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Title: An Essay On Green Nihilism
Author: Julian Langer
Date: 11/23/2017
Language: en
Topics: green nihilism, nihilism, anarchy, post left anarchy, ontological anarchism
Source: https://barbarically.blog/2017/11/23/an-essay-on-green-nihilism/

Julian Langer

An Essay On Green Nihilism

“Nihilist anarchism isn’t concerned with a social revolution that adds a

new chapter to an old history but the ending of history altogether.”

Aragorn!

Before I really start this I want to say that, actually, it is ok and

that we can be ok with that. Sure we can be horrified, enraged, hateful

and so on, but it is ok that we’ve encountered those feelings and what

caused them to be, in a certain sense, is ok.

No-thing was ever meant to last and nothingness is all that lasts.

Which is why my first statement regarding starting this piece is

actually bullshit. This piece didn’t start when I started typing it and

it won’t finish when I stop. Its beginnings are located in the

nothingness of displaced origins, far too complex for any cartography to

be created, and its endings will dissipate into the nothingness of

transience, when all who have read it or will ever read it have

forgotten it or died.

And that is ok too. No-thing was ever meant to last and nothingness is

all that lasts.

The river flows, with you and I caught in its currents, both made new

and destroyed in each present moment, and that is ok. It is ok that any

attempt to construct a meaningful existence out of the nothingness of

this acosmic condition was and is Absurd. And it is ok to keep doing it

– all living beings have done this and died, their efforts rendered

useless, but their wild fight/struggle to survive still beautiful the

same: even if Life is a cosmic joke, with the living being the punch

line, it is still ok to laugh and delight in the tragic comedy of it

all.

No-thing was ever meant to last and nothingness is all that lasts.

In Feral Consciousness I use for this type of acosmic nihilist ontology

the term o-nihilism and recently have taken to using the term wild-Being

to encompass a broad ontological description, which includes acosmic

transience. In this piece I will use wild-Being as the specific term for

ontological-nihilism and try to make my meaning of the term nihilism

clear in-use.

This is the fundamental issue presented when trying to discuss nihilism.

How do you define nothing? Can you say what isn’t is? Does the term with

all its varying context specific usages hold any pure true meaning? (The

definition of any word/sign is arbitrary and subject-specific, which

does render the last question irrelevant in one sense, but relevant to

the phantasmic game of discourse.)

There is also the issue of when varying categories of nihilism cross

over each other, making specific usages messier. Ontological,

mereological and existential nihilism all cross over each other at

various points, in ways that are difficult to disconnect.

Epistemological nihilism – what I term s-nihilism (nihilist-scepticism)

in Feral Consciousness – also seems linked to these three usages, but at

the same time doesn’t. And equally, existential, moral and political

nihilism seem interconnected and difficult to disconnect from each

other, or epistemological nihilism.

I am not going to worry though. I will just muddle through this as best

as I can. We are talking about No-thingness after all, through the

medium of constructing categories of forms and locating them within

meaning-maps, to describe events, locations, places, situations,

geographies, etc., which have already dissipated into the abyss of

transience. We are in the realm of phantasms of history, by virtue of

any level of engagement within this medium.

And that is ok. Remember it is an Absurd cosmic joke and you are the

punch line – so laugh arsehole! (Nietzsche called this Amor Fati)

No-thing was ever meant to last and nothingness is all that lasts.

We simply keep dancing our lives to the songs we find and create, in

rebellious revolt, and embrace the responsibility we have to ourselves

egoistically, as embodied selves who are extensions of the world, given

the freedom we are condemned to.

“The revolt against civilization means that we must attack both

internally and externally. In reality, there is no separation between

the two. This attack is a response: a response to the totality we’ve

been lulled into that seeks to destroy everything. For some that is

meant literally. Their goal is to eliminate everything from concrete to

Nature so that you are free to do anything or go anywhere. It’s a

nihilistic rage that seeks honesty only where the individual remains

isolated: to remove any and all conceivable chains.” Tucker

“I would rather be ashes than dust!

I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than

it should be stifled by dry-rot.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow,

than a sleepy and permanent planet.

The function of man is to live, not to exist.

I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.

I shall use my time.” London

The subject of nihilism has been one that anarchists have had to engage

with for many years. Primal anarchy, to borrow Tucker’s term, seems

synonymous to nihilism, in the sense of wild-Being.

But this has not been, is not and likely will continue not to be a

comfortable relationship.

This is predominantly due to the split between anarchists interested in

anarchism and those interested in anarchy.

Anarchism is a moral and political systematic ideological framework,

born out of the spirit of European “revolutions” in the 18th and 19th

centuries and utopian socialists aesthetics. Since its earliest usages,

the definition of anarchism has split into various schools of thought,

whose general focus of practice has been squabbling amongst themselves

over what it is that they want to do and if other anarchists will allow

them to do what they want to do – anarchism tends to be incredibly

boring and disappointing, so I personally generally don’t engage with

it.

Anarchy, as already stated, is wild-Being and something totally at odds

with most categories of anarchism’s aesthetics over what it is we as

anarchists desire – with the exceptions to this being green anarchism

and ontological anarchism (both in broad senses of the terms).

This contradiction is born out of anarchism’s general desire to

construct nice, civilised ways of being, which fit into Euro-American

moral preferences and the meliorist progression of History; whereas

anarchy requires the release from the repression of History into cynical

authenticity. (It is worth noting that many nihilist anarchists are only

part of that community out of disappointment with the failure of

anarchism as a movement to produce its desired ideological aims.)

Because of this contradiction, nihilist anarchists (in this context

referring to political and moral nihilism) are frequently ostracised

from the broader discussion, demonised and subjugated to witch-hunts.

This is in many ways amusing, given that Emma Goldman, a classic of

traditional anarchist discourse, was highly influenced by nihilists like

Stirner and Nietzsche, and that in many ways, even if through failure,

the Russian nihilist movement has had a larger effect on history, in its

effect on Lenin, than anarchism ever has done. But again, anarchy cares

not for history.

History is a means of encoding the territorialisation of the world into

order – creating the illusionary dichotomy of order and chaos in the

process. History is a realm of phantasms and spooks, and anarchists who

value anarchy over the systems of anarchism know this. As such,

nihilists frequently rebel in the face of history, angering its

proponents. And while there is perhaps something to be said for tact,

there is value in the schizm this laughter creates, as it opens up

spaces for collapsing history.

And here we encounter a problem. We have a perhaps valuable schizm and

yet find ourselves within History, subject to its means of enacting

violent oppression.

So the questions present themselves. What do we do? How do we go on? Do

we go on?

No clear answers present themselves. But we are not in an age of clear

answers (if we ever were is questionable, but moving on). So I shan’t

try to give something clear cut and easy.

Actually I am going to give something incredibly messy and difficult,

which will likely disgust many of you reading this (at least I hope it

will do).

We […] want to love because we feel love, because love pleases our

hearts and our senses, and we experience a higher self-enjoyment in the

love for another being. Stirner

We are perfect altogether! For we are, every moment, all that we can be;

and we never need be more. Stirner

“Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time.” London

Hippies, pacifists, liberals and romantics of varying descriptions have

ruined discussions around love for the most part. So as I transition

into this section, I’m aware of people’s prejudices and how it might be

being perceived already.

But love, like nihilism, is a term with many differing means. And love

can often almost mean opposite things.

If we take it that here love is not being used to refer to romance, then

we need to ask what romance is? It is easy enough to state that romance

involves an idealized perception of whatever it is we are undergoing

affection for. But there seems more to it than that. Romance is not

affection for the thing in-itself, but rather affection for the symbolic

mask the viewer is partially responsible for creating, hiding the actual

face and body of the thing in-itself. (This has involved embracing the

notion of things containing identities, but this is something I am

willing to embrace, while trapped in this medium of language to

communicate.)

Romance is actually what most of our contemporary ideologies are

entirely about. Nationalists and conservative are romantic towards their

nations. Liberals are romantic towards the oppressed. (Most) Anarchists

and socialists are romantic towards the revolution and supposed attacks

on the system. None of them love the thing in-itself. Their affections

are towards the idealised mask of what it represents symbolically,

within the language of discourse and its values.

Love is direct though. Love involves being a naked nothingness to

embrace the naked nothingness you are loving. Love requires finding

beauty in the imperfect. It requires seeing beauty behind the mask and

in the maskless. Love is affection for the thing in-itself, before all

language, representation and symbolisation, as something transient,

Absurd and beautiful, in its cosmic revolt to Be.

Love is the only reason to value anything – be it love of one’s self or

love of another. Love is the only reason to fight for anything. Love is

also the only reason to hate anything, as you can only love as intensely

as you can hate.

(Some (vulgar) nihilists, who cling to the dogmatisms of scientism and

poor quality eliminative materialism, claim that love isn’t real, but

this is born out of crass inauthenticity and utter self renunciation.)

“He was a silent fury who no torment could tame.” London

Revenge. "I call it Zarathustra’s Revenge because as Nietzsche said,

revenge may be second rate but it’s not nothing. One might enjoy the

satisfaction of terrifying the bastards for at least a few moments.

Formerly I advocated “Poetic Terrorism” rather than actual violence, the

idea being that art could be wielded as a weapon. Now I’ve rather come

to doubt it. But perhaps weapons might be wielded as art. From the

sledgehammer of the Luddites to the black bomb of the attentat,

destruction could serve as a form of creativity, for its own sake, or

for purely aesthetic reasons, without any illusions about revolution.

Oscar Wilde meets the acte gratuit: a dandyism of despair.….. Green

anarchists” & AntiCivilization Neo-primitivists seem (some of them) to

be moving toward a new pole of attraction, nihilism. Perhaps

neo-nihilism would serve as a better label, since this tendency is not

simply replicating the nihilism of the Russian narodniks or the French

attentatists of circa 1890 to 1912, however much the new nihilists look

to the old ones as precursors. I share their critique—in fact I think

I’ve been mirroring it to a large extent in this essay: creative

despair, let’s call it. What I do not understand however is their

proposal—if any. “What is to be done?” was originally a nihilist slogan,

after all, before Lenin appropriated it. I presume that my option #1,

passive escape, would not suit the agenda. As for Active Escapism, to

use the suffix “ism” implies some form not only of ideology but also

some action. What is the logical outcome of this train of thought?"

Hakim Bey

“If the politics of cruelty follows from the belief that we must destroy

what destroys us, the emotion of cruelty is revenge. Only this taste for

revenge offers resistance to the voices of this world that tell us to

put up with the daily violence done to us. To feel cruel is to know that

we deserve better than this world; that our bodies are not for us to

hate or to look upon with disgust; that our desires are not disastrous

pathologies. To feel the burning passion of cruelty, then, is to reclaim

refusal. We refuse to compromising ourselves and the million tiny

compromises of patriarchy, capitalism, white-supremacy,

heter/homo-normativity, and so on. As such, the subject of cruelty no

longer convinces themselves to love the world or to find something in

the world that redeems the whole. Simply put: the subject of cruelty

learns to hate the world. The feeling of cruelty is the necessary

correlate to the politics of cruelty; learning to hate the world is what

correlates to the political task of destroying what destroys us all.“

Hostis

Hatred is often, due to its historicised association with ugly aspects

of civilisation like racism, homophobia, nationalism, etc., disregarded

as something valuable or desirable. Many, if not most, religious

traditions preach that hatred is something evil and must be exorcised

from us, through various rituals and stages within their institutional

progressions.

This repression of an authentic emotive state that serves as a means of

reacting to that which inhibits our ability to live, is part of the

self-denying psychosis that civilisation actively creates. It serves as

a means of maintaining socio-normative every day life.

Hatred though is intimately tied to love though. I love what is wild and

as such hate that which represses the wild, civilisation. A mother

badger loves her cubs and as such hates the farmer who kills them. A

baby rhino loves its mother and as such hates the hunter who kills her.

Hatred is a valuable energy to draw from, like love.

Many of us within the nihilist anarchist community came to feel the

hatred we have for this culture out of a deep love for what is wild. It

is my desire for these energies to be well directed.

The direction of the love is easy – defend what you love and resist that

which seeks to harm what you love. We know this space well, though none

of us within the radical world are very good at it – which is not to say

that those efforts to defend and protect aren’t valuable. The direction

of the hatred is harder and we are, out of the moral sympathies that

dominate our discourses, worse at it. But simply enough, the direction

for the hatred is revenge.

Revenge is valuable as a means of cathartic release, for our psychic

wellbeing. But revenge is also important, as it serves as a means of

destabilising the power that those with authority have and taking it for

yourself.

How anyone choses to take revenge remains to be seen.

Hakim Bey in the quote above advocates for poetic terrorism.

Eco-extremists advocate more explicitly violent means of revenge. What

route eco-radicals of any community/milieu choses is up to them.

I’m not writing a how to manual here, so will let your imagination take

you to what feels like your desired course of action.

“I envy the savages. And I will cry to them in a loud voice: “Save

yourselves, civilization is coming.”

Of course: our dear civilization of which we are so proud. We have

abandoned the free and happy life of the forests for this horrendous

moral and material slavery. And we are maniacs, neurasthenics, suicides.

Why should I care that civilization has given humanity wings to fly so

that it can bomb cities, why should I care if I know every star in the

sky or every river on earth?” Filippi

So what is green nihilism?

It could be said that green nihilism is the energies of revenge born

from love and defence born from hate. It could also be said that green

nihilism is an embrace of the Absurd and defiant rebellious revolt in

the face of this culture of Death.

It could also be said though that green nihilism is the naturistic

becoming-animal of a feral becoming, relinquishing the adornments of

civilisation, its technologies, dressings and so on, in an unromantic

embrace of the wild. And in this sense, green nihilism is the practice

of individualistic authentic self-actualisation, through an

individualism tied to an egoism that encompasses the entire scope of the

world we are extensions of and immersed within.

In this way, green nihilism is very similar to gender nihilism and is

ultimately a rejection of species-being, in the sense Stirner described.

With the practice of rewilding as animal-becoming, like gender nihilist

friends, green nihilists are best served practicing active rebellion, in

whatever situation fits their needs and desires. This rebellion serves

as a means to releasing the repression of civility. It is a space that

presents a great deal of opportunity for fun for anarchists and green

nihilists, and is a space to simply enjoy the beauty of being alive,

with the energy of a wildfire at the core of our Being.

Again, I’m not writing a how to manual, so let your imagination and

desires take you.