QuoteProbably no other society has failed as dismally as the United States in the late 20th century to meet the basic test of any civilization: to enforce simple order and protect the lives and property of its members. History knows of many societies that have succumbed to anarchy when the central government proved unable to control warlords, rebels, and marauding invaders. But anarchy is not quite the problem here.

In the United States today, the government performs many of its functions more or less effectively. The mail is delivered (sometimes); the population, or at least part of it, is counted (sort of); and taxes are collected (you bet). You can accuse the federal leviathan of many things—corruption, incompetence, waste, bureaucratic strangulation—but mere anarchy, the lack of effective government, is not one of them. Yet at the same time, the state does not perform effectively or justly its basic duty of enforcing order and punishing criminals, and in this respect its failures do bring the country, or important parts of it, close to a state of anarchy. But that semblance of anarchy is coupled with many of the characteristics of tyranny, under which innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state. The result is what seems to be the first society in history in which elements of both anarchy and tyranny pertain at the same time and seem to be closely connected with each other and to constitute, more or less, opposite sides of the same coin.

This condition, which in some of my columns I have called "anarcho-tyranny," is essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/view/anarcho-tyranny-u-s-a-7/

QuoteAny group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.
This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

https://jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

QuoteThe tyrant, who is the most unjust of people, is also the unhappiest. The tyrant is constantly overcome by lawless desires which lead him to commit all manner of heinous act. His soul is full of disorder and regret, and is incapable of doing what it truly desires. The life of the political tyrant is even more wretched than that of the private tyrant, first, because the political tyrant is in a better position to feed his desires, and, second, because he is everywhere surrounded and watched by his enemies, and becomes at first their prisoner and at last their victim.

https://neelburton.com/2016/07/26/plato-on-democracy-tyranny-and-the-ideal-state/

QuoteAs social animals, we get our information from others. This includes morality, or a group behavior code based on a sense of value and purpose inherent to humanity.

In contrast, nihilism denies value and purpose and in turn, denies any special role to humanity. Like emotions, value and purpose are human judgments which do not exist in the outside world.

By denying value and purpose, nihilism forces us see physical reality as a mechanical process in which our part is small. When we are walking in winter, falling snow appears to be coming toward us, but in reality we are moving forward as it falls.

Where morality deals with how things appear to us, nihilism addresses reality as a design and encourages us to learn how to adapt to it. Morality is withdrawl from natural selection; nihilism embraces it, and describes the world as a complex machine.

https://www.anus.com/zine/philosophy/

QuoteWhat is the essence of nihilism? The essence of nihilism is this: there is one externality to us all, called reality, and it alone is important.

Humans tend to project their own mental images onto reality itself and mistake those mental images for reality. This occurs because we store our knowledge of the world in thought-objects, which like words or emotions, are memories. We access memories more quickly than reality itself because memory is faster and more efficient.

This leaves us vulnerable to self-deception or deception by others. We tell ourselves this "one tiny cupcake" won't scotch our diets; car salesmen tell us that a jalopy is not a junker, but a do-it-yourself race car adventure.

The underlying reality remains the same. We've just shifted our perceptions of it so that we are thinking of it a different way. While this is easy, and makes us feel better, the nature of reality itself hasn't changed and we will have to face consequences in reality, not in our thought-space.

The same method can mislead us regarding our goals. Savvy operators can shift our thinking from an actual goal to how we our others think, emote, judge, or feel about an outcome. Like the jalopy that becomes a race car, we are suddenly lost in our own minds.

In essence nihilism is a reduction of reality to what it is. We have limitations on our perception, but because with discipline our perception is consistent, we can still use it very effectively to understand our world.

A nihilist does not care about feelings, emotions, judgments or sensations. A nihilist cares about end results, specifically consequences. If I do this act, what will be the result? It is more like lab science than politics or salesmanship.

When we say we are nihilists, that is to say we believe in nothing. Belief is a human construct, and it can be applied to religion, politics, science or anything else where we can be misdirected by our own thought-objects.

Nihilism does not involve any particular path than that. You can be a nihilist and a Christian, if you can derive your notion of God from things you observe in reality. You can be a nihilist and still be a scientist, economist, priest, doctor, warrior, writer and/or disco dancer.

There are many people out there, all of them trivial cowards, who will try to sell you a series of "related" propositions with nihilism. These people are not nihilists, but believers. They believe in their own bottom line and the illusions they sell.

It is better to avoid involvement with such charlatans and instead to meditate on what nihilism delivers: freedom from our own minds. We can observe reality as it is, and both enjoy it and work with more effectively as a result.

https://www.nihil.org/nihilism/nihilism-is-realism

QuoteNihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.

https://iep.utm.edu/nihilism/

QuoteNihilism declines to accept the belief in universal, absolute, and objective forms of values, truths, and communications.

https://www.amerika.org/politics/total-nihilism/

QuoteNihilism brings an extreme skepticism not of the world, but of what humans consider to be the world, which is reality as tokenized into human symbols that represent our fears of conflict, death, and insignificance more than a sane and level-headed depiction of the world.

This extreme skepticism, a type of radical realism, gets us past the insanity that is killing us by making us worship humanist illusions instead of nature and the divine, which are written more in potential than in tangible, material, and symbolic objects.

https://www.o9a.org/2022/09/total-nihilism/

QuoteElena Bardin, 27, was sentenced Thursday to 14 years in prison after a jury convicted her of first-degree sexual abuse and unlawful transaction with a minor for having explicit sexual contact with a 17-year-old boy at the Adair County Juvenile Detention Center, where she taught English, according to Court TV.

Bardin — mother to a five-year-old girl — was also accused of asking the teen to murder her husband, but the jury acquitted her of that charge.

https://nypost.com/2025/11/15/us-news/married-teacher-elena-bardin-sentenced-to-prison-for-sexually-abusing-juvenile-inmate-at-kentucky-detention-center/

QuoteA neighbor across the hall from where the bodies were found noted that the smell of decomposition had been drifting out of the unit "for days."

"It would come in waves, and the maintenance would spray like an air freshener," the neighbor, who also asked not to be identified, recalled.

https://nypost.com/2025/11/13/us-news/mother-and-son-found-face-up-and-mummified-in-nyc-apartment/