Up From Nihilism

As I said in my previous article, I only wrote about the doxing of Ricky Vaughn because it dovetails with my current interests. I found it interesting because it struck me as being one of the rare occasions that I have seen a moral debate break out in the Alt-Right.

The Alt-Right doesn’t talk much about morality. The most striking thing about the optics debate was how much time was spent on it. There must have been hundreds of threads on forums and tens of thousands of comments and tweets about the importance of optics. It reinforced my view that the Alt-Right is more visual and interested in aesthetics than ethics.

It is also more interested in news and politics. It seems like nearly every podcast is about the latest news cycle and what Donald Trump is doing at the moment. We’re guilty of this too. I also tend to write about whatever Trump is doing at the moment and whatever happens to be in the news. There have been times when I have stepped away from this though to indulge my other interests.

I spent the whole month of February exploring my interest in black history. The month of March unexpectedly descended into a dumpster fire of acrimony. In light of everything that has recently happened, I now want to turn my attention to ethics. It is a subject which I haven’t really engaged with much in many years. This is going to be my new project here at Occidental Dissent.

I want to start with this sea of nihilism which exists on the internet. There is a strong vein of nihilism that runs through the Alt-Right. If I had to identify its sources, it seems to spring largely from Nietzschean philosophy, trolling and imageboard culture and post-libertarianism which have rejected the mainstream moral consensus. In its popular form, it is the belief that morality is a matter of opinion and it is characterized by the inability or unwillingness to articulate moral arguments.

Over a decade ago, I went through a nihilistic phase myself early in my internet career. As I grew older, I thought my way of it and never felt the need to return to the subject. Looking around, I don’t see anyone but Jordan Peterson out there giving young men advice about how they ought to live. We’re about to wade into an important subject which hopefully will spark a larger discussion.