Nietzsche's announcement of the "Death of God" now must be followed by an announcement of the "Death of Man" - the destruction of our faith in ourselves and our most basic sense of who we are.
"My claim... is that what is today called 'healthy' represents a lower level than that which under favorable circumstances would be healthy... that we are sick."
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
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Under these circumstances, it should not be surprising that violence rages everywhere: in military invasions and conquests; in the creation of hunger and starvation that could be averted; in the ferocious hatreds that divide different races and religions; in crimes in the streets; in the misery of crowded refugee camps; in the brutality of our institutions for legalized "punishment;" in the corporate exploitation of human beings.
As Paul Levy writes in the forward to Radical Regeneration:
"As if hypnotized, we are rushing as fast as possible toward self-destruction and destruction of the Biosphere. We seem to be suffering from a monomaniacal persistence in error and a stubborn inability to learn from our mistakes. We are acting out our destructive impulses virtually without restraint. We are attacking the continued viability of life on Earth in so many different ways that it seems as if we are determined to make our suicide attempts be successful."
David Michael Levin writes:
"After the first and most glorious phase of modernity, when western cultures broke away from its medieval past and basked in the sun of a healthy self-affirmation, an 'excessive pride,' a cultural narcissism, elevated Man to the position occupied by God... The pathologies of our present time are related to the fact that the being of the Self has adopted the historical form of a monadic ego and totally identified itself with the ego's will to power: a will to master and dominate...
"Humanism and science have increasingly inflated human being[s], while their political economies promoted... all forms of egotism, [and] encouraged our collective fantasies of planetary omnipotence and omniscience."
Kierkegaard posited an early form of nihilism, which he referred to as "leveling," He saw leveling as the process of suppressing individuality to a point where an individual's uniqueness becomes non-existent and nothing meaningful in one's existence can be affirmed.
Heidegger tried to understand nihilism as trying to achieve a victory through the devaluation of the highest values. The effect of this devaluation is, according to Heidegger, is narrowing our focus to "The Will To Power."
Symptoms of nihilism appear in individuals and as sociopolitical and cultural realities. Nihilism includes the conviction that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that humanistic knowledge is impossible.
Nihilism is like a cancer of the spirit. Just as cancer often brings the death of the body, something essential in us dies when we embrace this mindset.
This sickness involves self-annihilation. In addition to creating the destruction of others - it is a will to power with nothing to will in the end but its own desire for death.
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