and only object to the term because it must apparently hit close to home, or something.

Anyway, I'm getting a kick out of Lawrence Auster's discussion of the topic, at View From the Right, "BENEATH LIBERALS’ SELF-CELEBRATION, THE DESPAIR OF NIHILISM." It's a response to comments, so click the link for the whole context, but this part is good:

...Mr. Hechtman makes a good point. But I should have made clear that when I speak of liberals’ despair, I do not mean that they are consciously, literally in despair. Of course, on the level of their conscious experience, they are full of themselves and their “wonderful” existence. They are soaring in an afflatus of triumph. They are in a state of ecstatic disbelief that Tony Blair’s pledge fifteen years ago to “sweep away those forces of conservatism” has come true, so fast and so thoroughly.

But just beneath their surface joy, there is ever-increasing disturbance. How do we know this? Consider the fact that the more power liberals enjoy over society, and the more conservatives surrender to the liberal agenda (e.g. on the issue of homosexuals in the military), the angrier the liberals become, the fuller of fear and loathing of conservatives they become, the more they feel that conservatives threaten them, and the more they want to silence, suppress, and punish conservatives.

What explains this ever-growing turbulence and hatred in the souls of liberals, at the very moment of their world-historic triumph? It is the fact that their entire existence is based on rebellion against the order of being, or, more simply, against God. As a result, the more power and fulfillment they have, the more they are divided from the order of being, and the more the tension within them grows. Therefore they feel increasingly threatened by—and are compulsively driven to crush—any remaining sign of the Truth which they have apparently defeated. In their minds, it is conservatives that symbolize belief in the hated God and the hated order of being. So it is conservatives (or rather the fantasy demonized image they have of conservatives) that the liberals must destroy.

If this explanation sounds implausible to you, ask yourself why, if liberals are so happy and victorious, they are becoming more fearful, hate-filled, and tyrannical, instead of enjoying and relaxing in their triumph?

Back at the post it goes on like that, and then Auster replies to one more commenter:

Also, to avoid misunderstanding, when I speak of nihilism, I do not use it in the conventional, incorrect sense of “not believing in anything.” There is no human being who does not believe in anything. If “not believing in anything” is the definition of nihilism, then there is no such thing as nihilism. No. Nihilism is the denial of objective moral truth. Our contemporary nihilists believe in and enjoy all kinds of things, but they don’t believe that there’s any objective moral truth backing up the things they believe in.

I'll bet good money that freak leftist B.J. Keefe would blow this off as some "Greater Wingnuttia" hysteria. See, for example:

I was not typing "Blargh" in response to your effort to twist the definition of nihilism to fit your own preconceived notions. It was in response to everything else.

Oh, and don't miss the rest of the commentary at Auster's.

BONUS: When called out in the past on the "meaning" of nihilism, I almost always link to the definition at Dictionary.com, especially "1. a complete denial of all established authority and institutions" and "3. a revolutionary doctrine of destruction for its own sake..." And some real life examples here.

EXTRA: "Navigating Past Nihilism."