How nihilism gained the upper hand in Western society
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
Photo: Wikipedia
I’ve written, often and at length, about the decline in standards of government in the West, and the parallel and consequent destruction of the capacity of the state apparatus, and for that matter of private sector companies and non-government organisations as well. Others have said much the same thing. I’m not going to go over all that again here, but, faithful to my thesis that politics is somewhat like engineering, I want to look at some of the negative processes that have been at work over the last forty-odd years, and more importantly those positive and essential processes that have been abandoned or greatly reduced. There are various possible explanations for this state of affairs: as I’ll explain, I am increasingly leaning towards one which verges on the apocalyptic.
I’ll expand that rather gnomic comment about processes by reference to another physical principle: that of entropy. There are many definitions, but we’ll take the simplest: the tendency of systems, in the absence of new inputs of energy, to gradually decline into disorder. (Perhaps you can already see what I’m getting at?) You encounter it in everyday life. You come back from a walk on a cold day, and discover that the central heating system which you thought you had left switched on, has been off, so the house is now cold. You remember that there is some soup in the fridge, but of course it’s cold at the moment. You need to take it out, but even then it will never heat up beyond room temperature unaided, so you have to find a saucepan, put the soup in the saucepan, heat the soup, but not too much, and pour it into a bowl. In other words, you need to devote purpose, effort and energy into changing the state of the soup to a state suitable for eating. And then you put the central heating on. But suppose that half an hour later, your partner comes home and says “that smells good, can I have some?” Naturally, entropy ensures that the soup has progressively cooled, and may already have reached room temperature again. So more purpose, effort and energy are required to restore the soup to its previous edible state. Of course, if you were clever you might have anticipated this, and left the soup with just enough of a continuous heat input to maintain the desired temperature. Oh, and you suddenly remember that you took the wine out of the fridge last night and forgot to put it back, so it’s warmed up to room temperature now.
I’m not going to labour the analogy (it is only an analogy, though I think a useful one) but rather look at how the same principle applies to human beings collectively. We do not live in Brave New World: we are structured by the energy of individual families and schools. But there is no inherited blueprint for how we are supposed to organise ourselves in larger groups, let alone get things done. Imagine, for a moment, a thousand people of all ages and backgrounds, suddenly teleported to a wilderness somewhere. They would have no structure, no organised means of communication, no way of deciding what to do, no accumulated knowledge or experience of working together. Under certain circumstances, they might die quite quickly. As Joseph Henrich and others have pointed out, societies we like to think of as primitive have in general developed not just highly sophisticated survival skills, but the organisation to apply them, and means of transmission and improvement over time and through generations. Just surviving as a rice-growing village peasantry in ancient China, Japan and Korea involved ferocious levels of organisation, discipline, cooperation and leadership, as well as inherited knowledge. Send 50 MBAs back to medieval Japan in a time machine and they would be dead in a couple of weeks.
But wasn’t that all in the past? Don’t we have iPhones and AI to tell us how to work together now? Well, not really. Some of my first essays, years ago, were about the concept of authority. Now authority has had a bad reputation since the 1960s, especially among individualists who want to be like all the other individualists, but actually it’s an indispensable component of life, and often expresses itself in very mundane ways. A group of people visiting a foreign city together will automatically defer to the advice of the one person who has been there before, or who speaks the local language. In almost any randomly-assembled group, natural leaders will emerge, based on issues such as personality, experience, human skills, leadership ability and so on. (You should never confuse leadership with shouting louder than everybody else.)
In very small groups where life is simple, it may be that the strongest and most ruthless person rises to the top. This was true of warrior bands and pirate ships in the past: it is just as true today of militia groups and jihadists, who tend to be guided by individual loyalty and the prospect of loot, and so change their composition with bewildering rapidity. The investment of leaders in combating entropy, in other words, is enormous, even if in such groups, individuals with a little vision and the ability to plan and lead sometimes succeed in federating them, as happened with the original Islamic State in Iraq in 2006.
Yet there are limits, which is why militia groups and jihadists, no matter how motivated, cannot resist, let alone defeat, properly trained soldiers. It’s a commonplace of military history that battles are won by the side that makes the fewest mistakes and has the fewest weaknesses (the Capability Gradient as I call it) and it is for this reason that even quite small numbers of trained and disciplined troops, with high levels of entropy can defeat large numbers of irregulars. When I lecture on such issues, I sometimes show my students the opening scene of Ridley Scott’s film Gladiator, and I ask them: why did the Romans win? The answer is always organisation, training, discipline and leadership. Individually, the Romans were no stronger or braver than the Barbarians, but they worked as a team and trained continuously to do so, to avoid entropy developing. The Capability Gradient issue is very important, and often explains complete collapse and sudden defeats. A decade or so ago, armies expensively trained and equipped by the West in Mali, in Iraq and in the DRC all folded up in a matter of days and ran away, in the face of respectively, a mixture of jihadists and Touareg separatists, the Islamic State and a Rwandan-trained and equipped militia. The fact was that all of these armies were afflicted by entropy, poorly paid if at all, badly led, incapable of working together and disinclined to die to defend the foreign bank accounts of their political masters. The difference in organisation, training and leadership with their enemies was not enormous, but it was more than enough to be decisive.
This in turn is why western armies (but also the Russians and the Vietnamese, and better African armies like those of Ethiopia and Rwanda) have often been able to achieve considerable results with objectively very small forces. The jihadist advance on Bamako in 2013 was stopped by French forces initially barely 500 strong, and only lightly armed and equipped. The classic example is probably the British despatch of one battalion to Sierra Leone in 2000, which was originally intended as a hostage-rescue mission, but which drove all before it and ended the civil war. (Fortunately, because the British Army was heavily overstretched at the time and there were no reserves: the tiny force itself was sent over the protests of military chiefs.)
Yet after these incidents in Africa and the Middle East, there were cries of bewilderment. Fortunes had been put into training and equipping these soldiers. Where were the effects? Where had all the money gone? It was true that, especially in Africa, western states had poured resources into training, and all through the 2000s, they congratulated themselves on how many tens of thousands of African soldiers had been trained that year. The African Standby Force, the security instrument of the new African Union, would soon have well-trained, well-led, well-equipped Brigade-sized forces at its disposal to intervene in crises all over the continent, thus enabling the West to concentrate on other things, and avoid more endless and costly UN missions. And because soldiers need staffs able to plan and command operations, hundreds of African officers were trained over the years in Staff Colleges in the West and in India and Pakistan. Yet when the Malian Army fell apart in 2013, the African Standby Force could not be deployed because it did not yet exist, and indeed the possibility was not even mentioned. Once again the cry went out for western troops, thus undermining the very purpose of all this expenditure in the first place.
Yet so far as we know, all this effort and money had, indeed, been expended. It was not a mirage. But it wasn’t followed up: in other words, no attention was paid to the effects of entropy. Thus, bright potential staff officers were sent for staff training, but when they returned it was to the same dysfunctional system, and after a couple of years in the Operations Staff they would be moved, perhaps to command a logistics depot, or they would just leave, sick of the corruption and ineffectiveness of the system. And so it was necessary to train their successors, and their successors’ successors, in principle forever. And entropy tells us that training soldiers just once achieves little, not least because in most armies soldiers only spend a handful of years in uniform anyway. You need regular re-training, regular exercises and careful identification of future leaders, which was beyond the capacity of African armies or foreign donors to provide. (The Rwandans had enough money to constitute an exception, and anyway things are easier in a military dictatorship.)
We can express all this in summary terms as follows. Organisations do not constitute themselves naturally from separate individuals. Organisations with any degree of complexity at all require purpose, effort and energy to put together in the first place. They then require further periodic inputs if they are to remain effective, because entropy ensures that, left to themselves, organisations will become less ordered and thus less capable over time. This is a natural process and not necessarily the fault of individuals, although they may make it worse or conversely help to slow it down.
Capable organisations have always known this. Emergency services don’t just write procedures, they should practice them frequently. Governments make and rehearse plans for dealing with unexpected crises. Military units are given special training before being sent on operations. If you go to a dangerous area of the world you may have to listen to a security briefing you’ve heard several times before, just to make sure that you remember it. And so on. And if we are to seek a single dominant, immediate cause for the decline in politics and government in the western world over the last couple of generations, it is precisely that the natural tendency towards entropy has not been taken seriously. Indeed, as I shall try to show, everything has been done to increase entropy, sometimes through incompetence, sometimes through ideology, sometimes just by accident. And in turn, the ultimate causes of that are rather disturbing.
For example, when I was a young government official, it was accepted that one of the roles of the senior officials was to identify and nurture a pool of talent that would be needed to run the organisation when they themselves were long retired. This meant not just identifying people, but giving them the right experience and the right training to fit the best of them for senior positions. Similarly, in the armies of the Cold War, a Chief of Defence would have commanded units of every size from Platoon to at least a Division, as well as having the necessary political experience. This kind of system, at its best, produced people whose authority was accepted, because they’d been there and done it, and were deeply embedded in the system they led. That’s long gone, a victim of the idea that anyone with an MBA can run anything, anywhere, and anyway that what counts is not the ability of a leader but the optics and politics of choosing them.
It’s this, more than anything else, that lies behind the shambles that is now the western military, and its inability to understand, let alone to imagine how to counter, what the Russians are doing in Ukraine The military is a very high-entropy organisation, and needs to practice not only skills but also the retention of its guiding mindset, quite regularly. This is why regiments cultivate their history, and why naval vessels bear the same name through different generations. It reminds them who they are and why they exist. Western militaries have become largely dysfunctional not just for practical reasons (and here we may reflect that the consumption of ammunition and spares is a form of entropy that has to be allowed for, and it turns out it hasn’t been) but because no effort has been made to preserve this mindset: indeed, rather the reverse. No organisation, after all, is inherently good or bad just on paper. It’s how the organisation is structured, run and nurtured that makes the difference: a point to which I return.
Let’s look at some practical examples of the effects of entropy in history. The rise and fall of Empires and unitary states is a case in point, and probably the best example is that of the Ottomans, because it’s well documented and easy to follow on maps. An Empire based on military conquest is rapidly afflicted by entropy when the conquest stops, and with the Ottomans this happened after the loss of the Battle of Vienna in 1683. A slow decline set in, and groups in the government pressed for modernisation and reform to prevent the Empire being swallowed up by the rising industrial powers to the West. But reactionary forces were too strong to overcome, and it was not until the 1830s, when parts of the Empire were breaking away, and the European territories were rising up against their colonial masters, that reform was taken seriously, and an attempt was begun in 1839 to modernise the military and the political system: the Tanzimat. This is a complex story, and historians have debated how successful the Tanzimat was, before it sputtered out forty years later. In the end, though, the Empire did not become a modern, European-style state, and it was progressively dismembered by its neighbours (an Egyptian army occupied Syria for a decade) lost territories to indigenous European nationalists, and finally disappeared. Moreover, the praiseworthy attempt to give full civil rights to non-Muslims produced widespread violent resistance from Muslims who saw their positions threatened. Terrible massacres of Christians in 1850 in Mount Lebanon and in Damascus are reckoned by some historians to mark the beginning of the modern Middle East.
In any event, the Tanzimat is a good example of how entropy creeps up on political systems, and how difficult it is to reverse, without massive inputs of purpose, effort and energy. In the case of the Ottomans, given the size of the problems they faced, these were obviously insufficient. It is interesting to compare this failure with the success of Japan, at just about the same time. By the mid 19th century, isolation had left Japan well behind the West, and reformers there had an easier task in arguing that, in the absence of reform, they would rapidly become someone’s colony. The resulting reform programme was not without opponents (the Samurai clans had to be forcibly brought into line) but progress was such that modern, western-style military forces were established capable of defeating the Russians in the 1904-5 war. And Japan subsequently developed colonies of its own in Korea and Manchuria. But of course Japan had advantages of homogeneity, relatively small size and population, and most of all an immediate and pressing threat, which the Ottomans did not have, but which meant that the energy available for the task was sufficient.
But a key feature of the Japanese approach was from the beginning, and still remains, to combat entropy by continuously looking around to see what is being done elsewhere, and adapting as necessary. Rather than dramatic, often ill-considered change, such cultures favour continuous small improvements (popularised in the West through the Japanese word Kaizen). Sometimes (as in the industrial realm where the modern term came from) this is generated internally, whilst much has also been learned from careful analysis of how things are done elsewhere. Even today, the Japanese, Koreans and Singaporeans send missions abroad to evaluate how things are organised there, and to see if they can learn any lessons. In all cases, the idea is to counter the effects of entropy by continuous small applications of energy.
Finally, and briefly, the British and French Empires demonstrate what happens when the cost of combating entropy becomes prohibitive. The two Empires were quickly acquired but became progressively more expensive and logistically difficult to retain. Quite soon, the British found that their Empire East of Suez could not be defended: energy, in the sense of money and military forces, was inadequate, and the Singapore Naval Base, for example, never actually had any ships based there. After World War 1, the two countries struggled to meet the energy requirements of maintaining colonies, but kept them because they were the key to Great Power status. Quite soon after World War 2, though, the level of energy needed became prohibitive, and both countries decided that international influence, permanent membership of the UN Security Council and nuclear weapon status would have to substitute.
Little of this means anything today. Few people in western political systems would understand the principle of political entropy at all, or the need to put effort into just maintaining what you have in good condition, as you would with your car or your house. In one sense this reflects our short-term, quick result, throwaway society, where a replacement is always available from Amazon tomorrow, and even prestige marks of clothing or cars are only expected to last a few years. Sometimes this shows up in the most literal of senses: the infrastructure in most western countries is now cracking up, after decades of neglect because, in the end, who cares?
But the most important influence, I think, is the move away from any long-term commitment to organisations. These days, what were once careers are just lines on a CV. Every organisation you work in is just a step towards another, with more money and prestige. Even politics, once a second or at least parallel career for people who had already worked elsewhere, has become just part of a longer-term plan: researcher at 24, Ministerial adviser at 30, politician at 35, Minister yourself at 40, then cash in your experience and make lots of money. It’s futile to imagine that such people would, for example, approve expenditure on infrastructure that would benefit the country in ten years’ time, under another government. And come to that, why bother with the care and maintenance of your own Party, since it’s only a vehicle for your own ambitions? Indeed, whilst the decline of mass political parties has been much discussed, not enough attention has been given to the fact that maintaining and developing them is a difficult and tedious task, and requires energy to be put into it: energy which could better be devoted to your own career. And since politics isn’t “about” anything any more, you have no ideological obligations to voters and party supporters anyway.
But even a perfect political system requires support and, from the nineteenth century onwards, states progressively realised that a career government service was required to replace the favouritism and corruption of the past. The British, shaken by the experience of the Crimean War, devoted a great deal of energy not only to setting up the world’s first proper public service recruited and promoted on merit, but to inculcating values and traditions that would counteract the inevitable entropic drift all organisations risk. So for generations, under one name or another, regular training for the rest of your career was offered by the Civil Service College, to supplement training done internally, and usually carried out by your own peers. This helped to ensure the transmission of ideals and values, as well as knowledge. Unsurprisingly, all this was downgraded from the 1990s onwards, and the College was closed in 2012. It exists now, in name only, as just another business school offering courses in DEI and data protection. After all, who cares about the abilities, let alone the ethos, of the people who administer the country any more? And so why should they care themselves?
You can see the same thing happening in France. Even before the end of World War 2 De Gaulle’s provisional government had set up the École nationale d’administration, to break the stranglehold of the traditional, conservative French bureaucracy which had happily served Pétain, and to train a new generation imbued with Republican principles. With the passage of time, though, ENA has increasingly become just a finishing-school for the French elite, enabling them to spend a few years in politics and to accumulate an impressive contacts list before going off to make their fortunes elsewhere. And the Institute d’études politiques, intended to prepare students intellectually for the ENA competition, has degenerated into just another international university, offering many of its courses today in English. After all, who cares?
The British cared, at the time, and so did the French, and in both cases there were strong principles (a Protestant sense of duty, and Republican values) to underpin the initiatives. But I said at the beginning that combating entropy requires purpose, as well as energy and effort, and that purpose has very largely been lost. This loss began as simple indifference, and more recently, especially in Britain, it seems to have turned into active hatred, and towards an almost nihilistic disdain for anything public, about which I shall have more to say at the end.
It’s interesting that the British, looking around for inspiration nearly two hundred years ago, alighted on the Confucian principles of the Chinese Civil Service. Now looking back quickly at these essays, I’m surprised to find that I haven’t said much more about the Analects. This is strange, because the book is far from a detailed treatise on politics (it mostly consists of reported pithy sayings, which could today be tweets) nor is it a boring old man sounding off about the duties of the young. In fact, Confucius (551-479 BC) or “Master Kong,” or just “The Master,” was an able, even ambitious politician, who, like Machiavelli, knew what he was talking about. If anything, his remarks surprise us not by being profound and difficult, but by being simple and practical. Find and recruit good people. Promote the best. Innovate carefully. Cultivate trust. Help those who need more training. Cultivate virtue rather than threatening punishment. Set a good example yourself. None of this is difficult, or hard to understand and all of it has been field-tested over millennia in different political contexts. There is an almost unbearable irony in the fact that the British (and later other western societies) adopted these principles at a time when China seemed terminally weak, only to have abandoned them exactly at the moment where China became strong again.
Let’s just stay with Master Kong a moment to look at two of his principles. He strongly believed that the multiplication of statutes and ordinances accompanied by threats of punishment was much less effective than promoting good and professional behaviour in the first place. By extension, he wanted to avoid recourse to law, through making it as far as possible unnecessary. And it was very much in this spirit that modern institutions of government, including the military, were first created. Over the last half-century, though, our government systems have moved towards a form of legalistic control-freakery which reflects the basic Liberal belief that people are naturally dishonest and will cheat the moment your back is turned and controls are loosened. The result has been the progressive destruction of the public service ethos, but just as importantly the decline in actual performance, in spite of all the controls, reviews, accountability exercises and audits.
Let’s take a simple example. You work in an organisation which deals extensively with the public, and you spend much of your day answering queries and supplying information. Let’s assume that it is the practice to try to answer all queries within a week, and to have as few left in your in-box on a Friday as possible. And then some bright spark on high decides to convert this into a target: 90% of all requests should be answered within five working days. After all, you mostly do that anyway. But then the 90% becomes less a target than a limit. OK, it’s Friday at 5 o’clock and I’ve answered 91% of my enquiries. If I stayed another hour I could answer the lot. But why should I, I get paid just the same? And then of course you leave the most difficult cases, and often the most important, to the end, when you have already reached your target. And then there are arguments about special cases, and more work comes in, and work is done hastily and needs to be re-done, and before you know it, both performance and morale have started to suffer. But it keeps an army of auditors in business, even as it reinforces the subliminal message from your leaders: we don’t trust you.
That, of course, cuts across Master Kong’s other great injunction: lead by example, such that people will know how to behave well instinctively, rather than by lecturing them. This was once true of institutions in many countries, now the very idea seems risible. Leaders today generally hate the organisations they lead, and those who work for them. They view organisations, and even countries, as resources to extract advantage from: how childishly naive now must seem the story of Charles de Gaulle, on his resignation in 1969, writing a cheque to cover his personal telephone calls and letters while he was President. Running an organisation just means extracting everything you can from it before leaving. The British originated a system, since imitated elsewhere, where core functions of government were entrusted to sort-of-but-not-really independent “agencies,” headed by “Chief Executives” with targets to reach. You can imagine the rest. The easiest way to reach targets is to cheat on the back of your workforce, and the easiest way to an even better job is to very publicly rip everything up and put it back in a different format. By the time the cracks appear you’ll be gone.
Master Kong’s advice was to consider innovation carefully before moving, and indeed this was general practice until the last couple of generations. Now, change for its own sake is often a substitute for original thought of any kind. But organisations can become sick with change: subject to an incessant hurricane of innovation, they eventually forget what they are actually for. They violate, in other words, the principle of Institutional Integrity, which simply states that institutions should be structured and managed to suit the task they are intended to carry out. In an era when organisations are mainly concerned with how they look to external arbiters of taste, that must seem a revolutionary suggestion. So you may have read recently of the misadventures of the British Army with its new Ajax series of armoured vehicles, which don’t seem to work and may have to be cancelled. The gut reaction, of course, is to “change the system,” without perhaps reflecting that never-ending changes in the system over the decades may actually have been a major part of the problem.
So how do we understand all this? I’ve said already that incompetence, ideology and sheer accident have all played roles. But beyond that, much of the decline in governments, organisations, institutions and even private companies looks like self-defeating destruction, willed for its own sake. There seems to be a kind of fierce determination to let the world burn, to allow dangerous diseases to propagate, to use up resources as fast as we can, to pollute ourselves to death, when the systems we used to have could have addressed these problems, at least to some extent. Our political masters destroy education and health systems not just with indifference, but with relish. Our militaries cannot fight wars, our police forces cannot protect societies and our private sector has lost all contact with the real world and is now eating itself and just regurgitating money.
We live, in other words, in a nihilistic age. It was Nietzsche, purveyor of uncomfortable truths, who pointed out that the “Death of God,” and the consequent lack of any agreed system of ethics would lead to a world without meaning or purpose, because all values are baseless, all action is pointless, all outcomes are morally equivalent and no objectives are therefore worth pursuing. I don’t know how many people read past the title of his Will to Powerthese days, but his thesis that the end of all imposed values and meaning, the end of the very concept of truth and the impotence of reason, collectively amounted to “the most destructive force in history,” and would produce a “catastrophe” is hard to challenge. Writing in 1888, he predicted this would happen over the next two centuries. Moreover, like other nihilists of the time, he argued not just that everything would perish, but that everything “deserved to perish” and that deliberate destruction was therefore necessary.
This way of thinking—already familiar from Turgenev’s Fathers and Children published a generation before—can reasonably be said to express the dominant intellectual mood of the almost two centuries since Nietzsche wrote. (Nazism, at its base, was just an apocalyptic death cult.) Writers as influential as Spengler and Heidegger took up the theme, and the idea of the essential meaningless, pointlessness and absurdity of life runs through all modern literature and much philosophy, and subtly influences those who have never read either. (Studies of major figures of Modernist literature, for example, reveal a frightening level of elitist nihilism often drawn directly from Nietzsche.) Those like Sartre who argued that there was nonetheless the possibility of freedom and hope, have been sidelined in favour of an incessant parade of Marcuse-inspired post-modernist thinkers (and even more damagingly their popularisers) telling us that nothing is possible, nothing means anything, that the world is just patterns of domination and subjection that can never be changed, and all that remains now is to tear things down. Popular and political culture is thus mostly about destruction now, beginning with the traditional political parties of the West, and government and its institutions, but moving on to ideological destruction as well. Sometimes this is literal: statues smashed, plaques destroyed, works of art defaced, books torn from libraries, speakers howled down.
But history and culture themselves are in the process of being destroyed, as the nihilist machine grinds ever onwards; MacGilchrist’s left-brain dominance out of control once again. We are no longer interested in people who did things, but in people to whom terrible things were done. We no longer respect victors, we respect only victims. (Victors are just about acceptable if they have overcome the terrible handicaps of the marginalised etc.etc.) The obsession with denying sex differences will soon destroy the meaning of much world literature, from The Tale of Genji to Romeo and Juliet to Pride and Prejudice, to Anna Karenina. Large Language Models (I refuse to talk of “Artificial Intelligence”) are perhaps the most devastating weapon of destruction of all. Since they can only reproduce material they have been trained on, and since that material is now increasingly polluted by the error-prone output of LLMs themselves, then for the first time in human history we will know less every year than we did the year before.
For almost two hundred years, nihilists have argued that everything must be destroyed before some kind of new world can be built according to some principles we’ll get back to you on the details. And it is precisely the politics of destruction that typifies our age. European leaders destroy their countries in an attempt to destroy Russia. Israel is destroying Gaza. The United States destroys everything it touches. Most of all, political life is destroyed by the end of any semblance of debate and the substitution of the simple imperative to destroy one’s enemy. The only policy of the Notional Left in Europe is to “defeat fascism,” which means that everything displeasing to the political establishment is labelled “extreme right” or “hard right” or whatever, and thus even immigrant communities complaining about gangs operating in their midst are told to shut up because their protests “strengthen the extreme right.” Personal abuse is almost the only form of political speech these days. The death of Brigitte Bardot recently was marked by a rash of sour and vindictive articles and tweets criticising some of her political views: the nastiest perhaps was by the tiresome Sandrine Rousseau, who is to grace and beauty what Jeffrey Epstein was to child protection.
Practically all non-elite political movements today are based on negativity, protest and violence. The violent fringe of the Gilets jaunes demonstrators and the Black Bloc figures that infiltrated them were simply interested in destruction. The targets didn’t actually matter that much: shops, offices, bars, dry cleaners, whatever. One of the buildings they trashed was the Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris. (I walked past the damage a couple of days later.) At the time, this was rationalised as the attackers having mistaken the hospital for a nearby Bank, but there’s no poof of this. After all, if there are no agreed moral standards, why is it worse to destroy a hospital than a bank?
There are benefits of course, in the limited sense that if everything must be destroyed, there are still opportunities for last-minute looting at all levels. After all, nihilism is the logical end-product of unrestrained Liberalism: as Nietzsche said, in the absence of agreed ethical standards, with a correspondingly personal, solipsistic view of the world, power alone determines the ethics that dominate. And nothing is more powerful than controlling what people are allowed to say and do. You may be destroying the Humanities Faculty of your University, but there are jobs and money available as the ship goes down. You may be destroying government but think of all the money to be made from consulting contracts at the end of the day. In a society of radical apocalyptic individualism, only capable of the shortest of short-term thinking, destroying the economy of your country in the hope of destroying Russia makes perfect twisted sense.
And then? Nietzsche believed that everything had to be destroyed to produce something better, even if his own prescriptions have found few converts. The trouble is that, as I said at the beginning, human beings do not come in boxes with instructions for working together, and they do not spontaneously self-organise. If governments and states are destroyed, which appears to be our future, then the resulting political vacuum will soon be filled. I’m not worried about the Thiels and Musks of this world, who have no skills except extracting money, and whose strength and influence depends entirely on people doing things for their money. That doesn’t include dying for them. No, I have a feeling that the vacuum our nihilistic ruling class is busy creating will be filled by people we aren’t going to like at all. More on that cheerful subject next week.
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