“When perceived correctly, the world is a mirror which, disinterestedly, maintains a current record of our nature and constitution. Within this vast parabolic mirror, we should be able to see clearly the forms our faults have taken―which daily stand in our way. Yet, for the sake of allotting our inadequacies a wide berth and so as to avoid running into them head-on, we have learned to artfully avoid our own reflections. Our most regrettable qualities have successfully overwhelmed our nobility and now the image of a man has become indistinguishable from the form of his fault. Of a man, it can no longer be said that he is as a monkey aping the behavior of angels. For in our avoidance of ourselves, we have given up even on strife. The purpose of this critique is not to aid in the composition of an epic satire; rather, I would that this knowledge serve as a launching pad. We can correct the human model―there is a method.”
―John Constance
“I praise, I do not reproach, nihilism’s arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength. It is possible…”
―Nietzsche
The germ of nihilism, or that which is nothing, has for many millennia fulminated in the soul of our species’ various religious concepts and divers arts. Since the dawn of mankind’s often regretted advent, the eternal spirit of destruction and value’s loss has claimed countless individuals and entire civilizations. Yet, not until the nineteenth century was the prize of entropy characterized in a manner and appearance cognate to that of current doctrines of negation. In man’s tireless pursuit to acquire unbiased knowledge of reality and at long last corner truth, he had first to rend asunder the lies and arbitrary values that stood in his way. Ultimately, it was with rational skepticism and the empirical method that man paved a path toward his inevitable confrontation with the force of annihilation.
The corpus of epistemology is as an ancient oak with its roots deep in the soil and its branches reaching ever towards the heavens. Let us look upon this maze of branches and this network of roots as a linear evolutionary progression. And so as to not loose our-selves in its fauna, we will proceed by considering only contemporary philosophical ontology. Ontology: Q: “What is the purpose of life?” The voice of 20th century existentialism had no transcendent answer to this question. They were themselves courting a philosophy that looked suspiciously like nihilism. Nihilism is and always will be anathema to acceptable philosophical thought. So as to evade nihilism, existentialist thought deceptively chose an affirmative, albeit ambiguous stance. To the question of life’s purpose, was offered the mirroring reply: “Life.”
The assumption that the purpose of life is life itself (as attested by Sartre and Camus, and echoed by their contemporaries), serves as an ineffectual nostrum against the pox that has beset epistemology and ontology since the time of nihilism’s advent. For if “life” in the first case is devoid of purpose (as also attested by Sartre and Camus), then it stands to reason that “life” can acquire no greater semblance of purpose by virtue of its extolment as a tributary definition of its own value. Semantic duplicity, lacking a prepositional phrase, is incapable of reversing the value of a self-referential noun. Of course, this was not the meaning intended by the proponents of its formulization. Even Anti-foundationalists would undoubtedly wince at such redundant reductionism. Rather, the existentialist formulization intimates that life, when analyzed objectively, possesses no intrinsic meaning―it is void of value and, by extension, it is without purpose. However, within the private auspices of subjectivity, each person’s life acquires the values and meanings each assigns to their commission. Nevertheless, the framing of the supposition still requires additional clarification. Consider again the statement, “The purpose of life is life itself.” Applying flesh to this skeletal sentiment, we see “life” in the first case objectively void of merit and yet when the word reemerges it is magically altered: infused, seemingly, with purpose and rife with meaning. A transformation has occurred, but the agent by which this was made manifest remains unnamed. It can still be discerned, though it lies hidden behind an absence of clarification. Namely, the benefactor of life’s purpose is self-deception and avoidance of truth.
A new crisis at once manifests. The subjective meaning which must uphold a persons’ acceptance of their existence is revealed as a sham; wherefrom, it is more often by aide of cowardice, rather than gullibility, that a person’s hand is restrained from cancelling their own existence. Upon which crossroads, only two choices are discernable: live a lie, or desist from life. For either decision there are no rewards. One might recall, from that weathered body of Semitic lore, the assumption that death is a punishment; and, from Gnosticism, the belief that life is a prison. So it might seem, and, indeed, within Buddhism we find that all things are merely seeming.
So, seemingly, the Buddha is in the park, murmuring beneath the March Hare’s protestation: “All life is accident!” The Buddha’s slow continuous murmur becomes a drone: “Life after life after life after life after life after life after lifeafterlifeafterlife…”
Having chosen to live, there is but one truth. Nihil! We are presently bereft of the benefit of contrition. We are lacking even apologies. All roads lead to annihilation. Worst still, for those whose eyes are honed to the present, is the knowledge that the bending and turning paths of our past have emptied, all, upon this―Apocropolis, the fair-grounds of our failure. There is no longer any reason for a movement.
The crisis, the existentialist malaise, has already passed. We are living in its wake, and the majority of humanity is void of regret. Most are without awareness of value’s loss and meaning’s passing; though, as such, their ignorance does not absolve them of nihilism’s scourge, and they also wear death’s cowl and annihilation’s garments. Powerless they stand, neck to neck, beside the Apollonian nihilists who watch, unmoved and nonplussed, whilst the Faustian nihilists continue to rip and tear apart what little remains standing upon life’s soon barren stage.
Over and upon the rubble of life’s painted scenery, stepping carefully so as to avoid injury from the splintered slivers of values once relevant to our past, we wander aimlessly without wonderment―whilst others still march toward us and away from us, over the same wasteland, with no discernable purpose or relevant goal in sight. These soldiers of the deluge, who march in time to a funeral dirge, imagine that their footsteps fall in accord with the score of their nation’s triumphant anthem. All the while, they are unaware that the ideals and moorings that held aloft their nation, the mortar that bound together the stones of their capitals, have all been reduced to ruin and rubble.
All crosses are obsolete! So is every sign and symbol. Suffering is as sovran as joy, that is to say, both are baseless. The outmoded forms of expression and articulation―though they seem to us as absurd―we continue to implement, only because it is easier than to commence the pointless endeavor of starting anew. Yet in the course of our communication with each other, by the medium of our senses, what we have to say is obvious and the moment our utterances are issued, in that moment, they become obsolete.
Once more, nihilism is already upon us and has been for a great time. If not all of humanity is cognizant of this fact it is because most are unwilling or unable to face or comprehend the rhymelessness and absurdity of the era enclosing them. Let us not, however, venture so far as to consider ourselves post-nihilists; rather, allow that we might justifiably consider ourselves pre-something―and let each name for oneself the substance of that something. The past is lost―laid claim to by failure and annihilation. The present cannot be articulated―summarily, it is without sign or significance. The future cannot be claimed for all, yet it opens to each.
The plague which sapience must set its will against is far too virulent as to be so easily dismissed by mere subjective philanthropy. After all, a thing remains what it is, whatever it is, however we rename it or vainly attempt to abstract it by relation to our individual likes and dislikes. Morality was amongst the first and lightest courses comprising nihility’s rapacious feast. Extreme tactics are required. Tactics conciliatory to a stratagem more ostentatious and absurd than the reality its aim is to usurp. Such endeavors, however, cannot be outlined. Neither known prescription nor consolation can be given so as to assuage or eradicate the condition of our existence or the constitution of reality.
Nihilominus, although abreaction cannot be prescribed, it can be initiated. Nothing is ever given; rather, life’s vindication is a prize that must be won.
Toward this endeavor we bear witness to Azsacra Zarathustra whose astute vision, courage, and rejection of age-old values and ideals whose fulfillment of life’s reward has never manifested, lends credence to the proposition put forth by the O. S. S. There is a way to correct the human model. As Azsacra Zarathustra makes clear, this trajectory entails the redaction of what stood before. A Holy Rebellious Yes to Life and a withering scorn of what falsely presumes the mantle of humanity (posthumously—for humanity is no more).
The new man [what Azsacra Zarathustra has defined as the over, over-man; for the purpose of initiating the self-destruction of all identity, is here named: The Nihilmen], the Non Man will have to accomplish what was externally enacted upon the myriad lives that came before him, but of his own volition. Mien Nihil, the Tall Man who guards the threshold between existence and annihilation, repurposes matter into what we deem waste. He compacts the body; amputates the mind. This must be accomplished with uncompromising resolve and surgical precision if life’s merit is to be preserved. Before any thing or any quality appertaining anything can be preserved, it must first be discerned, understood, and held dear.
In summary, Azsacra Zarathustra has forcefully, yet carefully leveled a hammer against the bombast of philosophical elements from which no refined mater has yet to be distilled. This hammering against the mantle of philosophy has rendered a shape, a form, and design. The matter, the refined matter will now be brought forth from this lineal philosophical cartography. Azsacra Zarathustra, with symbols and diagrams, has forged a map that illustrates what the Nihilman, purposed toward the potential that life affords only living beings, can accomplish—presently, and not figuratively.
―Authored by N2 ItinitI, editor of “Et Nihil” [vide Luftwaffe: a tome of nihilist essays in tribute to the O. S. S.] This brief essay was extruded from the O. S. S. primer, “Nihilominus,” by permission of S. I. M. E. Here given, freely, and modified in extolment of our compatriot, A. Z. In Time, we will—we who remain. We will facilitate the destruction of all that once informed our legacy; toward the fulfillment of life: that life, which has been deliberately enslaved by means of self-identification with non-essential matters which were imposed upon humanity, but never benefitting humanity. As such, we renounce the humanist agenda, and all that being human entails. What will follow, and what has already come to fruition, is the advancement of the Non Men. Those who are mere men may not realize that their successor has already arrived, and is informed of their entitlement to the bounty that life bequeaths those who embrace life. The thieves will soon find they have no means to steal from those who reject the symbolic obstacles that were artificially created to bequeath the weak, those who inherited possession of the world’s enterprise, entitlement to the fruits of labor for which they never once labored (labor as resultant from employment, primarily being the labor of commerce, is in no way beneficial to life, and it must be subverted).
ZERO-CRITICISM 