The Horrific Intoxicant of Omnipossibility by Kenneth Smith   

3. Proliferant Nihilism

The modern concept of "rationality" is transparently instrumentalist or "technical," fitting means to ends but, at the same time, grotesquely inept to reason about or evaluate those ends. The modern concept of "knowledge" and "education" is likewise one-sidedly technocratic or "scientific," equally well subserving whatever purpose it may prostitute itself to ⁠— in practice, the purposes of those who can afford the prodigious tab on Big Science. Without the singular moral-cultural pollution that distinguishes modernity, we would never have been afflicted with the literal pollution that now infests the epithelia of our lungs, our mother's milk, our marrow, our cortex; yet true to the modernist code of extrinsic and self-distracted thinking, we get upset only about the physical dimension of our disease, our corrupted environment and our bodies seeded with nightmarish and novel ways to die. That is merely the effect of a system of human causes we cannot look in the face.

In countless ways, modern consciousness is marked by amoral or morally impotent structures of knowing. No other civilization has been so rich in know-how and yet so utterly impoverished in its grasp of the ends, goods, norms, values for-the-sake-of-which human action ⁠— including knowing ⁠— is carried out. For the most part, values survive among us only as rhetoric. Our form of society has more in common with a tool kit than with any thoughtfully composed book; modern minds are indeed made into utensils if not by their educational training then by their employment, for that is essentially what "employee" means. The category of the "useful" for most moderns is the entire horizon of their worldview, their whole cultural universe. When they retire or get fired, most moderns dissipate or die because they have never been accultured to comprehend themselves as anything but finitely "useful." The Greeks comprehended such a techno-mechanical mentality as the worldview of their middle class of banausoi, a caste that imagined itself to be rational although impoverished in values and culture, and imagined itself free although no less enslaved by its artificial forms than were douloi by their natural appetites. Modern culture has greatly potentiated its complex of technocracy, a maze of ever-obsolescing devices and uses, so that moderns in a severely abstractivist sense regard themselves as members of a civilization that is "almighty," accustomed to now-commonplace miracles that prove its omnipotence, its repeated violation of what was once deemed "unthinkable." Integral to this technocratic pride is the hybristic rape of nature, human nature included: for modern ego, all-invasive arbitrary will, cannot let anything be as it is, even its own psyche, its own sexuality, its own needs and hungers. Everything has to be converted into an artifact, an accomplishment wrought by the design of the will.

And yet in every dimension and domain of values and principles, moderns have inflicted not omnipotence but impotence on themselves: what is right or good, what ought to be done, how should one live, how can one justify what one believes is right in a normless or "anomic" culture (truly a contradiction in terms)? Only modern "knowledge" ⁠— science ⁠— is objective in the right simplistic ways to count as "certain" in the eyes of the cultureless, in the light of modernity's severely anti-subjectivist criticisms (de omnibus dubitandum est). Modern knowledge purports to be merely and universally practicable, realistic, reliable, that is, useful from all perspectives and for all purposes. But in actuality, its finite and particularist character guarantees that it is of no use for answering the normative and a-priorist questions, the most fundamental and all-pervading questions, that evaluating and philosophical minds want explored and answered. Science's "utility" responds only to the mechanical mentalities of the banausic personality, and it is no accident that modern science ultimately projects mechanistic preconceptions of the world, of nature, society, thinking and psyche. That is the characterological bias of the banausic, their preoccupation with means an systems of means. As modern ethos was from the left side of its face preaching the gospel of "liberation" from tradition and abstraction from nature, it was with the right organizing a socio-politico-economic apparatus to alienate humans from their nature: in this new arena, there would be no praxis or self-cultivation at all, for humans as ancillaries to systems of automata would have no more "freedom" than swine in a pig-farm.

Moderns' licentious culture has "liberated" them from all the values and self-mastery that once guaranteed autonomous, conscientious and individual control over their own lives. Having asphyxiated the arts of living and cultivating the riches of its inmates' humanity, modern culture has marinated their mentalities in a systemic futility, a pathos they are hardly fit even to recognize any longer. What has been the import and the impact of that barbarizing culture?

It seems nothing could be more "egalitarian" in concept than the culture of license, which abstracts pure ego away from all its natural differentiae of gender, race, age, ethnicity, and aesthetic and erotic aspects. And yet it only seems so because such a culture fosters a way of "thinking" utterly in abstracto. The war cry of modernity, "All is permitted," in actuality impacts naturally different personalities or characters in concretely different ways: to insist that there are no objective grounds for believing or valuing one way rather than another ⁠— to promulgate subjectivism ⁠— may be saying something essentially uniform in intent, but it is certainly not heard the same by mentalities of heterogeneous orientation. Aristoi are driven to find some structure of rational and critical justification that transcends mere conventionalism and the pathos of obtuse opinion. To be told that their entire ethos is as delusional as all the other idiosyncratisms or idiotisms that radically defeat the universalism of spirit, Nous, or reason ⁠— that it indeed is perhaps the most purely subjective of all human subjectivisms ⁠— eviscerates these "most excellent" individuals' utmost reason for living. For of all types aristoi are the most likely to be demoralized and driven to despair or suicide by the modern Logos, the nihilist, pointless, unquestioning, and incommunicative way of life that starves precisely all higher intelligence and meaning. Rampant modern subjectivism is most overtly recognizable as nihilism by aristic personalities, who may be sufficiently critical to be suspicious of the twenty or thirty different ideological rationalizations by which modernity denies the very intelligibility of moral truth or value-rationality. Aristoi are incurably circumspective, they look around or through the screen of verbalisms which ensnares banausic or doulic minds.

(a) When self-mastering aristoi hear "All is permitted," they realize its larger scheme of implications and consequences: namely, that it is truly self-incoherent to insist that "it is now forbidden to forbid things"; and that no form of social or political order can be built upon the chaotism and ephemeralism of licentiousness ⁠— such an "order" cannot be universalized or stabilized, it cannot be equitably enforced nor can it endure as a perennially self-rejuvenating civilization, a moral cosmos or an orchestration of the matters humans most profoundly care about. It merely sanctifies predation and injustice that a civilized order should be trying to contain. Greek aristoi grasped well over half a millennium before Jesus that human appetites of whatever sort are that foundation of sand upon which morons and villains try to build their houses; before the modern era no one had tried erecting an entire civilization upon such quicksand. The modern licentiousness is in truth fraudulent, not at all what it purports to be. It is a covert form of authoritarianism, a uniformitarianism that does not intend equitably to unleash all forms of personality but indeed means to hobble or asphyxiate some, all the better for others to traffic in proliferant licentious desires. The irrationalisms modernity propagated under one or another form of nihilism have been rhetorically clad in euphemisms, of course, making vices seem to be virtues and delusions to be values: incompetence is "specialization" or "modest resources," self-uncertainty or myopia is "experimentalism," exploitation and manipulation are "management," and the extermination of aristic ethos is merely "democratization" or "mediocritization." Aristoi are no longer permitted to consolidate, by means of education or culture, a fulfilled and sound understanding of what modernity is attempting to do in its psych-war against their character-type and values. Such a recognition would involve politically incorrect perspectives and ideas. It has been three generations since critics dared speak of "leveling"; the regime in whose hands leveling was a mere implement has now become so nearly perfectly successful in our barbarizing school system that it does not know what to do with the countless streamlined, humanly superfluous Yahoos it generates. How many moderns can even rise to the comprehension that their own and their fellows' pathos ⁠— their crippling intellectual and moral pollution, their miasma ⁠— has actually been sown by a regime, a culture?

(b) When means-minded banausoi hear "All is permitted," they understand that the traditional aristocratic principles and values are now defunct that once set limits to the infinite aggrandizement of profits and materialist indulgence. The "God" that once authorized something higher than economic drives is dead; for a cultural coup d'état has left aristoi decapitated of their principles. "Nil admirari" as Kierkegaard posed the issue is a defiant assertion that nothing exists which commands respect, nothing is truly "higher than" the ego-pursuits of the class of artisans, merchants and financiers who compose the utilitarian or means-obsessed banausoi, who indeed as a type have no idea whatsoever what reverence, piety, or conscience ultimately mean. We know this "liberating" economic and political doctrine as laissez-faire or the amoralization or emancipation of the "free market" from any normative principles not already inherent in its "world" or its mode of mentalities. This imperative corresponds to the modern surge in amoralized politics, i.e. Machiavellian machinations or Realpolitik, with all their hidden agendas and ulterior motives, their utter contempt for the pawns of the game. Modern economic, political and social history has produced a tidal surge of demand toward a "free market" and a scientized and licentious polity, both movements being in characterological terms nothing less than the revolt of the banausic against the aristic worldview. No higher perspective has the right in the modern order to proscribe the drive of utility-minded personalities to imperialize all that exists in the societal or civilizational world: commercialism thus advances into religion, the family, culture, sexual desperation, psychological cravings, the poverty of community and friendship, the schools, the nursery, younger and younger "demographic markets," not to mention politics and the professions. Who has the right to gainsay such invasions of crass commercialization, the reconception of what "life" or human energy is for, the redefinition of "corruption" and the now-lapsed right to evaluate, criticize or moralize about it?

Modernity is ultimately the high tide of banausic mentality, passing for "science" no less than for "common sense" under the nomenclature of pragmatism, realism, democratization, majoritarianism, conservatism, liberalism, libertarianism, economic vigor, entrepreneurship, etc. Moderns have no concept nor even any terminology to grasp what utilitarianism in this sense would imply, or what instrumentalism or technocratism ultimately signifies as a worldview. Those humans for whom of all in the world is nothing but means are truly themselves the cogs that make the machinery of fascism, totalitarianism, and other forms of political nihilism concretely possible: they render no judgments but merely "do their jobs," unconcerned about the human repercussions of whichever Behemoth pays their salaries and, if they behave, guarantees their medical care and retirement in ease. In their monochromatic mentality the very notions of values, norms, principals, critical intelligence, conscience, culture, etc. have all evaporated into the piquant modern Nothing. Long before science fiction begat the concept of an "android," such creatures ⁠— superficially humanoid, subliminally mechanized ⁠— had grown commonplace in our economic and political realities. In the mentality of the banausoi all "human" domains ⁠— the value-laden pursuits of culture, the arts, politics, religion, family, etc. ⁠— are merely lesser-order means for fostering the master-system of means (money, technological advance, etc.) which to the banausic mind seem the only conceivable "ends," indeed, the last Gods.

(c) When douloi hear "All is permitted," this strikes them as the truly apocalyptic word of a revolution, sexual, moral, political and more: during the ancient and the medieval regimes, slavish and appetitive personalities were indicted as animalistic, pathetic, myopic, undisciplined, morally and religiously blind, unconcerned about their impact on others; in sum as the most subhuman of human types. Now no one has the right to make such shaming judgments: officially the (subjectivist or nihilist) "truth" is that, just because one may equally arbitrarily choose anything at all one desires, all "goods" and "desires" are therefore equally good and valid; for there is no longer a hierarchy of values or Great Chain of Being with a spiritual authority to revile corporeal indulgences. The imbecile's vote or dollar or opinion or promise or credit is just as good as that of a sage, and alas and alack, even the imbecile has figured it out (perhaps the archaic term sage now needs to be explained to moderns). Appetites are appetites; in the "secularized" world there is no moral "up" or "down," certainly no invidious "higher" and "lower," "superior" and "inferior"; as Bentham remarks, "Pushpin [bowling] is just as good as poetry," and the Gospel of License ensures that one may consume as one likes for the sake of one's driving hungers. Some may be reviled for their appetites as sexual predators or pedophiles or sadists or plutomaniacs, but in the eyes of those driven by such appetites that Gospel has a clear and indisputable meaning: Different strokes for different folks. The distinctive modern animus against aristocratic personality, the culture of "resentment," has meant something far more sinister than the rise of a literature of pathetic anti-heroes; it has meant the unleashing of the subhuman, the Untermensch devoid of self-mastery who well comprehends what modern laissez-faire signifies, and precisely because of this is himself inconceivable to "decent" bourgeoisie in his moral bathos. So thoroughly did the subcivilized and submoral contents of modern civilization grasp its political implications that indeed these Untermenschen pumped themselves up to believe they were entitled to conceive of their vicious idiotisms and vile animosities as if these were the very values of Ubermenschen: such is the delusional potential of the culture of license, that mentalities and personalities that are demonstrably subrational and submoral, overtly, unspeakably brutal and sadistic, no longer feel obligated to respect superior rationality or keep in their "place" or in any way feel shame for their own moral defects and pathologies. All is merely "opinion," and every opinion no matter how rank or fatuous is just as valid and entitled to flourish as any other. In the free marketplace of ideas it is the weeds that tend to prevail in the absence of a culture.

The modern massified resentment against whatever claims to be "higher" means that appetites traditionally ashamed of themselves may now be proud of what they are, bold, audacious, forthrightly self-assertive, entitled to organize politically and demand their rights: not just substandard mentalities ⁠— idiots, ignoramuses, morons ⁠— have their rights under the modern regime of license but so do opportunists and predators, and occasionally the two types meet, often yielding media-sensations such as the Peoples' Temple of Johnstown, the Branch Davidians, and so on. Every form of predation has been granted boundless self-esteem and even self-righteousness in its own eyes by the modern relativism; "guilt" is a mere pose struck if one is caught, prosecuted, exposed to the judgment of the public, obliged to perform at begging for the sake of one's life or freedom. What criminality many individuals may permit themselves is limited solely by the inventiveness of their self-rationalizations, because truly the culture has no norms in place that abjure self-indulgence or self-aggrandizement by whatever means one may care to resort to. Self-denial is a moral language deader than the Scythians. What is called criminality among the uncapitalized classes (as Shaw observed) is mostly their attempts to practice the virtues of the upper classes (easy money, egocentric privilege, etc.) In the absence of any formally legal organizations to gather in the lion's share of profits to make them respectable. What was classically vice ⁠— greed, selfishness, dishonesty, venality, Ego itself ⁠— is now the ambient or normal and ordinary mentality prevailing across the modern landscape; when retirement funds and elections are stolen by their "betters," when the reality begins to sink in that the modern hierarchy of class or status has nothing to do with virtues, values, or quality of character, it's hard to deny the low-rent strata of criminals a bank heist or an embezzlement or two. The countless exposures of white collar fraud and sexual predation in office do not go unremarked by those in the moral lower depths. The privileges of upper-class criminals consist in their education that enables more sophisticated methods of criminality, not to mention virtuosic representation and close professional and personal relations with those who may prosecute or pass judgment on them.

Subcultures evolve among the appetitive to help sharpen the dynamic self-cultivation of their desires, to share innovative rhetoric for rationalization and to organize and pool resources politically and otherwise. What can "perverse" or "depraved" possibly mean now that relativisms, that is to say, every individual's own idiotist cravings and dementias, are God? Modernity has fertilized its world with a culture of license that guarantees the efflorescence of every species of irrationalism, would of racism, pornography, pedophilia, gun-fetishism, paranoid militias, not to mention the commonplace and overt partisan mentalities that control our political sphere. "Weasels fighting in a hole," Yeats called modern politics; and he had never met Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater or Roger Ailes.

It has not proved prudent for the gospel Everything is Possible to be broadcast to the culture at large. Criminality and predation work better when the privilege of making an exception of oneself is indeed exceptional, that is, the less universalized this nihilist self-comprehension, the better; those who have the clout of exemption from the law and common morality want after all to practice injustice, not to suffer it at others' hands. Well-to-do predators and parasites must feign respectability and decency, must seem models of decorum at least in their private lives. The complexity of financial, legal and political machinations serves to fend off the curiosity and understanding of the public and the organs of publicity. Who is really competent to say how this or that deal or hostile acquisition has been structured, in what ways laws have been skirted or immoralities flaunted? In ancient Rome it was said Quod licit Jovi non licet bovi, what is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to a cow; of course the point would have escaped not cows but plebeians. It is not divine or metaphysical privileges that moderns observe at play above them but the ways mega-concentrations of wealth like massive gravitational fields warp the playing grounds of law, politics, society, education, etc.

Modern nihilism understands well how slavish mentalities capitulate to systems of mass-order. That nihilism's evils have evolved into forms unintelligible even to highly cultivated critical intelligence and conscience. For the many conscripted by and in behalf of abstractions, modern ideology is the most economic form of imprisonment ever devised, a regime where prisoners are internally their own guards and the prisons are mere words. Edicts cascade down the hierarchy of command to cunning subordinates who know what is really meant, how to conceal the heinous actuality by euphemisms and how to contrive situations in which contrarian thinking has itself become unthinkable. The literature on Nazism alone is rife with modern sophistics:

There is a limit to the number of people you can kill out of hatred or lust for slaughter, but there is no limit to the number you can kill in the cool, systematic manner of the military categorical imperative.

—Seyss-Inquart, a top Nazi leader

One hundred dead is a catastrophe. Five million dead is a statistic.

—Adolf Eichmann

It no longer matters whether blue eyes, blond hair, and a six-foot stature truly guarantee superior human qualities. What does matter is that one can use this means as any other to organize people to the point ... Where no one has the opportunity anymore to consider whether this distinction is meaningful or not.

—Hannah Arendt

"This apparently minor, in reality decisive operation," Arendt continues, "of taking ideological views seriously" ⁠— more precisely, scientifically ⁠— is the triumph indeed of modern techno-organization over all residual forms of concrete individual thinking. Amid the cultural desolation of modernity, a primevally crass mentality has sniffed the winds of laissez-aller ⁠— the aroma off of God's great cadaver, Nietzsche would say ⁠— and realized no one has the right any longer to controvert even the most execrable savagery, atrocity, or bestiality in a way the malefactors are obligated to take seriously. Coupled like Siamese twins, the subhumanity of conscienceless hatreds, greeds and lusts is now accompanied by its lawyer, the sophistic mentality so well tutored in the modern play of relativisms, vicious equivocations and euphemisms. Against the naked horrors of modern carnage on the one hand and the unholy rationalizations that aid and abet them on the other, morally and politically stupefied moderns are for once stilled in their chatter. The world of high technodreams and amassed megafortunes belongs to beasts. Some moderns may count themselves lucky to be overlooked by the modern guilds of pirates, but no sheep escapes with his mutton intact.

At the outset of this topic, the ironic disparity was remarked between how moderns feel their cultural condition to be and how it is in truth: the gulf between a virtual or subjective "omnipotence" and moderns' actual or existential impotence is not simple irony however. It is precisely because this world order has made each individual qua individual into nothing, into a futile and negligible being of no consequence whatsoever, that therefore moderns compensate for their objective insectival status: vicariously they live through the extremisms and indulgences of their gods and demigods, the licentious and lucre-saturated movie and rock and sports stars, and other media heroes. Moderns' life of the imagination has grown more and more profoundly pathetic and escapist. It is not ironic but ideologically logical that the most impotent, the most humanly destitute or abstracted creatures should affiliate themselves with the worldview of omnipossibility. It is indeed the religion, the opiate of our system's human detritus.

With the myopia of an idiotist modernity has concentrated its structures of social, political and economic pressure to induce just the least scrupulous, the most irrational and compulsive personalities, to evolve the most heinous forms of genius imaginable. We have replicated from the molecule of individual character outward a crystallizing logic of neutered morality and valuelessness, a primal incapacity to discriminate virtues from vices. Like druglords, moderns devised institutional laboratories to strengthen and intensify that nihilist ideology, cultivating it into the modern antifaith whose secret covens are like covert pockets of cancer in our mass-potent organizations. You have only to ask of the modern amoralist and it is done: assassinations, bombings, strategic political and market rumors. Lying and defamation are nothing, the manipulation of the most facile media ever devised, words and mentalities. Moderns in their naiveté can conceive of nothing worse than being a slave, therefore the one thing forbidden to their licentious culture is calling them what they are. The Greeks, however, understood there was something far worse than being a slave: That was being a slave of a slavish personality, of someone who structurally or by nature lacked any idea at all of the proper uses, rights, values, and fulfillment of a human being. Modernity which imagines that "aristocracy" or "rule by the best" is the most contemptible of all conceivable states has yet to come to terms with the alternatives it has unwittingly opted for, kakistocracy or "rule by the worst," kleptocracy or "rule by thieves," mendacracy or "rule by liars."