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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 02 Jun 2020

Taken: 02 Jun 2020

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Excerpt •
By the Grace of Guile •
Author •
Loyal Rue •
Page 278 •

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . Like geese, we humans come into the world prepared to follow the authority of the first thing that moves. We are predisposed to assimilate the memes of the myth presented to us by our culture without bothering for a justification. The normal condition of social existence is to relax one’s intellectual defenses under presumption of truth. Under normal circumstances nihilism will appear just plain irrelevant. But if the myth of a culture has reached the limits of its adaptiveness, then we may expect hypocrisies and incongruities to become increasingly evident, and as this happens the skeptics will have their audience.

This is how we should understand the emergent nihilism of the past two centuries. It tells us that Western culture as we have known it may well be coming to its last stop. Things have changed, so that the old eternal truths no longer ring true. Not that they ever were absolutely true, of course, but now our defenses are up and the presumption of truth has vanished, enabling us to see them for what they are: contingent caricatures masquerading as universal truths -- that is, lies. Now under the influence of nihilism, the lies have been detected. Their designs no longer defeat our powers of perception; they are transparent. Now the only truth we are unable to deconstruct is the truth of nihilism. But even if we could deconstruct nihilism, doing so would hardly save us from amythia. The response to contemporary nihilism is not to debunk it but to depose it, to render to contemporary nihilism is not to debunk it but to depose it, to render it uninteresting and besides the point, to resubmerge it to the rightful place as an intellectual undercurrent. Nihilism is not here to stay. It may be true enough but its truth is maladaptive. It is here, however, to condemn our worn myths and to challenge us to replace them, and to displace it, with an adaptive illusion, a noble lie. ~ Page 278
4 years ago. Edited 4 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
By The Grace of Guile
8 months ago.

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