A guy I kinda know but not that well reached out to me on Instagram. He’s a conventionally attractive gay dude who I met once and have since been thirstfollowing.

He says he’s extremely angry and frustrated because “nobody wants to do anything about the situation.”

I think he reached out because he’s having angry political thoughts and I am, as we know, famously Angry & Political.

But he’s really determined to set this up as a “me vs. everyone” kind of situation.

“It’s so frustrating bc the world is going to shit and nobody cares! Everyone in this country just ignores reality.”

I tell him I totally get that feeling but there are a lot of people out there and who care and trying to do the best they can to fight it.

He immediately says that yeah, he knows but that’s not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about REAL action.

Putting aside the idea that feeding people and housing people is not “real action,” I point out that there are also lots of groups out there itching to burn shit down.

“Yeah, but they’re just gonna burn shit nobody cares about.”

At that point I suggest that whatever huge, unignorable target he wants to burn down, he should start gathering a crew and making plans.

So of course I get a “Haha” in response.

I’m saying all this because our great external enemy is fascism, but our great internal enemy is nihilism.

They are two sides of the same coin.

Nihilism is fascism directed against the self. Fascism is nihilism directed against the world.

Fascism and nihilism are regimes of negation and identity and ultimately of necrotic stasis.

They are equally detached from reality: the chance that Soros is funding anarchists in Portland is about as high as the chance that you’re the only one in the world who really cares.

Fascism and nihilism are both paranoid modes of knowing.

Paranoid knowledge assumes it already knows everything: all new ideas, all encounters with reality, are understood only in relation to existing fixed ideas. Paranoia follows a logic of identity: reduction to the same.

We could, if we wanted, make an argument that both fascism and nihilism in their purest form are a form of psychosis, a break with reality, with fascism expressed as paranoid-persecutory delusion and nihilism as narcissistic delusion. We don’t have to, but we could.

If we did make that argument it would line up with my (untested) sense that fascism is amenable to transference in a way nihilism isn’t. Nihilism is narcissism’s perverse inversion: nothing matters, not even me, and I know this because my mind can adjudicate all value and values.

Like fascism, nihilism is both a continuum and a condition; both a tendency and a conception of the world, both a habit or set of habits and an ideological position. Not every fascistic act is committed by an avowed full-time fascist.

Fascist production is insane and violent and murderous and delusional, but at least there’s actually some production. You can still drive on Hitler’s Autobahn; trains to Milan still drive at Mussolini’s train station. Even terror is a kind of production.

Nihilism produces nothing. It makes nothing, it creates nothing, it articulates nothing but its own stubborn petulance. Nihilism only negates. It sucks up and consumes and drains and depresses and leaves nothing behind, quite literally.

Nihilism, as we’ve said, is born of inverted narcissism. Nihilism’s narcissistic roots can be seen in the nihilist’s self-delusion. They‘re just being reasonable. They’re a little more honest than you about what the world is really like. They’re not sheltered and naive like you.

Then there’s the nihilism of inverted ideals, the nihilist as an idealist of ideals so pure the world itself cannot conceive them. He cares TOO much, really. All efforts, all investments, all ideals and values, are cute but lacking. If only someone else cared as much as me!

Fascism storms your house, drags you out, and shoots you in the back of the head. Nihilism is less dramatic, and less brave. It lurks in your basement, whispering, rotting the foundation until one day the whole thing just collapses and you find yourself in a worthless world.

Nihilism disempowers us. Depression freezes us, reduces our capacity, but nihilism turns our capacities against us. It makes us actively passive: we don’t just do nothing, we waste energy in obsessively working to keep ourselves from doing anything. It’s so perverse.

“Nothing has any value! Don’t you see?! Why are you bothering?! What’s the point?!”

Idk dude but if everything is pointless what’s the point of spending all this energy talking to me about it.