Nihilisism, in its emotional essence, is the FEELING that “success in life”—which can be variously defined but amounts to a FEELING of self acceptance and emotional peace—is impossible. You cannot belong. You cannot find rest. No cultural cave will have, no tribe bless you, even that, ultimately, of the cursed, even though there you will best approximate communion.
But sooner or later all members of such aggregations of chance and pain MUST be cast out. The emotional logic demands it.
This means failure is inevitable.
This means shame is inevitable.
This means there is no compelling reason not to reject any and all rules which increase the feeling of shame, even if for only a short time, and even if the long term cost, honestly reckoned, is HIGHER. You will obviously borrow in the future again from another future and in the long run—as likely nihilist Keynes put it—we are all dead.
Note though that the FEELING that nothing will or could ever work out, that the burden cannot be lifted by any human means except through altered states—like sex, intoxication (note the word toxic in there) and cruelty—STARTS with shame and works outward.
Shame is the water in which nihilistic fish swim. They cannot escape it, or so it seems.
Is it not easy enough from this perspective to derive Aleister Crowley, his “Do what thou will”, his sex, his drugs, his ultimate failure when he could no longer borrow from his future?
And it is worth noting that trauma itself amounts to a kind of brain damage. It is an electric shock that more or less literally places our nervous systems in a state of seizure, from which it is very difficult to escape.
And in thousands of years of human recorded civilization and some hundreds of years of modern science, we have only begun taking thus problem seriously—which to me means understanding it in scientific and not moral and religious terms—in perhaps the last thirty years.
Consider that altar boys were getting molested more or less with impunity as recently as the early 1980’s. Why would we not assume this sort of thing goes back forever?
Even though everything seems in decline—certainly I myself have claimed this often enough—it is also not wrong in my view to consider the idea that we are also on a high ledge—from which we can both see and fall—from which we can contemplate human history—human good and evil—from an historically unparalleled vantage point.
This is good.
There is ample cause both for love and hate; ample room for both despair and optimism.
Contemplate where your soul naturally goes snd ask why. You may get no answer, but asking is a start. It is opening a door, beyond which is something new.