Truth is Dead and We have Killed It

An Introduction to "Mihilism"

Not long ago, I wrote about how, in order to prove your Revivalist Catholic bona fides, you had to criticize John Lennon’s song “Imagine”.

You also had to criticize Nietzsche.  Why?  Because of his syphilis?  Because of his moustache?  

No, because Nietzsche was a nihilist who said God was dead.  Except … his point was that we had killed Him; or at least we had killed a concept of Him; or perhaps had killed the real God and put a false idol in His place.

But never mind context.  You can proof-text quite a bit of Nietzsche and make him sound utterly crazy - which is what we did at EWTN for an episode of The Apostle of Common Sense.  This is me as Frederich Nietzsche.  (My moustache is doing all the acting, but try not to notice.) …

Now we Super Catholics hated Nietzsche because we hated nihilism, which is the belief that there really is nothing (the word means “nothing-ism”) - no morality, no truth, no reality, no God - but at least there’s power and will and bullying and pain - lots of consolations for living in a meaningless world of nothingness, you see.  

But the truth is my Super Catholic former friends have all turned out to be nihilists.  They were nihilists in hiding all along.

Not exactly nihilists.  I would call them mihilists.  (The word is not related to the concept of nomenclatural mihilism in biology, by the way). In this case, mihilism is a pun, and a Latin pun at that.  Mihi in Latin means “to me” or “for me”.  Combine “for me” with nihilism: combine selfishness with the rejection of reality and you get mihilism. I deny it and destroy what really exists and burn it all down FOR MY SAKE … mihi + nihilism!  This is a kind of infantile pessimism that simply wants to have tantrums and break things.

As I write, there is one sure fire question to determine if you are dealing with a mihilist, with someone who denies truth and reality for their own advantage, with someone under the sway of the Dictatorship of Relativism. For now that question is, “Who won the 2020 election?”  

But of course it’s worse than that. It’s worse than mere power politics and selfish stupidity. It is antichristian. It is demonic. It is the End of Civilization as we Know It. (Other than that, it’s no big deal.)

Here’s Taylor Stoermer of Johns Hopkins on TikTok, with an edited transcript below for those who would rather read than watch …

… we've got some data points from last night [the Iowa Caucus] that should give us pause. These are entrance polls. One is that - and these are related - one is that 67% of all Trump supporters do not have college education.

And the second point, and it's related is that, two thirds of all Republicans, Iowa Republicans, do not believe that President Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, and 70% of them supported Trump. So that your average Trump supporter does not have a college education and doesn't believe that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.

Now, those two things gave me a little bit of pause because it reminded me of Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. And she's really exploring the rise of and success of Nazism and of Bolshevism, two sides of the same coin as far as she's concerned. What are the building blocks for their success in terms of gaining massive support and support among the masses as opposed to the mob? A key part of that support is reaching out and exploiting people who are uneducated, people who are hungry for simplistic narratives in a confusing world, and who will reach out for things, however absurd, in a kind of escape from reality. And for that the main ingredient is the absence of a basic level of education for you to really understand the world around you.

If you have your copy, if you want to look it up online, it is The Origins of Totalitarianism, Chapter Ten, page 474.  And this is what she writes there:

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist."

This is about making sure that you're reaching out for supporters who have lost the capacity for both experience and thought. And so when you've left the building of reality, then you will believe anything, however absurd, because you will reach for the simplistic narrative. That helps explain a whole bunch of other confusing things - again, no matter how absurd. 

And they don't, in fact, particularly object to being deceived. Because in a sense - and we see this here on TikTok, we see this in my comments; I see them in the comments of others - they hold everybody else's statements to be lies anyway. They'll deny whatever it is that I say. They'll deny whatever it is that you say. That's one of their main tactics. They just sort of take everybody to, in fact, be a manipulator, to be a liar, that there is no truth to be achieved. There are no standards of thought. There is no reality of experience.  Fact versus fiction.

And so this seems to be the Trump voter.  This is based upon data. We know that they are history deniers, right? They do not believe that the 2020 election was legitimately won by President Biden. And they don't have college degrees. Now, this is not a full-throated defense of a college education. I am a big believer in education. And education has emerged as the number one divider in American politics. It's not socioeconomic status. It's education. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to vote Democrat, no matter whether you are an independent or not. (I'm not a Democrat. I'm an Independent.) But the more education you have, the more likely you are to vote Democrat. The less educated you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican.

But the less educated you are, the less likely you are to recognize reality, the difference between fact and fiction, and to have any kind of a standard of thought between what's true and false. So you're willing to believe absurdities and not be terribly bothered about being deceived.

Why? Because you think everybody's lying. And you hear this in Trump's rhetoric.

I am not a political commentator. I am not a political scientist. I'm an historian and I'm a public history practitioner. I think about this in terms of how we prepare our students for a world in which this is increasingly the case, especially as we are expecting our students to be, in a sense, public scholars - to facilitate engagement in ways that inform.

But to do that, we have to understand the challenges.  And one of the major challenges is that there is an assault on information. You can look at Taylor Lorenz, one of Taylor Lorenz's most recent posts, about how difficult it is going into a period in which truth can be manipulated very quickly because people can lie quickly.  They can lie quickly, and the truth cannot catch up with them. That's scary ... because that means that the tools to combat it are simply inadequate to the challenge. That doesn't mean that we can't stand up for that, but that means we need to recognize that the challenge is there.  And we need to reinforce that recognition.

So I think that what we'll see in New Hampshire is going to be similar, because people who essentially are operating outside of the realm of reality - and this is not a criticism; this is an observation - if they are denying, if they are history deniers ... then anything's possible. They will believe things, however absurd. And we have heard absurd things come out of the mouths of these people, and we can no longer afford to just turn on The Daily Show and laugh at them. Because they seem to have turned out in large numbers to vote last night, and I suspect they're going to turn out in large numbers to vote in New Hampshire next week, although that's a primary and not a caucus. And it's a New England primary. It might be different. We've got South Carolina the week after that. But this is what we need to keep an eye out for - and it impacts all of us. And it certainly impacts those of us whose job it is - and whose broader interests lie - in engaging audiences with the truth.

Not just with truth, but with the truth and facts, with this whole explanation. This is what a public historian does, right? We try to help people understand the difference between fact and fiction when it comes to history, when it comes to our past and how we got from then to now. And to make sure that there's also an understanding of difference between true and false, the standards of our thought. But we are increasingly faced with people who are fed fiction and who will believe it, and therefore they're willing to believe anything, because they are looking for simplistic narratives in a confusing world. Then our job is cut out for us.

But I think that we're seeing that in a number of different contexts. We see that in Gaza. We see that in other places. But we have to be willing to recognize it, and we have to be willing to do something about it.

But the bigger challenge that we face is that this is a force that is operating political power today. And I think in order to be able to see where it goes, Hannah Arendt might, unfortunately, um, have an answer for us.

Of course, you can point out that (as in the case of my former Super Catholic friends), some very well-educated people claim to believe some utterly stupid things. But that’s not the point. The point is this.

If God is truth (John 14:6), then in as much as we have killed truth, we can say, with Nietezsche and the other “mihilists”, that we have killed God. “God is dead and we have killed Him. The truth is dead and we have destroyed it.”