No, Donny, these men are nihilists

Walter Sobchak famously did not like nihilists.

Sobchack, John Goodman’s eminently quotable character in the Coen brothers’ cult classic film, The Big Lebowski, is furious when he learns the would-be kidnappers he thought were Nazis were, instead, merely nihilists. “Nihilists! F–k me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”

Later, when our motley heroes confront the kidnappers, he reassures his friends, saying, “No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” In Walter’s mind, all nihilists are cowards because they believe in nothing and, therefore, will stand for nothing.

That doesn’t quite turn out to be the case in the movie. The gang of nihilists turns out to be inept and somewhat cowardly. And they’re not wholly consistent in their nihilism, which Walter chastises them for when they complain he’s not being “fair”: “Fair! Who’s the f–king nihilist here?”

But it turns out the nihilists in The Big Lebowski are still dangerous. People without an ethos — people who don’t believe that anything is true or that anything matters — are always dangerous.

Walter at first thought they were dealing with Nazis — with ultra-right-wing extremists, but it turned out he was facing something else. But while that something else may have been very different from ultra-right-wing extremism, that didn’t mean that it was therefore some kind of left-wing extremism. These men were not Communists, or Maoists Donny. Say what you want about the tenets of Maoism, at least it’s an ethos.

It turns out, as I feared, that Walter’s least-favorite people have become headline news because, as he failed to understand, nihilists actually are quite dangerous. People who believe in nothing — or who try to believe in nothing, or who pretend to believe in nothing — are always dangerous. “Nothing matters” doesn’t make some exception for the value of human life. People who believe that nothing matters are always dangerous even though they don’t map neatly onto the right-left ideological spectrum that living in a two-party system with winner-take-all elections tricks us into thinking contains and explains everything.

So for the past couple of days, we’ve watched public officials and law enforcement personnel struggle — and fail — to comprehend the meaningless meaning of the juvenile riddles of online nihilist meme-speak. They’ve approached these ciphers as coded messages that could be coherently de-coded to reveal the killer’s ethos. That’s not going to work here.

This doesn’t mean we need to do a deep dive into the ugly swamp of online nihilism, attempting to understand it by creating or imposing fine distinctions between myriad factions of Groypers and Pepe-the-frog memesters and incels and all the rest in some impossible attempt to make sense of its senselessness.

The senselessness is the point, Donny, these men are nihilists.

The video below from media scholar Cy Canterel — “Blackpill Aesthetics: A Crash Course in Meme Extremism” — is, I think, a helpful short explainer of the general anti-ethos ethos of online nihilism. Canterel’s “builders vs. burners” distinction is particularly helpful (along with the reminder that this doesn’t mean every “builder” ideology is therefore somehow on the same side).

Also helpful is the reminder here that “the medium is the message” is true, even — or especially — when the medium is memes written on bullets that are used to kill.

I appreciate Canterel’s simple, but not easy, conclusion:

The antidote is … to refuse the seduction of entropy as identity. Call the Black Pill what it is: A permission structure for cruelty wearing the mask of sophistication. Then do the unglamorous work of making meaning and belonging where spectacle can’t compete.

For those trying to make sense of this anti-sense, Canterel reminds us: “You’re not parsing a legislative program, you’re reading an attempt to turn reality into a toxic in-joke.”

This theme of the video — nihilism as an anti-community of those “in on the joke” — reminds me of something from The Screwtape Letters.  Screwtape advises the young demon Wormwood to avoid any real jokes and sap the joy out of his target’s life by replacing them with what Screwtape/C.S. Lewis calls “flippancy”:

But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armor-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.