really thoughtful piece... i can feel how much pain there is in what you’re describing... there’s so much horror in seeing mass shootings, fascist rhetoric, the crushing of the poor, billionaires hoarding while others starve… it makes sense that it can feel like the world is falling into nihilism...
but when i read your examples, what stands out to me is almost the opposite. the people you write about don’t seem to believe in nothing, they seem to believe too much. far-right movements are driven by deeply held myths about identity, purity, and control... billionaires believe in endless growth and extraction. even the people drawn into extremist spaces online aren’t empty; they’re full of anger and longing for belonging, and someone has offered them a story to live inside....
when a kid is radicalized on a forum, it isn’t because they’ve stared into a void and found nothing there. it’s because someone handed them a meaning so totalizing that it eclipsed everything else. that belief can be monstrous, but it’s still belief....
to me, nihilism would look like a collapse of all these narratives, where no one is sure what’s true and no story can hold. what we’re living through feels more like the violent collision of competing meanings, each side absolutely certain, each convinced they must fight to preserve their vision of the world.
so while i understand the urge to call it nihilism, especially when hopelessness creeps in, it seems like the real danger right now isn’t a lack of belief… it’s the kind of belief that leaves no room for anything else.
What a beautiful response! You might be right that “nihilism” isn’t the perfect word in this context, and I’d like to share a slightly different perspective that might add some insight.
I understand that, from the outside it seems there’s this paradox of (primarily) white evangelical Americans holding what seems like too much belief and yet too little faith at the same time. I grew up in communities like this, and one thing I notice people who didn’t sometimes miss is that what these people believe in, what they hold so strongly to, IS this almost nihilistic end of days philosophy.
For example, this perspective can help explain some of their tensions with environmentalists despite the (on paper) values overlap. After all, shouldn’t the people who worship the creator want to honor and care for his gift? It starts to make sense when we remember that they’re hoping for the rapture. They actually want to bring about the end of days. They hope for the fulfillment of (their interpretation of) biblical prophecy. They hold a desire for the ending of the world rather than its preservation. They’re raising little soldiers to fight in their holy wars, which is partly where their gun obsession comes from.
Of course, there are many layers and influences in this topic, but I hope this provides a different perspective and I’m curious to hear what you think.
If you’re interested in exploring this subject further, Tea Leving’s Substack dives deeper into some of these paradoxes.
thanks so much for your kind words and for being so open in how you’ve shared here… i had a somewhat religious upbringing myself, catholic school until about 6th grade, but i wouldn’t say that really qualifies me to understand what it’s like to live inside an evangelical worldview… so i’m definitely speaking from the outside here, def take what i'm saying with a grain of salt
just to check that i’m following you,
is it that from the environmentalist point of view, evangelicals can seem nihilistic? like, if you believe in a creator, why wouldn’t you protect creation?
if yes, that really clicked for me… and it also made me think about how that gaze might go both ways… to someone deeply rooted in a prophetic worldview, environmentalism could just as easily look like clinging to something that’s meant to pass away… almost like worshipping the temporary instead of trusting in the eternal
humans are so good at filling the world with meaning… we shape our sensations, our landscapes, our relationships with stories that hold everything together… but the more attached we are to those stories, the harder it is to hold space for anyone else’s… and anything outside our meaning can start to feel empty or even threatening, like a kind of void
from that place, each side can look at the other and see “nihilism,” even though both are actually overflowing with meaning
just different meanings that can’t easily coexist… it’s like two maps laid over the same terrain, but each one erases the other… i think that tension you’re describing lives right there, in what we call something when we can’t make sense of the story inside it
Hi! Your presence here is lovely, thank you! And yes, I was referring to the tension between environmentalism and evangelicalism in exactly the way you understood! I know many people who refuse to recycle - or even pick up their trash when they’re tubing down the river - because “god is going to take care of it.” 🫣 Evangelicalism is the Wild West of Christianity.
This concept applies more generally too. We can see their thought pattern in everything from their rejection of vaccines and modern medicine, to their refusal to stop engaging in corporal punishment and learn about proven stages of brain development. All the while obsessing about pseudoscience like the dangers of seed oils and slathering themselves in beef tallow (wtf…) instead of sunscreens.
For example, if you truly believe children are a miracle from god, wouldn’t you want to do what’s been proven to be best to protect them from harm? Wouldn’t you embrace more updated parenting methods that align with what’s been proven to be effective rather than continuing patterns of generational trauma?
But all of those things would require looking back at their own childhood and reckoning with what was done to them. It’s easier to just “forgive and forget” than it is to realize the very real ways you were betrayed by the people and institutions who were entrusted to care for you. Instead their attitude is often “well, I turned out fine.” (Spoiler alert, they didn’t).
I can have compassion for that, and, it’s not an excuse to continue perpetuating harm.
Love your maps and meaning analogy, and your embrace of the gray areas where truth often hides. Beautifully phrased. I wish more people in this situation could see it instead of being so fixed in black and white thinking.
thanks again for your words, lauren... i’ve been really enjoying this exchange. i agree with so much of what you shared, and what keeps coming up for me here is less about the specifics of any one belief, and more about the pattern of belief itself....
belief can have this ordering effect on reality... almost like a security blanket.... it takes the scary random events of the world and orders them
the more threatened a person or a group feels, the tighter they can cling to those beliefs... and that clinging can create what i think of as a kind of violence of certainty… an all-or-nothing stance that starts to shape the whole worldview and identity, often in ways that defy the very logical structure the belief claims to stand on....
i don't think beliefs are necessarily a problem in and of themselves- they're like maps and reality is like the terrain... no matter how good google maps gets, pixels will never be water and soil... humans get really crazy when we start treating pixels as soil...
so when i see contradictions... the kind you named so clearly, i don’t really see them as a bug in the system of human belief, but a feature... (because belief is always at the level of the map, it is never complete in its description of the terrain, so it must be limited in ways and eventually lead to contradiction- its structural not moral in my pov) over time, i’ve had to face my own contradictions too. like, i’ll rail against big tech while still keeping my amazon prime account. hell, there are a hundred little ways i live in tension with my values, and if i weren't feeling so self-righteous i could probably get the list to thousands lol... the more i’ve come to terms with that, the easier it is for me to see others’ contradictions without needing to react emotionally.
it’s not that i agree with them, i don’t even fully agree with myself half the time if im honest - but it shows me how much of the fantasy of “purity” or “perfection” is just that… a fantasy... a map of something that i may never get to perceive directly
and honestly, i think belief has less to do with logic than with membership. we’re social creatures. being seen as a “believer” whether evangelical, environmentalist, whatever, often means being woven into a community... and i imagine that leaving that can feel like a kind of death.... i’ve never lived in an evangelical community, but i can only imagine how hard it would be to walk away from your founding relationships, friends, maybe even family... there’s a very human logic to staying, even if the community itself has destructive elements... there is great power in collective human fantasy, no matter the aim of the fantasy itself...
seeing it this way helps me avoid slipping into that violence of certainty, the kind that hardens into intolerance and deepens the very isolation it’s reacting against. when i let go of that, dialogue becomes possible again... (especially dialogue with my less acceptable or darker parts- so i don't need to project them out onto others) curiosity can come back into the room. and even when there’s deep disagreement, it doesn’t have to feel like a threat to existence itself...
incredible incredible analysis of the world . thank you for tackling reality and writing about is so poignantly with full care . can't put into words how much more sane your writing makes me feel as you cut through the veil of disillusionment with a well informed image of reality that doesnt sink into the pessimism so easy to fall into . what youre writing is so important and needed . thank you !!!!
So true, and well said. Thanks so much for posting.
"Nearly every mass shooter in recent years has been radicalized on forums that are deeply disturbing, and almost entirely far-right. These cold, dark places are the ultimate example of what can happen when purposeless people reach for anything resembling community, anything resembling meaning."
Carl Jung writes in his memoir, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections":
"I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life ...
"They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually contained within too narrow a spiritual horizon." #p140
... too narrow a spiritual horizon. May be the central illness we are plagued with in these modern times. Are we all just biological robots, epiphenomenons in a reductive materialistic universe - human animals to be farmed by (soon to be) trillionaires?
Dunno. Profound mystery at the least. And following science over the last century, it's way more complex than I think anyone might have first imagined.
Very true and i think that this is another shocking aspect to this violence and its immediate spread via social media without any gatekeepers. PBS news hour had a psychologist that was advising parents how to cope with distress in their children if they saw these videos, I think it is really needed because there is no way to censor this video content nor should there be.
That’s another shocking aspect to this violence and its immediate spread via social media without any gatekeepers. PBS news hour had a psychologist that was advising parents how to cope with distress in their children if they saw these videos, I think it is really needed because there is no way to censor this video content nor should there be.
That, unfortunately,is wishful thinking. Look at treasury yields - the largest, most sophisticated and liquid securities market in the world is signaling no such thing.
Tell yourself that, if it makes you feel better. I am sure it is easier for you to argue with strawmen.
What I am, is an empiricist. I am saying that the evidence of the treasuries market does not reflect the scenario you are giving.
If, for example, a freak hurricane were projected to wipe out some area that normally never gets hurricanes, one would expect property insurers with a lot of exposure to that area to take a big hit. We saw something like this in the California wildfires - insurance company stocks took a hit, reflecting the payouts they were anticipated to make.
We don't see anything of the sort in treasury yields reflecting any kind of imminent distress.
American Exceptionalism going on for far too long, with most Americans feeling disempowered except at the point of a gun. Not even wanting to think or reason anything out, or become aware there is a world outside of the US of A, so crazy excesses prevail.
Problem is the rest of us live on the same planet, and insist on having a right to (a different) life!!!
Been feeling this way for a number of years, but this piece really does capture how pointless the mad dash to prove if a shooter is of this ideological stripe or that when they’re all lost in the swamp of doomerism.
There’s nothing worth fighting for or accomplishing for them, so why not lash out and get attention that way… I only fear at this stage of climate change and late stage capitalism, that we’re too late to avoid the bulk of mass calamity.
Regardless of ideology or faith (albeit predominantly right-wing extremism in some form) these people are lashing out at an artificially maintained world that seems to despise the very humans who built it and seeks to kill those who want to prevent the natural world from irreversibly breaking and killing everyone.
So of course they lash out. Of course they act like a cornered starving animal with nothing to lose and no hope of survival but still unwilling to lay down to die.
It's going to get so, so, so much worse unless we speak honestly and openly about our fears and hopes for the currently quite hopeless future ahead of us.
Revolution (a overused term indeed, but I mean it in a multifaceted &l steadily built way) Or Extinction.
There's no end game where our current capitalist hellscape of a system or trillionare wannabes survive and 'win' in the self-destructing world they've created; just cancerous death and decay.
And now nihilism has reached buzzword status. It's important to notate that there's two types of nihilism, the "Nothing matters so who cares if I die or am imprisoned for life" and the actual nihilism epidemic that was in full growth in the 90s and dominates our country's corporate and political elite of "Nothing matters so why not do crack cocaine, hoard as much wealth as possible, and be as sociopathic as possible". It's simply the trickle down effect: our country's elite who would serve as role models are nihilistic, so naturally it's only a matter of time before it spreads throughout the general population. So close to getting that with the main stream media mention, but who owns the main stream media? Who decides what is and isn't shown? It's not that it's invading our culture, it was always there and the masks have come off. Warren Buffet is a nihilist, as much as he tries to hide it with a facade of moderation.
Your take on "nihilistic investing" couldn't be any more off the mark. You're confusing absurdism with nihilism. You can see this clearest in the idol investor Keith Gills; it's not that losing $500m doesn't matter, it's just that turning $50k into $1b is completely absurd to begin with so who cares. In 2020 people had the time to learn, and a great many took to learning how to invest. When presented with a golden opportunity, instead of being allowed to win and rewarded for their efforts they were instead crushed by large capital firms and when that didn't work government intervention. The small guy can never win, the laws are not made for you to win and will be changed if you start winning, and the voice of the majority don't matter only the voice of the elite rang all throughout 2021. This is an absurd system, one where you are told hard work and effort is rewarded while simultaneously being shown the very opposite. As if their loss wasn't enough, we then have example after example in the following years of the elite betraying even basic common decency. The Beyond meat COO biting off a guy's nose, continued consolidation of monopolies, record profits during record inflation, the gambling banks who's avarice is rewarded with bailouts, the media coverage of pedophile politicians (many of whom are still in power); the crimes of the elite are so many that no one can remember them all but they can remember that the punishment is a slap on the wrist (if not an outright reward) and that there is no crime if you simply have enough money. All of this speaks to a clear lack of belief of a higher power or higher order. And the only coping mechanism that is allowed in such a system is absurdism. It's not that nothing matters, it's just that they no longer care. There's no reason to.
I would also like to address the belief that they are largely atheist. Although atheists are present, you'll find a good number of them in private worship but rebuking of the church at large. Whether it be God, a higher power, or the higher order of society the majority of them are agnostic. If you call them atheist they won't disagree; it's not because you're right it's simply that they don't care what you think. But listen to them and you'll find them wishing for a higher power to right what is wronged, to reach into the hearts of the wicked and change them, or to rain down divine retribution.
So a more accurate description of today's social climate wouldn't be a nihilism epidemic but rather a jihad; a holy war between the atheist nihilist elite and the agnostic absurdist public. None of this is going to be fixed by hope, as it is not hope that is lacking.
Forgive me for taking this moment to offer a far too light quote, but as Walter Sobchek said in the Big Lebowski "say what you want about the tenets of national socialism but at least it's an ethos."
Although he obviously said that with his tongue firmly in cheek, there is some truth to the fact that beliefs can be manipulated and worked within, but nihilism is a world truly without boundaries.
To your point, I feel like one side pretends to believe in something while the other pretends that believing in something it's own form of subjugation. In the end, we're left agreeing to believe in nothing. Meanwhile, kids search only for any handhold to build their personal morality on and get burnt on every stove and at every turn. "That's racist!" "That's woke!" Then we're shocked when they commit atrocities ironically.
At any rate, thanks for sharing this take as it feels really important right now and hopefully something smart people on here can help each other with.
really thoughtful piece... i can feel how much pain there is in what you’re describing... there’s so much horror in seeing mass shootings, fascist rhetoric, the crushing of the poor, billionaires hoarding while others starve… it makes sense that it can feel like the world is falling into nihilism...
but when i read your examples, what stands out to me is almost the opposite. the people you write about don’t seem to believe in nothing, they seem to believe too much. far-right movements are driven by deeply held myths about identity, purity, and control... billionaires believe in endless growth and extraction. even the people drawn into extremist spaces online aren’t empty; they’re full of anger and longing for belonging, and someone has offered them a story to live inside....
when a kid is radicalized on a forum, it isn’t because they’ve stared into a void and found nothing there. it’s because someone handed them a meaning so totalizing that it eclipsed everything else. that belief can be monstrous, but it’s still belief....
to me, nihilism would look like a collapse of all these narratives, where no one is sure what’s true and no story can hold. what we’re living through feels more like the violent collision of competing meanings, each side absolutely certain, each convinced they must fight to preserve their vision of the world.
so while i understand the urge to call it nihilism, especially when hopelessness creeps in, it seems like the real danger right now isn’t a lack of belief… it’s the kind of belief that leaves no room for anything else.
What a beautiful response! You might be right that “nihilism” isn’t the perfect word in this context, and I’d like to share a slightly different perspective that might add some insight.
I understand that, from the outside it seems there’s this paradox of (primarily) white evangelical Americans holding what seems like too much belief and yet too little faith at the same time. I grew up in communities like this, and one thing I notice people who didn’t sometimes miss is that what these people believe in, what they hold so strongly to, IS this almost nihilistic end of days philosophy.
For example, this perspective can help explain some of their tensions with environmentalists despite the (on paper) values overlap. After all, shouldn’t the people who worship the creator want to honor and care for his gift? It starts to make sense when we remember that they’re hoping for the rapture. They actually want to bring about the end of days. They hope for the fulfillment of (their interpretation of) biblical prophecy. They hold a desire for the ending of the world rather than its preservation. They’re raising little soldiers to fight in their holy wars, which is partly where their gun obsession comes from.
Of course, there are many layers and influences in this topic, but I hope this provides a different perspective and I’m curious to hear what you think.
If you’re interested in exploring this subject further, Tea Leving’s Substack dives deeper into some of these paradoxes.
thanks so much for your kind words and for being so open in how you’ve shared here… i had a somewhat religious upbringing myself, catholic school until about 6th grade, but i wouldn’t say that really qualifies me to understand what it’s like to live inside an evangelical worldview… so i’m definitely speaking from the outside here, def take what i'm saying with a grain of salt
just to check that i’m following you,
is it that from the environmentalist point of view, evangelicals can seem nihilistic? like, if you believe in a creator, why wouldn’t you protect creation?
if yes, that really clicked for me… and it also made me think about how that gaze might go both ways… to someone deeply rooted in a prophetic worldview, environmentalism could just as easily look like clinging to something that’s meant to pass away… almost like worshipping the temporary instead of trusting in the eternal
humans are so good at filling the world with meaning… we shape our sensations, our landscapes, our relationships with stories that hold everything together… but the more attached we are to those stories, the harder it is to hold space for anyone else’s… and anything outside our meaning can start to feel empty or even threatening, like a kind of void
from that place, each side can look at the other and see “nihilism,” even though both are actually overflowing with meaning
just different meanings that can’t easily coexist… it’s like two maps laid over the same terrain, but each one erases the other… i think that tension you’re describing lives right there, in what we call something when we can’t make sense of the story inside it
Hi! Your presence here is lovely, thank you! And yes, I was referring to the tension between environmentalism and evangelicalism in exactly the way you understood! I know many people who refuse to recycle - or even pick up their trash when they’re tubing down the river - because “god is going to take care of it.” 🫣 Evangelicalism is the Wild West of Christianity.
This concept applies more generally too. We can see their thought pattern in everything from their rejection of vaccines and modern medicine, to their refusal to stop engaging in corporal punishment and learn about proven stages of brain development. All the while obsessing about pseudoscience like the dangers of seed oils and slathering themselves in beef tallow (wtf…) instead of sunscreens.
For example, if you truly believe children are a miracle from god, wouldn’t you want to do what’s been proven to be best to protect them from harm? Wouldn’t you embrace more updated parenting methods that align with what’s been proven to be effective rather than continuing patterns of generational trauma?
But all of those things would require looking back at their own childhood and reckoning with what was done to them. It’s easier to just “forgive and forget” than it is to realize the very real ways you were betrayed by the people and institutions who were entrusted to care for you. Instead their attitude is often “well, I turned out fine.” (Spoiler alert, they didn’t).
I can have compassion for that, and, it’s not an excuse to continue perpetuating harm.
Love your maps and meaning analogy, and your embrace of the gray areas where truth often hides. Beautifully phrased. I wish more people in this situation could see it instead of being so fixed in black and white thinking.
Thanks so much for sharing with us!
thanks again for your words, lauren... i’ve been really enjoying this exchange. i agree with so much of what you shared, and what keeps coming up for me here is less about the specifics of any one belief, and more about the pattern of belief itself....
belief can have this ordering effect on reality... almost like a security blanket.... it takes the scary random events of the world and orders them
the more threatened a person or a group feels, the tighter they can cling to those beliefs... and that clinging can create what i think of as a kind of violence of certainty… an all-or-nothing stance that starts to shape the whole worldview and identity, often in ways that defy the very logical structure the belief claims to stand on....
i don't think beliefs are necessarily a problem in and of themselves- they're like maps and reality is like the terrain... no matter how good google maps gets, pixels will never be water and soil... humans get really crazy when we start treating pixels as soil...
so when i see contradictions... the kind you named so clearly, i don’t really see them as a bug in the system of human belief, but a feature... (because belief is always at the level of the map, it is never complete in its description of the terrain, so it must be limited in ways and eventually lead to contradiction- its structural not moral in my pov) over time, i’ve had to face my own contradictions too. like, i’ll rail against big tech while still keeping my amazon prime account. hell, there are a hundred little ways i live in tension with my values, and if i weren't feeling so self-righteous i could probably get the list to thousands lol... the more i’ve come to terms with that, the easier it is for me to see others’ contradictions without needing to react emotionally.
it’s not that i agree with them, i don’t even fully agree with myself half the time if im honest - but it shows me how much of the fantasy of “purity” or “perfection” is just that… a fantasy... a map of something that i may never get to perceive directly
and honestly, i think belief has less to do with logic than with membership. we’re social creatures. being seen as a “believer” whether evangelical, environmentalist, whatever, often means being woven into a community... and i imagine that leaving that can feel like a kind of death.... i’ve never lived in an evangelical community, but i can only imagine how hard it would be to walk away from your founding relationships, friends, maybe even family... there’s a very human logic to staying, even if the community itself has destructive elements... there is great power in collective human fantasy, no matter the aim of the fantasy itself...
seeing it this way helps me avoid slipping into that violence of certainty, the kind that hardens into intolerance and deepens the very isolation it’s reacting against. when i let go of that, dialogue becomes possible again... (especially dialogue with my less acceptable or darker parts- so i don't need to project them out onto others) curiosity can come back into the room. and even when there’s deep disagreement, it doesn’t have to feel like a threat to existence itself...
incredible incredible analysis of the world . thank you for tackling reality and writing about is so poignantly with full care . can't put into words how much more sane your writing makes me feel as you cut through the veil of disillusionment with a well informed image of reality that doesnt sink into the pessimism so easy to fall into . what youre writing is so important and needed . thank you !!!!
So true, and well said. Thanks so much for posting.
"Nearly every mass shooter in recent years has been radicalized on forums that are deeply disturbing, and almost entirely far-right. These cold, dark places are the ultimate example of what can happen when purposeless people reach for anything resembling community, anything resembling meaning."
Carl Jung writes in his memoir, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections":
"I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life ...
"They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually contained within too narrow a spiritual horizon." #p140
... too narrow a spiritual horizon. May be the central illness we are plagued with in these modern times. Are we all just biological robots, epiphenomenons in a reductive materialistic universe - human animals to be farmed by (soon to be) trillionaires?
The matrix right 🤨
Dunno. Profound mystery at the least. And following science over the last century, it's way more complex than I think anyone might have first imagined.
Very true and i think that this is another shocking aspect to this violence and its immediate spread via social media without any gatekeepers. PBS news hour had a psychologist that was advising parents how to cope with distress in their children if they saw these videos, I think it is really needed because there is no way to censor this video content nor should there be.
Thank you for writing this. It moved me to tears.
My daughter pointed out that she has witnessed two live murders on screen this week alone. It’s heartbreaking.
May we find a way to counter the fall towards nihilism.
Thank you for this piece, JP.
That’s another shocking aspect to this violence and its immediate spread via social media without any gatekeepers. PBS news hour had a psychologist that was advising parents how to cope with distress in their children if they saw these videos, I think it is really needed because there is no way to censor this video content nor should there be.
Start liking it. There no longer is any need to keep up the charade - the United States and its catamites are an empire now.
A collapsing one certainly, and the fastest yet historically speaking.
That, unfortunately,is wishful thinking. Look at treasury yields - the largest, most sophisticated and liquid securities market in the world is signaling no such thing.
The climate crisis doesn't care about your money numbers of a screen.
So why are treasury yields not reflecting this? Put it another way - if you know something they don't, it will be the easiest money you ever made.
Ah, okay. You're just a number-go-up climate crisis denier.
Tell yourself that, if it makes you feel better. I am sure it is easier for you to argue with strawmen.
What I am, is an empiricist. I am saying that the evidence of the treasuries market does not reflect the scenario you are giving.
If, for example, a freak hurricane were projected to wipe out some area that normally never gets hurricanes, one would expect property insurers with a lot of exposure to that area to take a big hit. We saw something like this in the California wildfires - insurance company stocks took a hit, reflecting the payouts they were anticipated to make.
We don't see anything of the sort in treasury yields reflecting any kind of imminent distress.
Sick America!
American Exceptionalism going on for far too long, with most Americans feeling disempowered except at the point of a gun. Not even wanting to think or reason anything out, or become aware there is a world outside of the US of A, so crazy excesses prevail.
Problem is the rest of us live on the same planet, and insist on having a right to (a different) life!!!
Been feeling this way for a number of years, but this piece really does capture how pointless the mad dash to prove if a shooter is of this ideological stripe or that when they’re all lost in the swamp of doomerism.
There’s nothing worth fighting for or accomplishing for them, so why not lash out and get attention that way… I only fear at this stage of climate change and late stage capitalism, that we’re too late to avoid the bulk of mass calamity.
Regardless of ideology or faith (albeit predominantly right-wing extremism in some form) these people are lashing out at an artificially maintained world that seems to despise the very humans who built it and seeks to kill those who want to prevent the natural world from irreversibly breaking and killing everyone.
So of course they lash out. Of course they act like a cornered starving animal with nothing to lose and no hope of survival but still unwilling to lay down to die.
It's going to get so, so, so much worse unless we speak honestly and openly about our fears and hopes for the currently quite hopeless future ahead of us.
Revolution (a overused term indeed, but I mean it in a multifaceted &l steadily built way) Or Extinction.
There's no end game where our current capitalist hellscape of a system or trillionare wannabes survive and 'win' in the self-destructing world they've created; just cancerous death and decay.
And now nihilism has reached buzzword status. It's important to notate that there's two types of nihilism, the "Nothing matters so who cares if I die or am imprisoned for life" and the actual nihilism epidemic that was in full growth in the 90s and dominates our country's corporate and political elite of "Nothing matters so why not do crack cocaine, hoard as much wealth as possible, and be as sociopathic as possible". It's simply the trickle down effect: our country's elite who would serve as role models are nihilistic, so naturally it's only a matter of time before it spreads throughout the general population. So close to getting that with the main stream media mention, but who owns the main stream media? Who decides what is and isn't shown? It's not that it's invading our culture, it was always there and the masks have come off. Warren Buffet is a nihilist, as much as he tries to hide it with a facade of moderation.
Your take on "nihilistic investing" couldn't be any more off the mark. You're confusing absurdism with nihilism. You can see this clearest in the idol investor Keith Gills; it's not that losing $500m doesn't matter, it's just that turning $50k into $1b is completely absurd to begin with so who cares. In 2020 people had the time to learn, and a great many took to learning how to invest. When presented with a golden opportunity, instead of being allowed to win and rewarded for their efforts they were instead crushed by large capital firms and when that didn't work government intervention. The small guy can never win, the laws are not made for you to win and will be changed if you start winning, and the voice of the majority don't matter only the voice of the elite rang all throughout 2021. This is an absurd system, one where you are told hard work and effort is rewarded while simultaneously being shown the very opposite. As if their loss wasn't enough, we then have example after example in the following years of the elite betraying even basic common decency. The Beyond meat COO biting off a guy's nose, continued consolidation of monopolies, record profits during record inflation, the gambling banks who's avarice is rewarded with bailouts, the media coverage of pedophile politicians (many of whom are still in power); the crimes of the elite are so many that no one can remember them all but they can remember that the punishment is a slap on the wrist (if not an outright reward) and that there is no crime if you simply have enough money. All of this speaks to a clear lack of belief of a higher power or higher order. And the only coping mechanism that is allowed in such a system is absurdism. It's not that nothing matters, it's just that they no longer care. There's no reason to.
I would also like to address the belief that they are largely atheist. Although atheists are present, you'll find a good number of them in private worship but rebuking of the church at large. Whether it be God, a higher power, or the higher order of society the majority of them are agnostic. If you call them atheist they won't disagree; it's not because you're right it's simply that they don't care what you think. But listen to them and you'll find them wishing for a higher power to right what is wronged, to reach into the hearts of the wicked and change them, or to rain down divine retribution.
So a more accurate description of today's social climate wouldn't be a nihilism epidemic but rather a jihad; a holy war between the atheist nihilist elite and the agnostic absurdist public. None of this is going to be fixed by hope, as it is not hope that is lacking.
Forgive me for taking this moment to offer a far too light quote, but as Walter Sobchek said in the Big Lebowski "say what you want about the tenets of national socialism but at least it's an ethos."
Although he obviously said that with his tongue firmly in cheek, there is some truth to the fact that beliefs can be manipulated and worked within, but nihilism is a world truly without boundaries.
To your point, I feel like one side pretends to believe in something while the other pretends that believing in something it's own form of subjugation. In the end, we're left agreeing to believe in nothing. Meanwhile, kids search only for any handhold to build their personal morality on and get burnt on every stove and at every turn. "That's racist!" "That's woke!" Then we're shocked when they commit atrocities ironically.
At any rate, thanks for sharing this take as it feels really important right now and hopefully something smart people on here can help each other with.