Belief in Nothing
CrowdSource 3.24.2025
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the nihilism(s) of our time.
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“Neo-Nihilism”
In two recent podcast episodes (with
) and an essay titled, “Against Nihilism,” describes an emerging “neo-nihilism”:… [the] pathologizing of any activism or even a humanist ethos ... is at the core of this neo-nihilist movement. The Red Scare women, along with other media figures in their circle, are rebranding this cynical vibe shift as cool and avant garde … as rebellion against the establishment, despite the fact that Trump and the Republican Party is very much the establishment.
“That’s How People Thought.” This “cynical vibe shift” reminds Evgenia of post-communist Russia: “… in Moscow in the 1990s … a cynical vibe surrounded me. … pervasive cynicism, apathy, and a mockery of anything that wasn’t just about making money.”
“Extremist One-Upmanship.”
made similar observations in 2023: “ … significant downtown figures soft-peddle eugenics; others glamorize revolutionary terrorism; others worship political strongmen. … ”“Cultural Putinism.” Author
connects Evgenia’s essay with Putin and Trump: “[This] is also what Trumpism says, ‘you live in a brutal, competitive society, you are a striving atom of self-regard, drop the humanitarian pretenses, live without hypocrisy, express some well-deserved sadism, and enjoy it.’ …”
What Is Nihilism?
It’s hard to top The Big Lebowski: “They were nihilists … they believe in nothing.” But another useful answer is found in the 1951 book, Nihilism, written by Helmut Thielicke, a Lutheran pastor who survived Nazi persecution and total war:
… in a world that is saturated and infested with pragmatism the question inevitably arises whether everything is not “pseudo,” whether everything is not — at best — a productive lie, and thus whether at the tail end of this parade of idols there is Nothing, a Nothing which is always dressed up in some new ideology, but still nothing but nothingness.
We see, therefore, that the last “ism” must necessarily be nihilism. It is not a term of abuse, but rather an end result, a discovery. But like all discoveries, even when they are dreadful, it can drive men into orgies and frenzies of passion.
Nihilism Everywhere
Yasha Levine and Evgenia are only the latest witnesses of “new” nihilism.
“Nihilism, in Nazi Germany and Today.” “We are the only creatures on the planet who are intelligent and intentional enough to have abolished ourselves,” writes theologian Carl R. Trueman in March 2024.
“The Nihilism of Young Men,” described by columnist Michelle Goldberg in July 2024.
“Financial Nihilism,” observed by journalist Daniel Soufi in September 2024.
Political Nihilism, “prevalent among Trump voters and pockets of the Left,” reported by
in November 2024.“Alethic Nihilism.” Psychologist Kyle D. Killian on nihilism as a mental health issue in January 2025.
“Reactionary Nihilism.” Katherine Stewart finds it in the White House, February 2025.
“A Sort Of Ivy League Right-Wing Nihilism.” David Brooks’ name for the new Trumpist ideology, February 2025.
“Gooners.” In an older but increasingly relevant piece,
identifies a new form of nihilism, December 2023. “People who are overly absorbed in the world of porn consumption probably would go for fascism. That’s why I’m talking about it! Because it’s bad!”
We’ve Been Here Before
… and not too long ago. In his Paris Review interview, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz describes the nihilism of his youth:
Those years — 1931–1933 — were years of despair. I now wonder whether a dark vision of history is a result of a personal inclination to pessimism or if one’s pessimism reflects the aura of an historical period. Whatever, that was a horrible period in Europe. The literature from Weimar Germany was nihilistic, sarcastic, full of hatred. The literature from the Soviet Union of the 1920s, before the introduction of Socialist Realism was also extremely cruel and negative. There were writers like Seifulina and Ilya Ehrenburg, who lived at that time in Paris. Ehrenburg’s nihilistic novels were immediately translated into Polish. So the mood of literature was very pessimistic, very negative; at the same time the political news was awful — Stalinism in Russia and Hitler coming to power in Germany. Understanding all that, of course, influenced our group. So did the rector of our university, an old professor, Marian Zdziechowski, who was an utter pessimist. He wrote a book entitled Facing the End in which he predicted that Europe would soon be destroyed by two forces, nationalism and communism. Fortunately for him, he died in 1939 just before the war started. There were also extremely pessimistic Polish authors, especially Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, a catastrophist in outlook. So our poetry expressed foreboding — a kind of surrealistic prophecy of horrors to come. It was like the voice of Cassandra. We conceived a cosmic catastrophe rather than a clearly defined political catastrophe. Later, under the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, there was a group of very young poets for whom, of course, the culmination, the apocalypse, was the Nazi occupation. For us it was not; it was simply part of a larger picture.
For more about Milosz, see
’s Czeslaw Milosz: A California Life.Dark Night of the Soul
Some resources for the nihilism-tempted:
Sober Analysis. “German Nihilism,” by Leo Strauss (1941), a lecture delivered while the Nazis were still winning.
Dramatic Analysis. Demons, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1871), a novel about nineteenth-century Russia that covers almost every possible form of nihilism.
Hope. The Experience of Nothingness by Michael Novak (1970), an essay which argues that nihilism can be transformed from a toxic ideology into a fruitful experience: “The experience of nothingness … is a vaccine against the lies upon which every civilization, American civilization in particular, is built.”
From the Crowd
- ’s piece, “From the Harper’s Letter to the Khalil Case” inspires another interesting clash between and . Read it here.
- responds to ’s essay about the need for fairy tales:
I think the fairly tale with an unobstructed moral is a fairly modern invention (18th / 19th / 20th century). Fairy tales prior to this often had complicated stories and ambiguous or contradictory takeaways.
If I were to distill your point, it’s that the absence of fairly tales in the modern cultural zeitgeist has led to an erosion of understanding for what’s fundamentally vital. Surely then people living before the invention of the modern fairy tale would have lacked this moral compass.
Or perhaps something else took the place of the fairly tale? Religion perhaps?
See you next week!
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Who would have thought that dismissing art, culture, tradition, sincerity, and religion, and basing the whole edifice in nothing aside what can be measured and bought and sold, while soaking the media with cynism and replacing ideals with financial targets and consumer crap would have resulted to this?
"Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of my actions"
George at this rate we're going to have to get our own podcast :P