Ok, I’m trying this for the second time. So I’ve just recently finished reading the book Travels In Nihilon, which I mentioned I was reading a while back and I should have been finished with a while back also but I’ve not been reading very much. Really just for about 15 minutes a day, I need to try and include reading more as part of a new restructured routine I think. Anyway, I said I might have something to say about it so here we are. It’s quite funny how I found out about the book actually, I searched my own blog title up on google to see what would come up one afternoon and there was another site/ blog with a similar title. I wouldn’t recommend it, it was just hipster trash but there was a post about the five books that most influenced the guy and this book was one of them. I don’t remember the others and while I’ve been able to find that blog again I can’t find the specific post about these books. Anyway from the brief description the book seemed quite interesting. It sounded like it would be worthwhile to give it a read given the kind of things that were on my mind at the time, so I found a copy on Amazon and ordered it.

Now “nihilism” is a tricky word, because my understanding of what it means seems to be quite different to the author Alan Sillitoe’s definition. From what I understand it’s essentially a lack of belief, not necessarily religious belief but belief in any kind of worldview that presents a greater meaning or purpose to you. I suppose it’d be more accurate to call that existential nihilism, but this is another great example of my concept of the cultural definition. What might be referred to in academic circles as existential nihilism, is just called nihilism more generally and even by those people as a shorthand. I’m not sure if this idea of mine is my own, or I’ve picked it up from somewhere else without realising. It certainly isn’t a wholly unique idea, and I’m not sure if the term “cultural definition” is the best thing to call it either. It’s funny too because the position is in a sense quite opposed to my usual outlook, I mean you could argue that it’s “democratic” in a way. It doesn’t have to be, I personally haven’t said that either the public consensus on a definition or the “official” definition of a word that would be in the oxford dictionary say is the more “true” version. All I will say is that it seems like most people would say so, after all given enough time the official definition will change or at the very least a second definition will be added to the dictionary.

I would say usually there is more complexity in these official/ older definitions of words and terms as a general rule, and as more and more people have become literate this simplification of language has sped up. Now obviously there are cases where both the cultural definition (or maybe I should call it, consensual definition? or functional definition?) is similarly nuanced and even more so than the older version. It’s not just standalone words even, look at the example that got me started on this tangent. Existential nihilism as an idea, has just become “nihilism” at least according to most people who you’d meet walking around on the street. There’s also moral nihilism, and political nihilism, etc. but those ideas are only covered by the new “nihilism” in so far as a symptom of this existential nihilism that many people feel is very common nowadays and is referred to simply as “nihilism”. Maybe I’m not explaining this very well, what I’m saying is these other nihilisms have all been tied in to one because of this simplification of language and this in turn limits our potential understanding of things. Now those other equally interesting and separate concepts are seen merely as different aspects or facets of the same one thing. Which is not even necessarily something I disagree with, in this particular instance in fact I would actually say I do agree with that to an extent, but the problem is that that’s not just another thing to consider it’s the only way of seeing things for most people, because of all these different ideas being shoved together under the word “nihilism”.

The thing is, the word “nihil” in latin from which the English word nihilism comes just means “nothing”, but we already have a word for that in English which is of course “nothing”. It seems to me there are two kinds of word, there are those that describe something completely material/ physical like a tree or a chair and translate easily, and words that describe things that are more abstract or dare I say metaphysical which of course are much more difficult to translate. Now obviously the word tree or chair is also an idea, the platonically ideal chair is whatever Charlemagne’s throne and a block of ice with a fur blanket on top that an eskimo sits on for supper have in common, and they both are ultimately a flawed but physical example of “chair”. The word exists to help make sense of the physical world, as opposed to a word like say (keeping on topic here) “nihilism” which may affect our behaviour in the material world but is not trying to describe something within it.

What I’m saying is, the word “nihilism” is not the English translation of the word “nihil” from latin. Perhaps when it was used as a component of these other terms it was closer to being so, take the concept of moral nihilism for example. To best explain moral nihilism (or at least what I think it is) I’ll actually go back to the example of the chair. So like a chair, all the real world examples may be flawed but share in common a certain “chair-ness”. Well a rather common view nowadays is moral relativism, which is similar in that according to this perspective there are certain different moral frameworks that exist but have some kind of universal “moral-ness” to them. Moral nihilism in comparison would deny that there is any such “moral-ness” at all. So you see how the evolution happens, or seems to have happened obviously, I’m not an etymologist I’m just an uneducated shut in so don’t take my word for it but you can see how it might have gone. “X nihilism” is generally a rejection of whatever “X-ness” people suggest there is. So the word is more similarly used to the latin “nihil”, “X nothingness” or “nothing X” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Existential nihilism isn’t really something that you can just sum up in a few sentences, but I suppose the general idea isn’t too difficult to understand, it’s in the name after all. Essentially, the idea is that existence has no meaning or anything at all really. We just are, inexplicably, and for no good reason at all really. How strange it is to be anything at all, as Jeff Magnum put it. Now of course, seeing as existence kind of covers.. well everything. It kind of makes sense how this one idea in a way consumed all the others. It’s understandable why people might believe that falling prey to this existential nihilism might lead someone to be distrustful of any kind of authoritative worldview at all. This is why, I think that all of these have come to simply exist together under the umbrella word “nihilism”.

Now, a lot of people (often reactionaries or religious types) who are scared of nihilism taking hold in the public consciousness or even lamenting the fact that it already has in their eyes, will go on to suggest what they think will be the result of it. Generally, you get images of a violent and chaotic world. A place where the people are ruled by fleeting fancies, and immediate urges. Naturally any kind of order or regimentation falls apart, and the idea of working towards a long term goal is an impossible one. Certainly if there’s not a very real and material long term reward for holding off on fully pursuing immediate hedonistic desires. I’ll take the example of this large football stadium I live near to. Now I’ve lived near it for most of my life, close to a decade and a half, and to this day when walking past it it still feels impressive. I mean you have to be there in person to get what I mean, it’s more than just a big building it feels fucking imperial. Especially at night and when it’s all lit up. Whether there’s crowds of people on a game day swarming around it and revealed by it’s looming presence for the tiny creatures they are or on a normal evening when you can really feel almost invincible up on the plateau the thing is built on knowing you’re in a city with millions of people and yet all alone in this huge open expanse.

See the builders who worked on that, a great deal of them probably support a different team or maybe are even foreign workers who don’t care about the sport at all. That’s fine, I’ve never cared about football either, but my point is that these football stadiums are the great monuments of our time. Now it’s certainly preferable to live in a civilisation with the wealth to build big majestic buildings like this at least, but it’s still lamentable that they are no longer built for the higher reasons the great wonders of the past were. Yes, slaves and hired workers were required to build such structures (The Great Pyramid of Giza, The Hagia Sophia, The Taj Mahal, Hadrian’s Mausoleum, and even The Empire State Building) in the past but the difference is that these structures were monuments to the very civilisation that birthed them. The people who own these stadiums today are foreign oligarchs who care nothing for the nation that hosts the thing, or even for the actual game of football in many cases, just like a lot of the builders as I said earlier.

These stadiums (and of course it doesn’t have to be football, in the US it might be baseball or that weird version of rugby where they wear armour, Canada it might be hockey, etc.) are what we might call private sector works. Now of course the private/ public sector dichotomy is a modern idea, and you can’t directly apply it to the past but you can in some sense describe a lot of these older buildings as “public sector” works. I mean sure often emperors and kings funded these projects themselves, but their wealth and the government treasury were often the same thing. Can you even imagine a typical western democratic government decreeing any kind of monument or great building be built today? Of course not, yet people do want that, why is the Trump wall such a huge selling point after all? You can’t have multi generational projects and term limits at the same time. That’s how you really know that nihilism has taken root, when your society has no self confidence, no desire or will to project itself onto the world. When you believe there’s nothing special about your culture to celebrate (with monuments for example), no long term vision, but just a demoralising and ugly day to day pragmatism.

Which finally brings me back to what I was trying to say right at the start, and onto the actual book. Like I said, the author’s definition of nihilism really doesn’t seem to be accurate at all. My understanding of the word is what I have gone through already, basically what would more accurately be called existential nihilism. The author’s definition seems to be describing the symptoms, or more accurately what some people think might be the symptoms. It’s like someone describing a fever as malaria, when you can have a fever just from a bad cold or a bunch of other illnesses. “Nihilism” as it is used in this book really could be substituted instead with the word “chaos”, at least that’s certainly how it seems at first glance. Here’s the premise of the novel. There is this country/ state which is called Nihilon and the government of Nihilon is intent on pursuing “””nihilism””” as a policy. The blurb describes Nihilon as “a little known country, whose life and economy are based on nihilistic principles”. Now how this actually plays out in the book is that the government does all it can to create as much chaos and contradiction as possible in every regard, so there are laws demanding that you never be caught driving sober, and manual labour is seen as women’s work, and so forth.

Now going back to what I was talking about earlier, in a rather ironic way not only is the definition wrong but the use of this wrong definition makes the fictional Nihilon in one sense quite the opposite of a nihilistic nation. The policy of perfectly regimented chaos (as it’s literally referred to at one point in the novel) requires far more self confidence on the part of the ruling elite, represented by the shadowy President Nil, than any of the great and powerful empires of old and even the pathological and idealistic states of the 20th century. Think Best Korea, The Soviet Union or The Third Reich, and Nihilon is just as authoritarian if not more so than any of those places. The level of oversight required to enforce this state of chaos is immense, people’s lives are micromanaged in every way.

Now the book is set a good two decades after this regime has held control, and so naturally people have begun to adapt to the mayhem. The average citizen of Nihilon by the time our characters arrive is a bipolar petty scam artist with a sociopathic disregard for human life. There’s one passage in particular that really illustrates the level of control the government has. One of the characters is on an airplane and chatting to the guy next to him as they’re arriving in Nihilon, so before they even arrive but the airline is owned by the government I believe, and at one point after the stranger says something he shouldn’t a voice barks out at him through a speaker on the back of the chair in front of them telling him to stop. It’s claimed that the voice is President Nil himself, although no one actually knows what he looks like, regardless I think that illustrates the situation quite well. It reminds me of the telescreens from 1984. So throughout my time reading the book this was kind of on the back of my mind, the government isn’t pursuing a policy of nihilism, that’s a contradiction in terms. Not only that, but this is one of the most ideologically single minded regimes imaginable if anything.

It’s not until reflecting after I was finished that I think I really understood what the author was truly trying to express. See the plot of the book is that the main characters are sent to this mysterious country to write a tourist guide for the place, but while there a civil war breaks out between the government and the “forces of law and order”, a rival faction who claim they want to restore those very things. The main plot culminates in this assault by the forces of law and order on a facility in the mountains from where the government of Nihilon planned to send a rocket ship into space with two “lovers” in order to broadcast to the world the first ever example of sex in space. It’s a huge symbolic thing, again reinforcing how much vision this government has, and they’re unable to stop it in time. Nevertheless the forces of law and order still manage to take control, President Nil flees and the daughter of the old president of Damascony (the name of the region before it became Nihilon, also following a civil war a few decades earlier) is made queen.

Now President Nil himself appears only twice in the story, or three times if that voice in the airplane really is him. The first time is already quite a way towards the end, just before the assault on the compound in the mountains, and it is revealed that the whole thing has in fact been orchestrated by him. That’s the twist of the story, or one of them anyway. It’s already revealed earlier on that the guidebook mission was a cover, and that the main characters were unwittingly set up to play a role in the rebellion, but it’s not until this scene right near the end that President Nil is revealed as the actual person behind it. So this is shown to the reader, but the characters themselves don’t meet the man until the very end, the last couple of pages of the book. This scene is as the characters are leaving once and for all.

See after the new regime settles in it quickly becomes apparent that nothing has actually changed, immediately there are a bunch of new equally zany and inane laws passed as the ones from before only this time in the name of honesty and virtue or some similar expression. It really doesn’t come as much surprise, as during the earlier parts of the book it’s made clear that the people fighting for “law and order” and the nihilonian forces are basically indistinguishable. They’re the same feckless idiots and self serving swindlers as every single person in this god forsaken country. The very attack on the compound is emblematic of this, a completely insane event with legions of sportscars smashing against the walls and the queen being carried into battle in a medieval style litter, etc. It slowly becomes clear that this is just a big game to these people, like football teams the one they ended up supporting was arbitrary.

See then it starts to become clear, and as the characters are trying to get the hell out of this now clearly irredeemable shithole they have one last encounter before getting on the boat home. As they are just about to leave, there are explosions in the crowd and the characters dash into the boat for safety. All except one, Benjamin Smith, who is probably the most developed of all the characters in the book and the one with the most ties to Nihilon having fought in the first civil war when the place was still known as Damascony. He sees the man in the crowd, who we the reader know to be President Nil and as he goes to kill him President Nil smiles. Here’s a quote from this last passage of the novel, just as the explosions start to go off. “It was like a volcano erupting, a spectacle which showed Benjamin – though only for a moment – that Nihilon was a country for which nothing could be done, a part of the world that could no more be covered by  guidebook than a jungle could”.

You see, President Nil smiled because it was in this moment that he knew he had achieved his goal at last, and he could die knowing that. He knew that because he saw the realisation in Benjamin’s eyes, that Nihilon had now actually become nihilistic in the true sense. I don’t mean that it had become chaotic, as I thought at first when reading the book the author meant by that word, I mean actually nihilistic. Remember what I said earlier about how some say a similarly orderless and nonsensical civilisation may be a result of a society that falls prey to nihilistic thinking, well President Nil seems to have almost done the reverse. By artificially creating such a world, he’s selected for the people who of course would thrive in it. The civil war was his big gambit, to see if all his hard work had paid off, and he was right. His long term policy it turns out, truly was nihilism after all. The only question really, is why he had such a goal.