Category Archives: Nihilism

To the editor: President Trump cited nationalism as his primary reason for withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Accord. (The clearest evidence yet that Trump is turning the U.S. into a force for bad in the world, editorial, June 1)

Nationalists are proud of their country and have a positive view of their future, although at some times badly skewed. I don't see any pride or positive energy coming from the Trump camp.

Instead, I would describe his action as one of nihilism, based on the historical definition of it is as the doctrine of an extreme Russian revolutionary party which found nothing to approve of in the established social order. The current attitude of Trump supporters is nothing more than tribal solipsism tinged with incoherence and unabashed greed.

Trump cant start to move the United States out of the Paris deal until 2019. A lot can happen between now and then, and given the pace of events since Trump was elected, it probably will.

Barbara Snider, Huntington Beach

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To the editor: Thirty years ago, the international community understood the grave danger of ozone depletion and came together to sign the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Through this multinational effort, nations showed the benefit of working together for the common good and for the well-being of each nation in a globalized world.

As a result of this cooperation, the ozone layer over Antarctica has started to recover.

This spirit of cooperation was lost the moment Trump set our nation and the world on a backward course. Who would have imagined that 1987 would have been a more enlightened time than 2017?

Linda Shahinian, Culver City

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To the editor: Europe and China are taking the lead on climate change. Since when did either of those two deserve to be a standard of moral authority?

I love Europe and have been there at least 30 times. But over the last 100-plus years, that continent has given us two world wars and the toxic trilogy of fascism, communism, and socialism, causing governments around the world to kill millions of their own people and impoverish even more. China has a similar moral history.

To be fair, Africa and the Middle East have also produced horrific states, but I really dont care if Uganda supports the Paris Accord.

David Goodwin, Los Angeles

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To the editor: In the early 1970s, when I was in college, a friend and I spent a summer traveling throughout Europe and Israel. Because the United States was viewed poorly in light of the Vietnam War, we were advised to downplay the fact that we were Americans and pretend that we were actually Canadian.

Now, because of Trumps behavior (specifically his abysmal decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord), it is once again being suggested that while traveling abroad we would save ourselves a significant amount of ridicule if we laid low as Americans.

While most of us are unable to leave our current lives and become Canadians, it might be appropriate to, at least while abroad, pretend we are.

David Esquith, Northridge

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To the editor: A note to our friends and allies worldwide:

Please realize that the majority of Americans do not support abandoning the Paris agreement, reducing our support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, buddying up to Russia, verbally bullying our closest friends, canceling international trade agreements, building a border wall or banning people from certain Muslim-majority countries.

Only Trump and the most conservative people in his party are for this. Unfortunately, they are currently in control of our government.

We are as aghast as you are. In a few short years, Trump and his co-conspirators will be gone and this nightmare will be over. Please bear with us until we are able to return to normalcy and rejoin the international community in a spirit of universal cooperation.

Steven Levine, Mill Valley, Calif.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook

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Withdrawing from the Paris Accord: Trump is behaving like a nihilist, not a nationalist - Los Angeles Times

Its hard to find a less likely cultural rallying point than Adult Swims Rick and Morty, the weird, bleak, semi-psychedelic animated show about a misanthropic scientist and his below-average grandson whose world-inverting adventures tend to have an odd tinge of nihilism. But its the nihilism that makes the show such a relief to watch.

Rick and Morty is often horrifyingly violent, and its family dynamics are a defiantly unpleasant reversal of the classic will-they-or-wont-they romantic tension: Instead, we root for characters to get divorced for their sakes and for their children. Thematically, suicide looms large.

And yet the show is not just a cult hit, but an astonishing financial success. Among young men, the show washigher-rated than anything running on broadcast TV during its first season. As the network begins its marketing push toward a third season, set for later this summer, the series has quietly become a big-enough deal that there is atraveling merch van shaped like Ricks body touring the country, selling swag that fanswait in line for hours to buy.

There are a lot of answers, none of them particularly satisfying, to the question of what makes a hit, but as so much in the world goes so wrong so quickly, a lot of previously good jokes seem to have expired, or retained only nostalgia value. Rick and Morty, with its queasy blend of high-minded brutality and unusual kindness, is something new.

The show is the work of Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland, who often use old sci-fi cliches forced into different shapes to bizarre and hypnotic effect. Harmons casual mastery of the sitcom formula was a compelling reason to watch his under-loved live-action sitcom Community; Roiland is something between a protg and a partner on Rick and Morty, having developed the title characters, both of whom he voices, in Harmons digital TV workshop, Channel 101.

At full wattage, the showviciously smashes the world only to see it restored to its old, troubled state in some unsettling way, by hopping into a dimension where our heroes doppelgngers have just died in a grisly accident, or having nigh-omniscient house pets abandon their plans to enslave humanity for fear of becoming too much like us.

But for a show with a nonzero number of alien testicle monsters, the characters in Rick and Morty respond to unknowable cosmic tragedy in recognizable, even existential ways, sometimes with heartbreaking honesty. WHAT IS MY PURPOSE? asks a robot Rick invents to pass him some butter. You pass butter, Rick replies. The robot looks at its hands and finally sees them for what they are: butter passers. OH MY GOD, it replies. Rick and Mortys dilemmas are hilarious and absurd, but its characters desperation is real, and that may help explain its appeal to a demographic that barely even haveTVs anymore.

Goldman Sachs christened millennials the renter generation in a recent report, observing that theyre simply not buying houses, cars, or durable goods such as refrigerators and washing machines at the rates their parents did. Since the recession, the median wage for every industry except health care, with its increasing demand from aging boomers, has fallen for people 34 and under. This is another reason its so remarkable to see a show on basic cable attract millennials: Far fewer of them subscribe to cable at all.

Greed has destroyed the [cable] value proposition, wrote industry analyst Rich Greenfield in a research note last week. The target demo for Rick and Morty thinks twice about buying a TV, let alone a Time Warner subscription.

This financial trend is actually visible within Rick and Morty episodes. Young people avoid ads, so companies trying to reach them often use product placement, and brands that cant sell to young people simply abandon them (try to find a Lexus ad for people under 40). Thus, product placement in Rick and Morty is a handy index of brands that are OK with poor people: Wheat Thins, Cold Stone Creamery, Shoneys, McDonalds. No Whirlpool, no Infiniti, little financial services or real estate. Thats stuff for people who arent afraid of living under a bridge, and who dont need an inoculation of despair with their dinnertime half-hour comedy.

When Rick tells his daughter that emotionally speaking, honey, Shoneys is my home, were not just laughing at Rick; were laughing at Shoneys, too. Who could be at home, emotionally speaking, in a restaurant you go to when Applebees is closed due to flood damage? A lot of us, actually.

A few weeks ago, Adult Swim debuted one episode of season 3 on April Fools Day as a sort of anti-prank. The internet loved jokes about a discontinued McDonalds menu item (yay,brand synergy) but in fact the shows punchline was that Rick collapses the interstellar economy by hacking into the Galactic Federations central servers, recalling the financial crisis, which presumably means more jobs in food service on an interstellar level.

Tragedy plus time equals comedy, but if you dont have time, light-years will do.

Though Rick is the shows omniscient guru, its Morty who puts it best, when he tries to explain to his sister that he and Rick managed to destroy their entire universe with a botched love potion and had to hide out in hers because her Rick and Morty had just died. The moral?

Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybodys gonna die, he tells her. Come watch TV.

Follow Sam Thielman onTwitter

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Rick and Morty is a TV powerhouse because millennials are broke ... - VICE News

In an article written for theAtlantic, James Fallows compares the current Administrations Russia scandal with Watergate, and provides reasons for his conclusion that this one is actually worse.

Worse for and about the president. Worse for the overall national interest. Worse in what it suggests about the American democratic systems ability to defend itself.

Fallows begins by deconstructing the adage that the coverup is always worse than the crime; as he points out, whatNixon and his allies were trying to do falls under the category of dirty tricks. It was a bungled effort to find incriminating or embarrassing information about his political enemies, and the adage held: the crime really wasnt as bad as the subsequent illegal efforts to cover it up.

And what is alleged this time? Nothing less than attacks by an authoritarian foreign government on the fundamentals of American democracy, by interfering with an electionand doing so as part of a larger strategy that included parallel interference in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and elsewhere. At worst, such efforts might actually have changed the election results. At least, they were meant to destroy trust in democracy. Not much of this is fully understood or proven, but the potential stakes are incomparably greater than what happened during Watergate, crime and cover-up alike.

Fallows enumerates other differences:As he points out, even in his stonewalling, Nixon paid lip service to the concepts of due process and check and balances. As I have previously posted, to the extent Trump even understands those concepts, he is contemptuous of them.

Nixonwas paranoid, resentful, bigoted, and a crook. But as Fallows reminds us, he was also deeply knowledgeable, strategically adept and publicly disciplined. Trumpwell, supply your own descriptors; Fallows is more reserved than I would be, settling for impulsive,ignorantand uncontrollable.

Most troubling, however, arent the differences between these two deeply flawed men. As Fallows notes, the social and political contexts within which they rose to power are dramatically different.

When Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox,

Within the space of a few hours, three senior officialsRichardson, Ruckelshaus, and Coxhad all made a choice of principle over position, and resigned or been fired rather than comply with orders they considered illegitimate. Their example shines nearly half a century later because such a choice remains so rare.

The Republicans of the Watergate era stuck with Richard Nixon as long as they could, but they acted all along as if larger principles were at stake

On the merits, this eras Republican president has done far more to justify investigation than Richard Nixon did. Yet this eras Republican senators and members of congress have, cravenly, done far less. A few have grumbled about concerns and so on, but they have stuck with Trump where it counts, in votes, and since Comeys firing they have been stunning in their silence.

Charlie Sykes, who formerly hosted a conservative radio call-in show, recently summed up the reasons for that silence, and the differences between then and now.

If there was one principle that used to unite conservatives, it was respect for the rule of law. Not long ago, conservatives would have been horrified at wholesale violations of the norms and traditions of our political system, and would have been appalled by a president who showed overt contempt for the separation of powers.

Sykes gives a number of examples supporting his thesis that conservatism is being eclipsed by a visceral tribalism: Loathing those who loathe the president. Rabid anti-anti-Trumpism. Rooting for ones team, not ones principles. As he concludes,

As the right doubles down on anti-anti-Trumpism, it will find itself goaded into defending and rationalizing ever more outrageous conduct just as long as it annoys CNN and the left.

In many ways anti-anti-Trumpism mirrors Donald Trump himself, because at its core there are no fixed values, no respect for constitutional government or ideas of personal character, only a free-floating nihilism cloaked in insult, mockery and bombast.

Needless to say, this is not a form of conservatism that Edmund Burke, or even Barry Goldwater, would have recognized.

Conservative political philosophy has been replaced with racist and classist resentments. Donald Trump is President because he is very good at exploiting those resentments. In that sense, and that sense only, he has channelledand perfectedNixon.

[Originally published at SheilaKennedy.net on May 29, 2017]

Sheila Kennedy is a former high school English teacher, former lawyer, former Republican, former Executive Director of Indianas ACLU, former columnist for the Indianapolis Star, and former young person. She is currently an (increasingly cranky) old person, a Professor of Law and Public Policy at Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis, and Director of IUPUIs Center for Civic Literacy. She writes for the Indianapolis Business Journal, PA Times, and the Indiana Word, and blogs at http://www.sheilakennedy.net. For those who are interested in more detail, links to an abbreviated CV and academic publications can be found on her blog, along with links to her books..

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Trump, Nixon, Watergate & Conservative Nihilism - Peacock Panache

Whats most striking about the backlash is not its censoriousness. Yes, the calls for a boycott, the ratting-out of Hopkins to the police for something she said, reminds us of the illiberal age we live in. But Hopkins has had her collar felt for saying much less. As shes found out, slagging off Scottish people or accidentally accusing a food blogger of defacing a monument is enough to see you fall foul of the New Inquisition.

No, whats striking is the profound moral cowardice, and the contempt for ordinary people, that the PC age has fostered. Over the past 24 hours, as information about Abedi has seeped out, commentators have been refusing to make him a martyr, refusing to talk about him these are the people we must remember, they say, retweeting images of the dead.

In any other context, this might have been an admirable thing to do a refusal to give him the status he craved. But thats not what is going on here. If this is supposed to be about the victims, why bother with Hopkins? Why not ignore her, block her, tell her to fuck off? Why waste breath on her? Its because really they are incapable of reckoning with the disturbing questions that Monday night once again raised.

Why have some of those born and raised among us as Abedi was grown to hate us? Why, among a minority of Muslim youth, is this nihilism brewing? And what might we have done to foster it, to cultivate it? These are questions theyd rather not answer. To do so would be to inflame, in their minds, the only hate they really care about the hate of lumpen plebs, the sort of people they imagine lap up Katie Hopkins every tweet.

Hopkins tried to make Manchester all about her. But through the response it generated, it told us more about the mainstream, about the cowards who tell us to treat Islamist terror like a natural disaster, a time only for sympathy and thanking the emergency services; the cowards who would rather shriek at cretinous columnists than reckon with the real hatred in our midst; the cowards who seem to get more exercised by tweets than bombs.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_

For permission to republish spiked articles, please contact Viv Regan.

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Why the Twitterati hates Hopkins more than Abedi - Spiked

Theatrical Review 20th Century Fox; 123 minutes

Director: Ridley Scott

The numerous financial forces that conspired to put Alien: Covenant on thousands and thousands of screens the world over have ensured that theirinvestment will be sold, from the title on down, with more clarity and promise than its predecessor. Whereas 2012s Prometheus was able to get by plenty well through mysterious marketing, a very rare is-it-or-is-it-not play with decades-old iconography, Covenantis being sold, in posters and trailers and TV spots, aseverything youd expect and just about nothing that would really raise any eyebrow. Except, of course, why the nearly octogenarian Ridley Scott, after having the opportunity to go balls-out weird with his flawed, sometimes majestic sci-fi epic, would commit such time and energy to what is, at first glance, clearly a retread.

Then you get a bit deeper into the thing such as, say, actually seeing the movie, which I think counts for a lot and it quickly becomes clear that fans loyal toeither side of thisfranchise can come away happy. (Count yourself as neither? This is so emphatically not the film for you.) Prometheus was sold on the basis of possessingstrands of Aliens DNA, only to pretty unambiguously find itself in that world by the time a creature was cut out of someones stomach. Alien: Covenant is the orchestra following theoverture, and not nearly as much of an apology as even Scotthas already started indicating. Yes, it has the pieces people wanted last time around. Weve got Xenomorphs. Weve got Facehuggers. Weve got bursts from the chest, along with some parts of the body whose injuriesrender aniconic death tame by comparison. Weve got a badass lady on a hulking spaceship. Weve got shady corporate interest. Weve got an untrustworthy robot. Sixth verse, initially same as the first and second and third and fourth and fifth. But those pieces also set upa table-turning: this is an Alien movie in which strands of the Prometheus DNA can be felt at first glance hello again, Michael Fassbender and Guy Pearce, the latter of whom has been freed from the constraints of playing elderly only for that prequel to continue growing in influenceand eventually form a full-scale sequel inside a comfy (albeit very disgusting) recollection. What emerges is an amplification of certain strengths and step-down of specific ambitions, provided you, like I, enjoyed Prometheus as a philosophically hare-brained visual and Fassbender spectacle but were a bit bored by the slimier callbacks.

Scott and returning DPDariusz Wolski are again clearly in heaven photographing this extraterrestrial hell, resulting in a more directorially muscular work than anything hes put forthfor some time. More than a masterful manipulation of colorsand shadows formedby the many light sources (or decided lack thereof) within a given scene, the visual schema at work is most dazzling in its plurality from shot to shot. In lieu of the distracting multi-cam rhythm established throughout Scotts recent reign, which sometimes had a sense of movementcloser to sitcom than cinema, are tightly held compositions, hard lines, and, most welcome, a notable lack of repeated set-ups, which only appear atthe occasional shot-reverse dialogue. Even those would seem to be cut to a faster beat: the movie has masters to serve, but itwants to hit the juicy stuff in a flash.

Though Fassbender, who introduces the films human(-ish) element in two successive scenes, raises the question of why were going back to the well, doubly so when theres twiceas much of him to go around. After a distress call (sound familiar?) brings the colonizing ship Covenant holdingboth couples and thousands of embryos headed towards a new earth to a planet, and after crew members become infected (sound familiar?), we discover that theyve in fact intercepted a beaconfrom the Prometheus, and are soon rescued by David.Alien: Covenantis wisenot to take one second to pretend this malevolent robot has changed his ways in the ten years between films; the fun instead lies in just how far hes since gone and just how far hell soon go in pursuit of

you can probably guess with just a quick refresher of Prometheus narrative turns, though I wont spoil every detail perhaps because the familiar unfurling of creatures and kills makes spoilers something of a moot concept. Ill do even less to talk about a double-entendre-filled encounter between the two androids, except to say that none of Covenants big-scale thrills are staged with the joy contained herein, nor do effects dazzle more thanwhen background, foreground, and respective halves of the screen make it possible. His supporting players are mostly stranded with rote-beyond-rote lines Believe me, I know wheat, intones Oscar nominee Demin Bichir in one stabat characterization the only real survivor, save a dependable Billy Crudup and just-this-side-of-not-comicDanny McBride, being Katherine Waterston. As Daniels (I absolutely had to look thisup), she brings something somewhat new the balance between refresh and Ripley that Noomi Rapaces Elisabeth Shaw (whose return is but one in a line of gross cruelties inflicted upon the human cast) struggled tohitupon.

And, good Lord, what a vile movie Covenant is, even as an ostensible return to form for a consistently vile franchise. Thesemore-or-less-nameless sacks of meat scream, cry, grunt, get subjected to lacerations and burns, are made the subject of post-mortem or, worse, verge-of-post-mortem insert shots, and make so much gooey noise when knocked down for the count. This might be a franchise first (save the rancid Alien: Resurrection) of true misery being visited upon victims, all the more so when the alien creatures are now subject to deft CGI enhancements that turn them moreaggressive than ever. Watching Scotts film might also be a fresh, overdue case for the series place as more horror than sci-fi; it only took an exponential increase for Alien to return to its roots.

Alien: Covenants bargain is good enough: come for the Fassbenders, stay for the nihilism and grotesquerie, and emergewith at least a few questions and curiosities on your mind. (If nothing else, Im delighted at the movies doubling-down on a now-clear trajectory that sci-fis most fearsome creature was created by a sexually ambiguous, for-some-reason-Irish-accented robot.) If Scott does, in fact, begin shooting a new film next year and this franchise is momentarily here to stay, more like this. I might find fault at every other turn, but at least theyre getting something genuine out of me.

Alien: Covenant opens on Friday, May 19.

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Alien: Covenant - The Film Stage (blog)

Ive suffered from severe depression since I was 18. When I was young it was confusing and scary; now I understand the signs and see a pattern.

Theres a nihilistic element in depression. When youre happy, youre suspicious of it. You torpedo your own life. For instance, Id be in a relationship and move 3,000 miles away and not understand why it didnt work out. You dont trust being emotionally close to people so you throw a grenade into your emotional turret; you wreck it.

I go through periods when I wind up in a hospital. I was practically catatonic one time I came out. I just was not well. I was living in an SRO, just a shit hole. When you stop working, you lose everything and when youre in the hospital for three months and youre 38, its harder to pick up the pieces.

Then a gentleman told me about the art room (at Coast Mental Healths resource centre on Seymour Street.) Here, people are really encouraging art; all of a sudden, I was doing something good.

I come here seven days a week. No matter how crappy I feel, I walk here like an automaton. I open the cupboard, take out my paints. Boom. Paint. Boom. Paint. I get rid of everything else and just paint.

Nothing, no medication, has ever done what painting has done as a therapy. Im immersing myself in the vision on canvas and I fall into whatever aesthetic the painting provides. It goes where it wants to go. The thing you start with becomes a secondary element. You pull one thing out and the story is no longer about this, its about this.

If the painting is going well, its the best thing Ive ever done. Youre in the joy. Thats why nothing I do is precious. Painting is the verb, not the noun; its the act of painting, its not the painting. Its the act of doing it, not the end result.

They closed the art room for six months for renovations. It was a horrible time. I was working on an exhibit for Gallery Gachet and I had to paint at home. Id go 36 hours straight but thats not a good thing. With painting, you need the element of reflection. If you dont, you start to crumble. You dont have that editing angle sitting over your head saying Dont do that.

This will sound like hyperbole but the art room may well have saved my life. This space was instrumental in stopping my collapse.

I believe we need to be given a chance but we also have to be responsible. It engenders a sense of worth. Nothing says Im getting better than getting something done."

Transcribed by Martha Perkins following a conversation at Coast Mental Healths resource centre on Seymour Street. You can view his art at leefevans.carbonmade.com. Mental Health Week is May 5 to 11.

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Counteracting the nihilism of depression through painting - Vancouver Courier

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a tremendous achievement.

Not just in its ability to effortlessly blend its systems and design choices in ways that feel like they should have been obvious to developers for years, but in its incredible storytelling which relies more on the density and variety of Hyrule and its people than it does on overproduced cutscenes and dialogue.

The story of Courage and Wisdoms never-ending struggle with Power has always been the centrepiece of Zeldas narrative; a heros journey worthy of Joseph Campbells ridiculous cult of the monomyth. Breath of the Wild doesnt do much to tamper with this formula although it offers some compelling alterations that make Princess Zelda the most formidable and self-reliant she has ever been and placed Ganon at the peak of his menace. Rather, it expands upon established mythos by an insight into Hyrule and its people, the downtrodden populace of a world constantly beset upon by the literal embodiment of calamity. Hyrule should be a world of constant sorrow and depression and yet there is so much hope.

The thing that struck me most about the world that Breath of the Wild takes place in is that all of its citizens seem to be aware of the cross-dimensional struggle between the three aspects of the Triforce throughout time and space. They know there has always been a Ganon, that a hero of time will always rise to oppose him, and that victory for the hero is never assured. One day the hero will fail, calamity Ganon will win, and the world will be destroyed. It is inevitable.

Breath of the Wilds vast, beautiful wilderness filled with signs and wonders is an allegory for the nihilistic futility present in all that is temporal, only its monsters and heroic trials have no tendency towards the symbolic. Hyrule is a place that constantly threatens an untimely death at the hands of some grotesque horror or natural wonder that you are ill-equipped to manage. You could fall to your death or freeze solid in some far-flung tundra, cross the path of a savage Lynel or overextend a trip to the border of Death Mountain; and above it all the threat of Calamity Ganon looms large, ready to swallow the light in yawning darkness should your feet make their carriage too slow.

But then this has all happened before. In another time, another place, the light of courage and wisdom was snuffed out by overwhelming power and yet the hero has returned, reborn each once again.

And thats what I love about Breath of the Wilds lovely cast of background talent. Think about the world they live in. Theyre meagre pawns born into the humdrum sideline of a battle between the fates; a battle which was almost lost a century before; a battle with consequences that have already begun to manifest in the blight of their flora and the corruption of their fauna. These stalwart pedants have lived in the shadow of encroaching oblivion for one hundred years as monsters and titans have roamed their lands, threatening their children for at least a generation. Yet they persist. Even as their princess has levelled ceaseless single combat against the object of their disillusionment they have gone about their day to day, not with somber resignation but, in many cases, with cheerful enthusiasm that borders on child-like ignorance.

Because what else can they do? What can any of us do?

We are born to die. The world that breathes life into our stardust bones will one day take its gift away and leave us in the ground without a thought. The citizens of Hyrule know this better than we because theyve lived with Damocles sword perched high atop their capital for one hundred years. But they still love, they still seek out their lifes great purpose, and arrow girl still just wants to get nocked so, so bad.

We could all learn a thing or two from them. Keep calm. Carry on. Every ending informs the next. Play the game, man. Play the game.

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The Beautiful Nihilism of Breath of the Wild - GameSpew

Imagine if Back to the Future featured Marty McFly as a dense, south-of-80-IQ type and Dr. Emmett Brown as a sociopathic alcoholic. This is Rick and Morty.

Show creator Dan Harmon (creator of Community) and Justin Roiland showcase their acerbic wit in this sci-fi comedy. Every episode veers into absurd, often bleak territory. What started as an attempt to troll a major studio quickly became the one of the most critically acclaimed shows on Adult Swim after only two seasons. How could this dark, cynical, and nihilistic show become so beloved?

It is tempting to dismiss the show as an over-hyped product of post-modern nihilism that caters to the proclivities of a post-modern, post-truth, post-meaning, post-everything audience. Yet beneath the veneer of cynical humor lies a thread of hope. The show is built upon a dramatic tension between meaninglessness and love. In a cruel universerather, multi-versethat has no ultimate meaning, the seemingly sociopathic Rick finds himself gradually expressing deeply human love.

The meaninglessness of life is one of the central themes of Rick and Morty. Throughout the show, the writers remind the viewer how much life seems purposeless. In the episode Meeseeks and Destroy, the titular character explains that, unlike humans, Meeseeks are not born into this world fumbling for meaningExistence is pain for a Meeseeks.

Often, rather than simply skirting the issue, the writers choose to address the meaninglessness of the universe directly. When a love potion gone wrong begins creating mutant freaks in Rick Potion No. 9, Rick and Morty quickly abandon their reality and teleport to another dimension to replace recently deceased versions of themselves. An appalled Morty asks, What about the reality we left behind? To which Rick dismissively answers Dont think about itnow pick up your dead self and come on.

While Morty only feels shock at first, he seems to embrace Ricks philosophy only two episodes later when he tells his sister Summer, Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody is going to die. Come watch TV?

As other writers have noted, the show draws heavily on the work of French philosopher Albert Camus. Unlike existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, who seek to invent their own meaning in life, Camus suggests we cannot find transcendent meaning in life because the unknown will always overwhelm us. As he declared in The Myth of Sisyphus, I dont know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. Instead of fumbling for meaning, it is best for men to open [themselves] to the gentle indifference of the world as Camus terms it in The Stranger.

While the writers of Rick and Morty regularly draw upon Camus absurdism, it would be remiss to suggest the writers want the viewers to agree with Rick. Regularly, the writers remind us that Rick is not a happy man. Ricks seemingly gibberish catchphrase wub a lub a dub dub actually means, I am in great pain. Please help me, reveals episode 11 of season one.

One poignant moment demonstrates the extent of Ricks existential pain. In one season two episode, Rick returns home from a raucous bender with an ex-lover who says she is moving on for good. Upon his return, the perpetually indifferent Rick seems morose, to the point of actively contemplating suicide (by death ray, of course).

The song Do You Feel it? by Chaos Chaos plays during this sequence to drive home the utter despair Rick feels when he faces the seemingly purposelessness of his existence. Do you feel it? / Do you feel that I can see your soul? the singer asks as Rick passes out next to his lab equipment, overcome with grief. The writers evidently do not want to encourage the audience to celebrate Ricks sociopathic tendencies.

If its not Ricks nihilistic propensities, why have audiences found him so endearing? The answer lies in his compelling story arc. Even though Rick seems to be a sociopath, he is gradually discovering how to love and care for people.

After a season of Ricks truly bizarre antics, the show opens the second season with a key character moment. When faced with the choice of saving himself or Morty, Rick chooses to save Morty. In coming to terms with his decision, Rick states, I am okay with this. Be good, Morty. Be better than me. Of course the writers pull the rug out from under the audience only five seconds later and Rick is able to return to back to reality, quickly dismissing the significance of his actions.

However, Ricks moment of altruism is not merely a humorous exception to his sociopathic behavior. At the end of the second season, Rick sacrifices himself again. This time he surrenders the Galactic Federation, which is hunting him and his family for acts of terrorism. Rick negotiates his surrender by ensuring his family [can] have a normal life, while Nine Inch Nails Hurt plays in the background of the scene.

While the season three premiere brings Rick back to his crazed, mad scientist self, the sacrifice he made illustrates two key elements of his character. First, Rick feels as if Everyone I know / Goes away in the end as Trent Raznor puts it in Hurt. Rick knows that he hurts the people he loves and thats not something he wants to do.

Second, Ricks sacrifice demonstrates that he genuinely wants those he cares about to be happy. Such compassion belies his statement in season two, episode ten that being nice is something stupid people do to hedge their bets. Every time Rick defies his own cynical reductionism, he expresses a sense of humanity that undercuts the universes meaninglessness. Despite his decades of spouting dark, multi-dimensional absurdist dogma, Rick would gladly give up his empire of dirt if he could save his family.

Rick and Morty targets an audience that sees itself as smarter than the average idiot. We are the post-everything generation that, despite all of our enlightened musings, has found ourselves adrift in a sea of meaninglessness. Rather than co-opting the nihilism of this age, Rick and Morty cleverly disguises its rather potent criticism of our philosophy by cloaking itself in the veneer of absurdism.

The writers are challenging our comfortably jaundiced view of the world. Camus be d-mned. We want Rick to violate his core beliefs about the gentle indifference of the world. We want him to feel it. We want him to hurtbecause in doing so, he can love his grandkids and be more fully human.

It might take nine more back-and-forth, Szechuan-sauce-fueled seasons of madness to get a fully human Rick. The writers might never give us a fully human Rick. But in the meantime, we can learn from Ricks moments of humanity. Herein lies the essence of the show. Life might make no sense, but we can still demonstrate love by sacrificing to protect our loved ones. And that means something real.

Currently working as a senior research associate for a market research firm, Joshua has spent his career developing various analysis techniques. He graduated from Patrick Henry College with a B.A. in government and will begin his J.D. studies at Stetson Law School in the fall.

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Why 'Rick and Morty' Is Not Just Another Depressing Show - The Federalist

Clarence Pages piece on dystopiabrought to mind thoughts about similarities between nihilism, communism, libertarianism and dystopia.

Upon retirement, I got to reading 19th century Russian literature: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev and others. During the period when these men were active, there was also an active Russian intelligentsia. The intelligentsia were social critics, so to speak.

Some of them developed the political theory we call nihilism. Broadly speaking, the big idea was that the czarist system, serfdom, the church, and all the supporting institutions were oppressive. They all needed to be destroyed root and branch. Only then would the people be able to see how to rebuild a new society, the main feature of which would be minimal government. Some hoped for no government.

What happened in Russia was that communism came along with a much more detailed and developed ideology. Communism, like nihilism, intended to produce a classless society in which all central government would melt away along with the old class system. But before that could happen there would have to be a period during which a benevolent communist government would lead the people out of that outmoded class system and into the governmentless communist paradise. Somehow, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and their successors didn't make this happen.

While reading about all this, it occurred to me this love of the idea of living without a government, or with minimal government, appealed not only to the old time Russian intelligentsia and their successors, but to many in America, namely those who came to call themselves libertarians.

The difference being that here in America it was the rich and, finally, some white middle-class workers who were longing to get rid of government. They saw democratic government, the function of which was to serve all the people, as oppressive.

So our libertarians subscribe to a nihilistic-like movement, as did the old Russian intelligentsia, hoping to crush the government and its attendant institutions in order to make a better life for themselves.

This idea didn't work out for the Russians, and I doubt it will work for the libertarians. They are now crying out that democracy, in its attempt to balance all interests, is, to the contrary, dystopian.

Dennis Beard, Evanston

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The age-old fight against 'oppressive' government - Chicago Tribune

New York Times

America, From Exceptionalism to Nihilism New York Times MASHOBRA, India The world is going America's way, Fareed Zakaria wrote in 2008. Countries are becoming more open, market friendly and democratic. Since the fall of communism, American leaders in politics, business and journalism have ...

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America, From Exceptionalism to Nihilism - New York Times