In 1987 I read Alan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”. It was a a complex book but what I remember are two points that he made. First, kids were showing up at the University of Chicago with no background at all in thinking deep thoughts, questions about good and evil, what makes a good life, how to live a meaningful life, what’s right and wrong? These kinds of questions used to present themselves to earlier generations through religion, reading good literature, philosophy, etc. What he saw was kids believing that right and wrong were relative, that there was no right and wrong. But they were wrong. There are things that are right and wrong. Not everything is subjective and arbitrary.
He then expanded that idea into the Germans and Nietzsche’s Death of God famous quote and his warning that without a God, without actual right and wrong the world could collapse into nihilism, the belief that life is meaningless, truth could not be known, and the world would spiral into ever greater violence and annihilation. And, indeed, with the rise of Nazism that is exactly what the Germans did, and also did the Fascist Mussolini Italians and Fascist Franco Spanish.
So, the killing of extremist provocateur, Charlie Kirk? It appears that the killer was a neo-Nazi Groyper, a young man, among millions of young men, whose minds have been warped on social media into believing that life isn’t worth living, it is all just a big joke, and they are dedicated to creating chaos, destruction. It appears they are lost inside the deranged void of nihilism. He saw Kirk as a fraud. And he killed him as a joke, since all of life is just a big meaningless joke, in order to cause pain just to see the pain, in order to make his nihilistic social media world laugh, and maybe that’s all it was. Just show up a fake, and make his world laugh.
I am old, liberal, and am not familiar with the despairs and coping strategies of young men lost in nihilism. To me the question was whether he was a right wing nut or a left wing nut. But maybe he’s just a violent nihilistic troll.
This is a shock to me. Hoping that this isn’t our future. It did not work out well for the Germans, nor the world.
Although there are determined people wanting more destruction, I choose to believe in the Better Angels of our natures. I choose to believe we will emerge from these terrible mistakes and renew ourselves.
