Peace

By: Ap Smith

Life in the modern age seems not to be attuned to the needs and peculiarities of human nature or indeed the environment humanity finds itself in. We plunder our ecosystems of all their worth in order to sustain a degree of material comfort we must make slaves of ourselves to keep, we've rendered life meaningless in striving for the kind of society where culture is undermined by rampant materialism and each person is nothing more than one in a mass of innumerable faceless beings with only a selfish pursuit of immediate individual pleasure in common. Theres no longer any debating around this, modern civilization is a time bomb; its not a question of whether it will go off but when. In a thoroughly morbid sense, perhaps the most amusing thing is that few people even realize anything is wrong, not least those entrusted with leading our societies. Many people seem to sense something is not quite right but for one reason or another cannot articulate their worries. Given that we live in an age where all the information one receives is a dogmatic proclamation of the absolute progressive perfection of our civilization, it is not entirely unforgivable that one might not understand how we got into this mess or what indeed we can do to change it. This article then is written for all those who ever saw the chaos underlying modern life and were dismayed by the size of the task of unpicking the complex weave of causes and effects to understand how things came to be as they are.

The title of this article is peace, what it refers to is not the state of non-hostilities hippies aspire to but the kind of peace one reaches within themselves. Inner peace simply means coming to terms with the way the world works and how the forces that form it operate. This does not mean a passive acceptance of any sort of difficult or unfavourable situation that comes by in life but understanding why the world is as it is.

Most people refuse to accept reality and try to avoid it by constructing fantasy worlds in their minds that they hope to replace reality with. Their morals, lifestyles and hopes all reflect this denial of reality. Their desire is to escape the things in reality they do not like the look of, usually this means one thing above anything else: death. They are frightened by the thought of death and the fact they will eventually die. The uncertainty, loneliness and isolation death inevitably connotes drives fear deep into their being, so to avoid confronting death they shy from life and all its struggles. They try to remove from life everything that reminds them of death creating social institutions to shield their vulnerabilities and suppress the urges of those who would dare act without fear of death. Driven frantically on by fear they impose their unrealistic beliefs on to the world hoping to mute out death. With time the neurosis sinks in so far they become subtley paranoid and grow bitter with the world and those people that do not share in their mindset.

A doctor would diagnose confusing things in the mind with things in the wider world as insane. Yet the people who do so in the way described make up the majority of the populous in modern society. Together they form a bloody minded passive-aggressive mob worse than any army and completely determined to force their lunatic beliefs on to the whole of society. Their influence can be found in our religion, politics, academics, our work place and just about everywhere imaginable.

In earlier times where man had to do more to simply survive, those who were too self absorbed and neurotic to accept the horrors of death could expect a swift death of their own. The birth of civilization meant a drastic change in this process; where previously the weak would quickly be rooted out of a human population by their own inability to cope with reality, the relative comfort civilizations created through their distance from the natural environment meant weaknesses were able to develop within a human population without nature to keep them in check. Eventually the strong, capable, intelligent types of people who build civilizations are outbred by weaker types, most of whom through cowardice and low biological quality fail to correctly deal with reality. Throughout the history of modern western civilizations successive political and social reforms intended to empower the weak underclasses and tear the strong from their positions of power have, through either stupidity or malice, served to create a situation where most of the power to direct societies course lies within the hands of the unintelligent and scared. Control of our civilization has literally been handed over to the mindless plebeians meant for little more than serfdom and slavery. Today the reasoning pervades that if we level inequity and simply make things more equal we will address the fundamental problems within our societies and can fix absolutely anything. This is false logic symptomatic of the sort of death fearing modern society promotes. Realistically, in order to face up to societies core problems we must also face up to death.

Societies values are rotten, reflecting the mentality of the death fearing sheep who live in imaginary worlds and hope to beat reality by ignoring it. The only sane thing to do is purge ourselves of their values. But how do we identify which values are products of insanity? Further, how do we know when we have found reality?

Nihilism is the process by which we may accomplish this. By destroying our attachment to values and removing from our perception the sense of our own place and well being within the world (in eastern mysticism this is known as discarding the ego) we grant ourselves the ability to see the world in all its nakedness and confront that which frightens most people. All value is only attatched to the world within the human mind and exists solely in that place. Therefore life has no meaning and reality has no moral depth. Now also we can view human behaviour in light of its ability to react to real world stimulus, whether a person retreats into fanciful beliefs without relationship to the evident situation or they actually face up to what is before them. Thus a nihilist is born.

Once we've left behind our values and seen the truth of the world, we then ourselves face the choice of what we do about all we have found. Do we choose to live knowing life has no inherent value or meaning? If so, how do we choose to live? Possessing the sort of honest awareness of reality that the average person lacks, most nihilists would be uncomfortable resuming a life under the illusions they once knew, besides this the choices are: 1. do nothing, remain in a state where nothing attains any value and one is detached from life, 2. rebuild ones values on the basis of what is observable within reality. The latter means to create value that do not deny reality but uphold it as the guider of purpose and reason. This ultimately amounts to pragmatism, acting upon reality before internal dogma valuing that which is effective and healthy above that which is neither. All meaning is created within the individual mind and life has no inherent value; knowing this the nihilist is at advantage where most people fall for superstition and self deception, choosing to live not because they are bound by preconceptions to labour miserably under delusions but because they are fond of life and of being master of their own destiny.

To be truly at peace with the world as much means to accept that death is inevitable as it does mean accepting that creating values is a natural part of human psychology; They can either be a means to face up to reality or to deny it outright. a healthy minded nihilist chooses the former option. When our values stop reflecting reality they can no longer help us effectively deal with anything. Reality has a terrible habit of not caring what people feel about it and doing whatever it likes regardless. A society that has lost touch with reality has no way of effectively guarding itself against harm or dealing with trouble and is therefore never far away from disaster.

Article Source: http://www.content.onlypunjab.com

Irish Nihilism Society website - www.anus.com/tribes/ins

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