Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread # 125
Neo Nihilism

1/ Before New Zealand, I had written a thread about nihilism which began like this:
“There are lots of toxic males out there, spraying away: Trump, Gaetz, Beck, the Duck guy, Rush, Jerry Falwell, Mike Huckabee, Hannity ...

2/ “..these guys rejoice in contempt, their edge is never tender, they know what’s wrong with everyone else, and nothing, of course, is wrong with them. When Dante first saw the population of hell, he lamented: “So many! I had not known death had undone so many.”...

3/ Then the weaponized super-white boy in New Zealand struck. Let’s take another look at nihilism, and try to understand how it has surfaced in our time.

4/ As a 19th century movement, nihilism -- the belief in nothing, the denial of meaning itself -- surfaced in Russia, was experienced briefly by Tolstoy and pondered at great depth by Dostoevsky.

5/ For both of these great souls, as well as many others, the pervasive and absurd injustice of Czarist Russia, as well as the total complicity of the nation’s religion in the misrule of the Czars, formed the background of their nihilism.

6/ Tolstoy entered a period of great despair as he contemplated the annihilation of death. Despite his wealth and fame and family, he saw only nothingness ahead. His family removed ropes and razors from the home. His was the conversion of a truly desperate man.

7/ Interestingly, Tolstoy’s conversion was spurred by the call of Jesus to a life of nonviolence. Jesus’ call -- to turn the other cheek, to love my enemy, to extend forgiveness 70 times 7 -- seemed to this genius to be pure revelation, utterly the Word of God.

8/ After Jesus, that word of nonviolence lay inert for centuries, when Francis picked it up. It passed to and flourished under George Fox, then leaped to Thoreau and Ruskin and then to Tolstoy, who passed it to Gandhi, Gandhi to King, King to Barber.

9/ The word about nonviolence always involves healing the violence within so that you can then walk nonviolence out into the street rather than inflicting injustice on others. That inner division, that (usually male) tear in the soul, was the special territory of Dostoevsky.

10/ He named the young and idealistic murderer in his novel “Crime and Punishment”, Raskolnikov, a name that refers to something torn, or divided. The name comes from the same root (“sk”) that gives us,in our language, “scissors” “schism” and even “shit.” That which is separated.

11/ Dostoevsky observed in others, and explored within himself, what he called the Underground -- the massive, hidden, energy of death surfacing in his own addictions. He was interested in the divided self because he was seeking integrity.

12/ Dostoevsky did not get there until near his death when, in his final novel, “The Brothers Karamazov”, in the 19th century’s most daring scene, he brings in the figure of Christ to confront the impossibly divided Grand Inquisitor.

13/ It's now >150 years, & we are in Trump’s America. So what does all this Russian insight have to do with us? Both the US & Russia just now share a sense of diminishment. The communist dream has ended for them, & the limitless expansion of wealth & influence is ending for us.

14/ In both lands the default move was to replace cooperative decision-making with the strong, greedy, solitary male.

15/ And in both lands that man is a man dominated by what Dostoevsky called the interior Underground. Trump, Putin, Un, et al try to resolve their inner division by conceding honor to greed.

16/ Beyond and below them, though, lies another, yet more horrid phenomenon -- a new, manufactured version of the divided self...

17/ From the troll farms in St. Petersburg to the hackers in China to the warped boys in their apartments across our own land, the dividing of young male brains proceeds.

18/ We are being warned about this by the great @LincolnsBible and we need to pay heed. Behind this effort to arouse the hatreds and nurse the grievances of men already on the verge of spiritual despair lurk powerful forces happy to weaponize their rising internal violence.

19/ We can see the propaganda machines of neo-nationalists - here in the US, the depraved Fox network forms much of the background noise that opens impressionable, poorly-educated minds to new hatreds. What’s behind Fox? The endless, pointless, nihilistic greed of Rupert Murdoch.

20/ We can see -- indeed we cannot hide from -- the racist and nationalist bilge coming from the White House. What’s behind that? The endless, pointless, nihilistic greed of Donald Trump.

21/ You and I can see the monsters of Greed -- the Mercers and the Kochs -- who have captured the GOP and sent warped souls into the government to do their bidding.

22/ We can see, too, the utterly Trumped enemies of God who run great pseudo Christian broadcasts and “ministries”, urging on their people’s greed as they idolize the dishonest nihilist in the White House.

23/ What most of us can’t see are the sites, the tweets, the facebook places where fragile minds are violated with obscene conspiracy theories and nazi-level white supremacy.

24/ But when the boys and men who are their acolytes go there, whatever in their mind is already broken becomes venomous. And so the slaughter of the innocents keeps reoccurring, as does the imprisonment of non-white children in the desert.

25/ There is blood on the hands of the GOP, the NRA, the corrupted parts of the white evangelical church and those getting rich by egging on the internet weaponizing machine.

26/ We will need reformations in all these areas as soon as we can replace this wretched administration and their enablers.

27/ Meanwhile, let each of us attend to our own underground, finding that sanctuary that helps restore our minds and souls, and join in with what the great Rev. Dr. Barber calls the moral revival of our land.

28/ We live at the moral nadir of our country’s history. But I can sense the Spirit moving.