What is driving nihilism?

Industrial technological society.

Good. The masses must become poor and disillusioned before they can crown the new chief of their tribe.

"People can be retroactively deprived of meaning in a rather unequivocal way. For example, many of us have ancestors who fought and died for what they believed was the sovereignty and integrity of their nation … gave their lives so that their own future generations could exist in security and prosperity. They invested great meaning in their sacrifice. But when this merely paved the way for immediate future generations determined to give away the sovereignty and integrity for which they had died, their sacrifice was deprived of meaning. Everyone who ever sacrificed life or comfort for one’s nation, and the civilization of which that nation was emblematic, has been abjectly robbed of meaning by the subhuman garbage that now mostly populates national and international governments and academia, indoctrinating the weak of mind to cede their humanity. After all, it’s not as though these subhumans actually have a plan for improving the situation for anyone but themselves; their idea is simply to steal everything that isn’t nailed down and redistribute the crumbs to a mongrelized, deracinated underclass devoid of freedom and dignity. It’s an unbelievable tragedy."

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Capitalism

modern institutions offer no positive vision of the world, only negations of possible positive visions

>tfw me and my buddy co-own a popular bar and once the disillusionment happens we're going to go the Hitler route and start our own populist uprising from speeches in beer halls
Collapse is looking comfy for me, lads.

>They can only alter the choices that don't matter.

It's more along the lines of learned helplessness. There's a lot of brainwashing and red tape to overcome, but nothing really *forces* you to be part of the system. At the end of the day and you can choose a different system - US cults famously prey on this. Or if you really have the balls, go full frontier and live in central africa.

It miiiiiight blow your mind to realize this, but people have NOT always been religious. religion falls in and out of favor like any other cultural trend.

go read a book and maybe you'd find that out.

I live in an extremely liberal state in the US so even my most "conservative" friends are libertarians are most. But it's odd, in the past couple years a lot of people who've always known me as "that funny right wing friend" are starting to come to me and tell me that I was right about shit that they initially didn't think I was right about. I know more than a couple New England white Bernie Sanders supporters who feel super disillusioned because they've realized that the left is explicitly anti-white. I can see our future forming and it's great.

>people have NOT always been religious
Name a single location and time period prior to the 1960s where people in general were not religious.

Capitalism

it'll be me

This isn't nihilism, it's the anomie and apathy driven by liberalism and decadence. Good times create weak men.

Langan is such an insufferable cunt. Nationalism is a fairly new meme, filling the void as church lost power. Before that there were only empires, and a common man in there was anything but patriotic.

I wonder how it would differ in America?

die boomer

No it won't, you narcissist. We have too many Hitlers and not enough Horst Wessels. Stop trying to gain personally from a movement that needs people willing to contribute famelessly.

it's okay to be wrong

To understand the opposite of nihilism, you need to understand the roots of it in the Cartesian-Newtonian universe of the Enlightenment era. In this model the universe was created largely as it was, and is essentially a machine of cause and effect started by a First Cause which also sustains it. Everything is determined by mechanistic rules, including animals, which were though to be literal automatons. Humans were exempted from causal determinism by free will, which was given by God as self-creative inspiration.

This view began to be challenged in the era of Darwin who described a process that could account for life without requiring a creator-God, a trend that would be followed in every scientific field. God effectively died but the mechanistic universe model was largely maintained. This resulted in active nihilism (humans as the sole creators of meaning, who create meaning ex nihilo from a meaningless existence) and passive nihilism (even humans are mere meat robots.)

The sciences have moved increasingly away from mechanicism but it's remained in our public philosophy and the way we largely think about ourselves because it's the foundation of the entire world order, exemplified in the paradigm of game theory which describes humans as self-interest-maximizing agent-automatons. It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The opposite of nihilism is not theism, which is the root of the cancer. Theism is the monopolization of creative originality by an All-Creator, and the opposite is the anarchization of creativity, a pan-creativism where all occurrences are simultaneously self-creating and created by the categorical other, featuring both bottom-up causal influence and top-down self-influence. A metaphor is considering the universe not as a creative unity but a self-creating tapestry where each thread is created by and creates others. Instead of meaning being absent, created ex-nihilo, or a singular end to all things, meaning is infinite in potential and inexhaustible, an endless becoming where meaning is both objectively experienced as an immediacy and a subjective aim towards the future.

The perspective of life from this is engaging in one's existence as co-creative relationships between all things, most especially others humans which we are capable of sharing the most interiority and meaning-creating with. It is seeing other humans beings as other life-artists and engaging with them in the art of shared lives, to recognize individual autonomy and interdependence as not being in conflict but mutually essential.

France during Robespierre's first year.
Russia since the 1930s
Vatican city since the Medicis

It really is a mutable trend, especially with that age group.
Still, a large part of it seems to be related too lack of finance. Mimetic desire could be creating a negative feedback loop here via social media and failed expectations.

>I can see our future forming and it's great.
Shape it into the future you want bro, I believe in you. Study rhetoric and public speaking, have a look at the industry in your state and figure out where the workers might congregate so you know how to get at them with flyers and speeches. All of this is made much easier with a buddy or two but once the economy dives it'll be like shooting fish in a barrel.

>France during Robespierre's first year.
As in the Robespierre who was overthrown by people who were religious because of his insane nonsense? You think Robespierre seize power and the whole of France was magically irreligious? The Vendee certainly disagrees. Shit example to list first.

>Russia since the 1930s
You realize that the Orthodox Church was abolished and then revived under Stalin's rule precisely because it was unrealistic to leave it abolished? Orthodoxy is and has always been the majority religion in Russia since its inception.

>Vatican city since the Medicis
What you stupid fucking cum drinking nigger? I'll take this as you admitting defeat. Nice try kid *brandishes katana*

Poor career prospects, wage stagnation making it harder for millennials to make a life of their own and the atomisation of society. It's hard to believe that your life is meaningful when basic needs aren't being met.

Pass the bong

We are eradicating meaning. Humans are a mess of evolutionary heuristics and hangovers. Technology has progressed to such an extent that we can easily trick these heuristics. In a first world country there is no struggle for food, more entertainment than a person could ever need is available for free, artificial gyms are doping us with hormones for free, porn is driving out our sexual urges, etc. More and more people are simply dropping out of society.
At the same time we are abolishing all that is religious. Science explains more and more of the world. Things we once thought had significance or "meaning" are now just the result of simple pseudo-deterministic systems (quantum mechanics won't set you free baby). In this day and age one would have to be a special kind of credulous to believe in a greater purpose.
It's only going to get worse. What happens when no one has to work? What happens when neuroscience explains everything you think and feel? What happens when there is a drug to make you feel love/fulfillment/religion/whatever available in convenient tablet or powdered form?

I personally am going to kill myself in a few years.
academia.edu/19469409/Crash_Space

I'm in NJ and it's majority nonwhite here. I'm lucky that I'm in one of the few majority white areas in the state but overall this place is definitely fucked. Anything that happens here will be underground and not within the system.

Good post user

Dont kill yourself, watch it all come crumbling down and you will find happiness

I also enjoy responding with the word "Capitalism" whenever someone wants an explanation for why something in the current world goes wrong.
But the question is nagging me more and more that if whatever system X it would be that currently reigns, the answer to the above question then would be X.
What in the current bad situation can we explicitly tie to capitalism and what part of our answering is just tautologically pointing to . The danger I see here is that this answer frees us from the need to understand what's actually the cause and effect.
I think the above is also why Lands Capital idea is appealing. If you elevate Capital to a god that was coming (from le future) all along, then indeed it seems natural that the system X that reigns just HAD to be capitalism.

I'd like to build an institution then. It cannot be _that_ hard. Let's do it online, an uni, a global reading club or sort. Not a job training circle, of course. Let's think out loud:
Why do people partake in the institution? Do we have to read Humboldt to design it? What's the incentives for that?

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>all the marxists in this thread citing alienation theories with no replacement
>they unironically believe humans live in a purely materialistic plane and any medicine they prescribe wont get to the essence of anything

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sooo when did you get a hold of my notebooks huh???

capitalists believe humans live in a purely materialistic plane too. Stop thinking in dualist terms, the right and the left are two sides of the same coin

alright marxfags help me out here, is it worth reading an abridged version of capital or should i just suck it up and read all 2800 pages?

Seeking meaning through any economic/political movement is going leave you feeling empty because it’s rests on the impossible ideal that negative things can be completely removed from society when in fact we live in a relativistic world which needs the bad to experience the good. That’s why all religions work on accepting suffering.

You act as if you end this on a positive note but
>meaning is infinite in potential and inexhaustible, an endless becoming where meaning is both objectively experienced as an immediacy and a subjective aim towards the future.
doesn't say anything.
You still leave making meaning to us and have no reason to believe that there's no external meanings to things.

not only that, but getting >economic/political will inadvertently mean you have to get comfortable to support violence in one way or another. And that ends up drawing a lot of antagonisms against your person. To endure this path, you have to get entirely and absolutely spooked by your position.

atomized individualism

>happiness
I think you've missed the point. There is a surplus of happiness.

>the sun

>There is a surplus of happiness.
cringe

We do live in a purely materialistic plane. But human consciousness desires immaterial things, which do not exist. Consciousness was a mistake.