[This is Paul Cudenec’s contribution to Nevermore’s Against the Rising Tide of Nihilism series and he reads it here]

Many years ago I penned a (never-published) novel entitled The Extremist, which recounted the adventures of an angry and disillusioned lad from the London suburbs who joined an openly nihilist political organisation.

He soon discovered that there was nothing that this group (the Nihilist Bloc, if I remember correctly) hated more than anarchists, with their absurdly positive view of human nature.

And it particularly objected to the famed punk group the Sex Pistols because while they exhorted their fans to “get pissed, destroy” – which was obviously an admirably nihilist sentiment – they were misdirecting people to the enemy camp by calling the song “Anarchy in the UK”.

Today I would say that there definitely are, and have been, anarchists whose worldview and actions are nihilistic.

But nihilism represents pretty much the opposite of my own kind of anarchism, which I often call organic radicalism in order to avoid confusion with those false friends.

The nihilistic conviction that life is meaningless is, I would say, at the core of our contemporary social dis-ease.

It opens the door for people to base their entire existence on nothing but immediate gratification of one kind or another, to prioritise personal comfort and convenience over everything else.

For me, people living this way have stopped well short of becoming what adult human beings are supposed to be.

They have barely progressed beyond the stage of a baby, whose life is simply about clinging to its parents and hoping it will be fed, cleaned, carried around and cared for until it can stand on its own two feet.

The nihilist denial of the validity of moral values is likewise in stark contrast to my own position.

Not only do I believe that we each have a duty to live according to a strong sense of morality, but I think we are born with those values, that they are innate to the human mind.

This is why we do not need artificial, top-down books of rules and laws to impose “order” on our communities.

Cooperation and mutual aid come naturally to us and, left to our own devices, we would live more or less harmoniously, most of the time.

It is the unnatural corruption of a nihilistic society which stops people from following their inner moral compass.

When society as a whole is built on the negation of morality, why should individuals feel obliged to act morally?

Indeed, living one’s life according to moral values is, at the very least, an impediment to achieving status and success in this debased world and can even place one in the firing line of a system whose rules and laws are largely aimed at defending its own immoral actions from scrutiny and challenge.

Somebody standing up for morality is recast as an extremist, a fanatic, a spreader of disinformation or misinformation, a fomenter of “hate” against those acting immorally and a danger to (immoral and nihilistic) society.

I would argue that the nihilistic rejection of both meaning and morality represents a denial of life itself; it is vitaphobic.

It blocks any possible understanding of the individual’s role as part of a multi-layered living organism – family, community, species, nature, cosmos.

It therefore prevents people from acting on that belonging and their knowledge of that belonging.

It cuts an individual off from who he or she really is and reduces them to a little blind worm squirming around in a dark pit of nothingness.

Nihilism is the negation of all that is best in us and all that our species could, one day, become.

It is the life-denying creed of satanic modernity.