I've been on substack for like two years now, with 30+ different subscriptions, and this is one of the top essays I've read. It really nails the point that we are in the midst of some massive historical force, that every one of us is more or less suffering a personal tragedy as a result of the nihilism of the modern world, and that there is actually nothing that exists yet as a valid alternative to this empty way of life. And also, there is no going back to the past.
I recently read Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War, and there's a part in it where he's discussing the birth of Islam. He mentions that before Islam exploded on the scene, there was a set of competing religious traditions in the Arabian Peninsula from which Islam ultimately emerged:
"It is a little known fact that Muhammad was just one (albeit the most successful) of at least half a dozen monotheistic prophets active in Arabia in the early seventh century. Naturally, the other five religious leaders are now considered “false prophets,” because they lost out to Islam. But such a sudden appearance of comparable religious movements all over Arabia is indicative of sociopolitical conditions that were ripe for something such as Islam to happen."
I think the best we can hope for is that we are in some kind of similarly "ripe" primordial state. There is certainty plenty of groping in the dark here on substack. Even ZeroHPLovecraft recently wrote an essay on the subject, but he ended it by simply saying the solution was that someone needs to unify The New Testament and the works of Nietzsche, and made no attempt to do it himself...
Maybe it's more appropriate to describe the situation as "unripe but ripening", because I don't currently see anything serious or substantial that could actually fill the role of displacing the modern nihilism. Most of it is bronze-age larping, or based Orthodox-Christian chads who want to retake Constantinople - i.e. very unserious people. Of the few who catch wider attention, many of them seem to end up grifters (Jordan Peterson for example).
Personally, I don't anything serious is going to happen until there is some massive economic collapse, probably brought about by peak oil or mineral shortages or something like that. Once it becomes clear that the great material wealth of modernity will no longer be there as a numbing agent with which to fill the void, it's going to force a lot of people to start searching for something more meaningful (or drugs). As suggested in this essay, I don't think the damage that rationality and scientific progress did to biblical legitimacy can be easily undone short of a new dark age, so what happens in such a situation will be anyone's guess.
Like you, I expect things will get much worse on the material plane, and that the best thing we can do is to live well below our economic means, to try to wrestle with these difficult spiritual and philosophical issues and to derive some personal non-materialist meaning in life wherever possible. It's not easy. People generally are still far too complacent and conditions are not ripe enough yet for a societal paradigm shift, whatever it may eventually be.
You make an interesting point regarding Islam - I have Tom Holland's "In the Shadow of the Sword" on my nightstand to read, but Turchin could be interesting as well. Christianity also arose during turbulent end-of-world times when there were a lot of competing prophets, so perhaps we need similarly difficult conditions for such a new philosophy filled with meaning to arise.
*** Once it becomes clear that the great material wealth of modernity will no longer be there as a numbing agent with which to fill the void, it's going to force a lot of people to start searching for something more meaningful (or drugs). ***
A lot of people were and are betting on drugs. Alcohol was “essential” during the COVID-19 scare, and nobody in Washington is serious about stopping the flow of drugs into the country. The border is wide open, but Sudafed is watched closely?
It appears that whatever happens, it's guided with great precision -- to screw over the vast majority of citizens worldwide.
The inevitability of where we are now is what I question. Not that a collapse could never happen, but that it’s being made to happen and as quickly as possible.
The economy is largely self correcting. The trick for those trying to collapse it, is to convince the majority of people that the collapse is “organic.” However, I don't think it's working.
The health insurance industry is the same way. The government has, as it's goal, a single-payer government run health care system. That's why private health insurance is such a giant cluster fuck. It didn't become that way on its own. It was strategically brought about through government regulation. Those regulations are not visible to the end user. So it appears as incompetence, or mismanagement on the part of the insurance companies. That's why everyone hates the health insurance industry.
The bad part is that there is a critical mass for the economy. Where that is, I don't know, but the people trying to collapse it, I don't think know either. They don't care. They will push until it dies. They aren't concerned with the point at which the collapse is immanent, just that it happens.
All of this is shitty, and even more shitty for the younger crowd, because most of their youth will be burned up in this quagmire of man-caused misery, all to solidify power.
The Demons will be summoned soon. It will be an all out assault, coming right after the carnage of billions murdered in Nuclear Fire. The only “system” that will triumph will be Islam. Because Islam alone endows to man obligation & responsibilities “weighty” enough to keep slaying said Demons; in spite of them breaching by the trillions.
Thank you for this concise overview of the meaning crisis aspect of the eight-ball we find ourselves behind. I agree that it is a very important aspect of our dilemma. I find myself wondering how much of our moral/spiritual malaise is due to our having been poisoned in countless ways since ~1865, when seed oils were introduced into our food supply, and our meat consumption began to decline, accelerating around the time of the revolt of the elites, ~1880-1920. I wonder, how much of garbage state of philosophy is a consequence of the garbage state of our postmodern health? Recent testimonials of men who've adopted "The Lion Diet" give me hope that if our best men were to eat the best diet, they'd produce better philosophy!
(Of course, the right diet can't fix the unfixable, e.g. Jordan Peterson).
Another key to un-poisoning ourselves is to become aware that we have deliberate poisoners at the levers of power, including what is promoted as philosophy. Marxism, Freudianism, The Frankfurt School and Postmodernism were not accidents...
Another well written great historic piece. Thank you.
I exeriment and reflect on "meaning" for years now. I struggled with depression in the past and overcame it as a permanent visitor. He just visits me occassionally now and I trie to make him welcome and value what he has to say. Same with paranoia.
Drugs were mentioned. To have a useful conversation about drugs and meaning we have to look into how people can use drugs. It can be used to numb, forget, retreat, hybernate and escape the drugless world. They can also be used to uninhibitate and express our behaviour, thoughts, ideas, emotions and so forth helping us to express and process what needs to be processed. And some drugs can induce the profoundest experiences of meaning equal if not more profound than the meanings of spiritual awakening, based on my personal experience.
So drugs, used expertly, can definetly help to experience profound meanings temporarily. This includes an "afterglow" lasting years if not the rest of our lives. However, we are still dealing with a dual world here and the same drugs can throw us into an abyss of eternal hoplessness, madness and despair.(I came close and protocols saved me) There is a reason why psychedelic drugs in indigenous cultues were always taken under the guidance of a shaman.
We never had a widly used spiritual shamanic relationship with psychedelics in the modern Western world. But it is growing and maybe one day it leads to a new paradigm and a vastly more intelligent and meaningful culture.
Psychedlic drugs, when used wisely in a safe framework have the potential to create a paradigm shift. They already proved their potential. They already have moved our culture away from materalism and nihilism. The big social movements of the sixties and seventies were triggered by psychedlic drugs. The Internet and the smart phone in your hand wouldn't exist without psychedic drugs. Steve Jobs - a man who did and achieved many profound things in his life - listed taking LSD as the three most profound things in his life.
However, sadly, even pro-psychedlic people like Rogan and J. Petersen make fun and rubbish Timothy Leary these days, as recently happened in a podcast. But Leary, like no other, saw the revoutioinary social and spiritual potential of psychedelics. He wasn't joking when he suggested to put it into the drinking water. For insiders and true psychonauts, the mechanism are clear. The psychedlic molecules posesses a higher form of intelligence that impregnate us when under their influence.
The guided psychedlic experience is very related to mystical experiences. Direct wisdom flows from it.
For me, meaning is not related to culture or the paradigm we live in. It's deeply personal and totally independent from how I live my life. To feel profound meaning has nothing to do with the objects or ideas that sourround me.
Like beauty, meaning lies in the eyes of the beholder. It is a differnt state of consciousness, a different state of being that allows to feel profound meaning. In that state, the world and every object in it, is buzzing with meaning.
What has no meaning is the material natural world by itself, of course. It is simply a colossal cause-and-effect matrix where everything affects everything else in a chotic manner. Our minds filter the chaos and create patterns where there are none in reality. But it gives us some sense of order - however fragile. If all you know is the material natural plane all meaning eventually turns to dust. Everything dies and gets anilhilated. A good and necessary law for the material plane otherwise we all get suffocated in too much life. In the material world, death and life complement each other. They feed from each other and that's why there is this sense of stability and balance.
These altered states of profound meaning can be achieved through spiritual practise and often happen spontaneously to people. They are just not recognized as that. They are just registered as a really good day for no apparent reason. Out ego-centric mind usually destroys it by intellectualizing it and clinging to it because it feels so good.
In short: Meaning or dispair are not out there. Despair sits in the mind. Meaning appears in the no-mind state. Psychedelic drugs and spiritual practice dial down the conscious ego mind. When the constant chatter of the mind is insignificant we experience profound meaning in whatever is in front of us, which includes life itself.
I don't know if this is essential or coincidental, but as outlined, the issue begins when the founding principles of the dominant paradigm are undermined.
The current paradigm is materialism, (and all that that entails.)
The action plan must be to attack and undermine the materialist faith at every opportunity. It must be replaced with something else. A founding story, guiding principles, something to live, and die for.
In the art of the Western world before the Great War of 1914, there is optimism, hope, flair, and dare I say, real beauty. We weren’t drowning in nihilism just yet. Maybe we were on the right track. If we can just rid ourselves of all the plastic, all the fake money, all the wrong information, then perhaps the real substance of the world will again be clear enough that we can see a way forward.
Nietzsche and Tolstoy both warned about the advent of nihilism at the end of the 19th century, but Junger agrees with you, where he stated: "At that time there was great optimism: it was said that this would be the century of Great Progress. And it was not so much the First World War that shattered that confidence as the Second. The essential change in our century only really took place from the middle of it, from 1945 onwards.... It was the Second World War that brought us down into the depths of the maelstrom, into the vortex of nihilism." https://juengertranslationproject.substack.com/p/the-coming-titans-ernst-junger
It’s an epic fantasy series that explores the semantic apocalypse, transhumanism, morality, religion and the nature of meaning.
The author is a liberal, but surprisingly enough it was a series that unironically red pilled me in what it had to say about things I used to believe but now recognize as being poison.
If I had to describe, it’s like Dune meets Conan the Barbarian meets 40k meets the Book of Job.
The world is your somewhat typical medieval pastiche. The main thing that stuck out to me however is the series main villains.
Just like how Sauron was Tolkien’s blurry image of the coming neoliberal dictatorship filtered through a 21st century lens.
The main villains of the SA series are for all intents and purposes the WEF. A cabal of sorcerers and scientists known as the Holy Consult.
Long ago an alien race known as the Inchoroi achieved high heights of technological advancement. They became depraved hedonists, calling themselves ‘a Race of Lovers’ until one day they discovered the existence of the afterlife and the fact that they were eternally damned for their materialistic ways.
Instead of repenting for their sins, the surviving Inchoroi, having crash land on the world, hatch a conspiracy to exterminate most of the humanity.
To sterilize humanity and brutally cull them with bio weapons, leaving behind a tiny number of souls that they plan to gather and control to seal the material world from the afterlife and escape the divine judgement that awaits them.
‘Imagine a world where no womb quickens, where no soul hopes.’
I had to skim, because time. But I will return tonight. Good news is, there are tens of millions of young men hungry for purpose, meaning and truth. We just have to figure out how to reach them
A new myth that integrate man and nature and give a new sacred meaning and cohesion to his life as an individual and a member and a code of conduct is needed. Time is ripe for another Odin to dismember the old order to craft a fresh order.
I've been on substack for like two years now, with 30+ different subscriptions, and this is one of the top essays I've read. It really nails the point that we are in the midst of some massive historical force, that every one of us is more or less suffering a personal tragedy as a result of the nihilism of the modern world, and that there is actually nothing that exists yet as a valid alternative to this empty way of life. And also, there is no going back to the past.
I recently read Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War, and there's a part in it where he's discussing the birth of Islam. He mentions that before Islam exploded on the scene, there was a set of competing religious traditions in the Arabian Peninsula from which Islam ultimately emerged:
"It is a little known fact that Muhammad was just one (albeit the most successful) of at least half a dozen monotheistic prophets active in Arabia in the early seventh century. Naturally, the other five religious leaders are now considered “false prophets,” because they lost out to Islam. But such a sudden appearance of comparable religious movements all over Arabia is indicative of sociopolitical conditions that were ripe for something such as Islam to happen."
I think the best we can hope for is that we are in some kind of similarly "ripe" primordial state. There is certainty plenty of groping in the dark here on substack. Even ZeroHPLovecraft recently wrote an essay on the subject, but he ended it by simply saying the solution was that someone needs to unify The New Testament and the works of Nietzsche, and made no attempt to do it himself...
Maybe it's more appropriate to describe the situation as "unripe but ripening", because I don't currently see anything serious or substantial that could actually fill the role of displacing the modern nihilism. Most of it is bronze-age larping, or based Orthodox-Christian chads who want to retake Constantinople - i.e. very unserious people. Of the few who catch wider attention, many of them seem to end up grifters (Jordan Peterson for example).
Personally, I don't anything serious is going to happen until there is some massive economic collapse, probably brought about by peak oil or mineral shortages or something like that. Once it becomes clear that the great material wealth of modernity will no longer be there as a numbing agent with which to fill the void, it's going to force a lot of people to start searching for something more meaningful (or drugs). As suggested in this essay, I don't think the damage that rationality and scientific progress did to biblical legitimacy can be easily undone short of a new dark age, so what happens in such a situation will be anyone's guess.
Very well said, Will. I agree with all of this.
Like you, I expect things will get much worse on the material plane, and that the best thing we can do is to live well below our economic means, to try to wrestle with these difficult spiritual and philosophical issues and to derive some personal non-materialist meaning in life wherever possible. It's not easy. People generally are still far too complacent and conditions are not ripe enough yet for a societal paradigm shift, whatever it may eventually be.
You make an interesting point regarding Islam - I have Tom Holland's "In the Shadow of the Sword" on my nightstand to read, but Turchin could be interesting as well. Christianity also arose during turbulent end-of-world times when there were a lot of competing prophets, so perhaps we need similarly difficult conditions for such a new philosophy filled with meaning to arise.
You said:
*** Once it becomes clear that the great material wealth of modernity will no longer be there as a numbing agent with which to fill the void, it's going to force a lot of people to start searching for something more meaningful (or drugs). ***
A lot of people were and are betting on drugs. Alcohol was “essential” during the COVID-19 scare, and nobody in Washington is serious about stopping the flow of drugs into the country. The border is wide open, but Sudafed is watched closely?
It appears that whatever happens, it's guided with great precision -- to screw over the vast majority of citizens worldwide.
The inevitability of where we are now is what I question. Not that a collapse could never happen, but that it’s being made to happen and as quickly as possible.
The economy is largely self correcting. The trick for those trying to collapse it, is to convince the majority of people that the collapse is “organic.” However, I don't think it's working.
The health insurance industry is the same way. The government has, as it's goal, a single-payer government run health care system. That's why private health insurance is such a giant cluster fuck. It didn't become that way on its own. It was strategically brought about through government regulation. Those regulations are not visible to the end user. So it appears as incompetence, or mismanagement on the part of the insurance companies. That's why everyone hates the health insurance industry.
The bad part is that there is a critical mass for the economy. Where that is, I don't know, but the people trying to collapse it, I don't think know either. They don't care. They will push until it dies. They aren't concerned with the point at which the collapse is immanent, just that it happens.
All of this is shitty, and even more shitty for the younger crowd, because most of their youth will be burned up in this quagmire of man-caused misery, all to solidify power.
God help us all.
The Demons will be summoned soon. It will be an all out assault, coming right after the carnage of billions murdered in Nuclear Fire. The only “system” that will triumph will be Islam. Because Islam alone endows to man obligation & responsibilities “weighty” enough to keep slaying said Demons; in spite of them breaching by the trillions.
Thank you for this concise overview of the meaning crisis aspect of the eight-ball we find ourselves behind. I agree that it is a very important aspect of our dilemma. I find myself wondering how much of our moral/spiritual malaise is due to our having been poisoned in countless ways since ~1865, when seed oils were introduced into our food supply, and our meat consumption began to decline, accelerating around the time of the revolt of the elites, ~1880-1920. I wonder, how much of garbage state of philosophy is a consequence of the garbage state of our postmodern health? Recent testimonials of men who've adopted "The Lion Diet" give me hope that if our best men were to eat the best diet, they'd produce better philosophy!
(Of course, the right diet can't fix the unfixable, e.g. Jordan Peterson).
Another key to un-poisoning ourselves is to become aware that we have deliberate poisoners at the levers of power, including what is promoted as philosophy. Marxism, Freudianism, The Frankfurt School and Postmodernism were not accidents...
Another well written great historic piece. Thank you.
I exeriment and reflect on "meaning" for years now. I struggled with depression in the past and overcame it as a permanent visitor. He just visits me occassionally now and I trie to make him welcome and value what he has to say. Same with paranoia.
Drugs were mentioned. To have a useful conversation about drugs and meaning we have to look into how people can use drugs. It can be used to numb, forget, retreat, hybernate and escape the drugless world. They can also be used to uninhibitate and express our behaviour, thoughts, ideas, emotions and so forth helping us to express and process what needs to be processed. And some drugs can induce the profoundest experiences of meaning equal if not more profound than the meanings of spiritual awakening, based on my personal experience.
So drugs, used expertly, can definetly help to experience profound meanings temporarily. This includes an "afterglow" lasting years if not the rest of our lives. However, we are still dealing with a dual world here and the same drugs can throw us into an abyss of eternal hoplessness, madness and despair.(I came close and protocols saved me) There is a reason why psychedelic drugs in indigenous cultues were always taken under the guidance of a shaman.
We never had a widly used spiritual shamanic relationship with psychedelics in the modern Western world. But it is growing and maybe one day it leads to a new paradigm and a vastly more intelligent and meaningful culture.
Psychedlic drugs, when used wisely in a safe framework have the potential to create a paradigm shift. They already proved their potential. They already have moved our culture away from materalism and nihilism. The big social movements of the sixties and seventies were triggered by psychedlic drugs. The Internet and the smart phone in your hand wouldn't exist without psychedic drugs. Steve Jobs - a man who did and achieved many profound things in his life - listed taking LSD as the three most profound things in his life.
However, sadly, even pro-psychedlic people like Rogan and J. Petersen make fun and rubbish Timothy Leary these days, as recently happened in a podcast. But Leary, like no other, saw the revoutioinary social and spiritual potential of psychedelics. He wasn't joking when he suggested to put it into the drinking water. For insiders and true psychonauts, the mechanism are clear. The psychedlic molecules posesses a higher form of intelligence that impregnate us when under their influence.
The guided psychedlic experience is very related to mystical experiences. Direct wisdom flows from it.
For me, meaning is not related to culture or the paradigm we live in. It's deeply personal and totally independent from how I live my life. To feel profound meaning has nothing to do with the objects or ideas that sourround me.
Like beauty, meaning lies in the eyes of the beholder. It is a differnt state of consciousness, a different state of being that allows to feel profound meaning. In that state, the world and every object in it, is buzzing with meaning.
What has no meaning is the material natural world by itself, of course. It is simply a colossal cause-and-effect matrix where everything affects everything else in a chotic manner. Our minds filter the chaos and create patterns where there are none in reality. But it gives us some sense of order - however fragile. If all you know is the material natural plane all meaning eventually turns to dust. Everything dies and gets anilhilated. A good and necessary law for the material plane otherwise we all get suffocated in too much life. In the material world, death and life complement each other. They feed from each other and that's why there is this sense of stability and balance.
These altered states of profound meaning can be achieved through spiritual practise and often happen spontaneously to people. They are just not recognized as that. They are just registered as a really good day for no apparent reason. Out ego-centric mind usually destroys it by intellectualizing it and clinging to it because it feels so good.
In short: Meaning or dispair are not out there. Despair sits in the mind. Meaning appears in the no-mind state. Psychedelic drugs and spiritual practice dial down the conscious ego mind. When the constant chatter of the mind is insignificant we experience profound meaning in whatever is in front of us, which includes life itself.
I don't know if this is essential or coincidental, but as outlined, the issue begins when the founding principles of the dominant paradigm are undermined.
The current paradigm is materialism, (and all that that entails.)
The action plan must be to attack and undermine the materialist faith at every opportunity. It must be replaced with something else. A founding story, guiding principles, something to live, and die for.
In the art of the Western world before the Great War of 1914, there is optimism, hope, flair, and dare I say, real beauty. We weren’t drowning in nihilism just yet. Maybe we were on the right track. If we can just rid ourselves of all the plastic, all the fake money, all the wrong information, then perhaps the real substance of the world will again be clear enough that we can see a way forward.
Nietzsche and Tolstoy both warned about the advent of nihilism at the end of the 19th century, but Junger agrees with you, where he stated: "At that time there was great optimism: it was said that this would be the century of Great Progress. And it was not so much the First World War that shattered that confidence as the Second. The essential change in our century only really took place from the middle of it, from 1945 onwards.... It was the Second World War that brought us down into the depths of the maelstrom, into the vortex of nihilism." https://juengertranslationproject.substack.com/p/the-coming-titans-ernst-junger
Kant was more oracle than instigator in my opinion. He foresaw the death of meaning and did his best to try and find a way out.
I am more and more convinced we may be heading towards a semantic apocalypse. How we avoid it, I have no idea.
Out of curiosity have you ever read R Scott Bakker’s Second Apocalypse?
I have not read any of R Scott Bakker's work, well, except for this now: https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/what-is-the-semantic-apocalypse/. I read fiction when I was younger, but not much these days. Do you recommend his work? What about it appeals to you?
It’s an epic fantasy series that explores the semantic apocalypse, transhumanism, morality, religion and the nature of meaning.
The author is a liberal, but surprisingly enough it was a series that unironically red pilled me in what it had to say about things I used to believe but now recognize as being poison.
If I had to describe, it’s like Dune meets Conan the Barbarian meets 40k meets the Book of Job.
The world is your somewhat typical medieval pastiche. The main thing that stuck out to me however is the series main villains.
Just like how Sauron was Tolkien’s blurry image of the coming neoliberal dictatorship filtered through a 21st century lens.
The main villains of the SA series are for all intents and purposes the WEF. A cabal of sorcerers and scientists known as the Holy Consult.
Long ago an alien race known as the Inchoroi achieved high heights of technological advancement. They became depraved hedonists, calling themselves ‘a Race of Lovers’ until one day they discovered the existence of the afterlife and the fact that they were eternally damned for their materialistic ways.
Instead of repenting for their sins, the surviving Inchoroi, having crash land on the world, hatch a conspiracy to exterminate most of the humanity.
To sterilize humanity and brutally cull them with bio weapons, leaving behind a tiny number of souls that they plan to gather and control to seal the material world from the afterlife and escape the divine judgement that awaits them.
‘Imagine a world where no womb quickens, where no soul hopes.’
Wow.
I had to skim, because time. But I will return tonight. Good news is, there are tens of millions of young men hungry for purpose, meaning and truth. We just have to figure out how to reach them
Be an Odin and craft a new order out of the dismembered corpus of old
Talk enervate, action energize.
A new myth that integrate man and nature and give a new sacred meaning and cohesion to his life as an individual and a member and a code of conduct is needed. Time is ripe for another Odin to dismember the old order to craft a fresh order.