Nihilism and the next obstacle, The Mechanics of Virtue, 247

247

Our machinery is complex and manifold, and we divide up this single reality through many different faculties.  Then through habituation we associate all the separate pieces back into a “whole” – not the original whole, but a representation convenient to our need to survive and our drive to dominate.  That is to say, habit “straightens” the necessarily crooked approach to reality.  Yet now, any honest deconstruction appears crooked and fragmented.  Education breaks with custom, making knowledge itself a wicked venture.  

Nonetheless, this nihilistic stage is valued to the precise degree that one values honesty.  And what value do we claim for honesty?  Our suffering?  Our self-sacrifice?  Despite the suffering we claim, our nihilism was as easy and pleasurable as informing an overbearing society that two plus two does not equal their five, but our four.  We hide our revenge behind the mask of the “truth-speaker” much like that old and wise man claimed to have no other motive than the pursuit of truth and virtue ... as he snared and humiliated the dominant members of his society.


Let us be honest with ourselves.  Nihilism is easy.  It is the next obstacle however that is unbearable and constitutes our real suffering: the subsequent need to simplify all into a life strategy has until now been resisted for its close relation to the straight and narrow morality one has just destroyed. 

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