VANITAS

Backfire

Anyone who lives a life that deviates a substantial amount from what is declared as standard or normal behaviour or lifestyle, is bound to get some backfire for that at some point. Solitude, loneliness, irrational or erratic behaviour, over-principal behaviour, loss of perspective, paranoia, emotional instability, or just your regular plain insanity (not just the non-standard or abnormal behaviour, since that's relative and highly subjective, but schyzophrenia, depression, bipolarity and so on).

This is something SocioNihilism thoroughly tries to avoid, how inevitable it may be. The more serious one gets involved with nihilism, the more dislodged he becomes from humanity, society and morality. There aren't many things left to hold him back, to stop him, no more conscience to help him make judgements. Left alone to his intelligence and fears to decide further on.

The intelligence and fear factors are there to make us cope with our distance from the majority of human standards. They are there to abstain us from suicide, misanthropy, anarchy, fascism, self-destruction; we are born social human beings, but raised moral slaves, know your enemy. Fail to do so, and you achieve nothing.

Some examples:

- Dead (old Mayhem) committed suicide with a shotgun (and allegedly tried cutting himself with a knife, although the band members who found him might have had something to do with that. that and the fact that it was physically impossible to be in the position he was found dead in), he felt so isolated from humanity that he actually thought he wasn't human (the lyrics he wrote are a good reference, Life Eternal being my personal favourite), and saw no use in keeping on living this human life he had no connection with.

- Kanwulf of Nargaroth, one of the most massive muppets metal must have known, often declared how hard his life is, poor little misunderstood German kid (sorry, I feel uncapable of raising respect for a git like that, he may make good melancholic raw black metal though). He blames it on his misanthropic nature; he loathes humanity so bad that it's hard for him to struggle his way through life. Funny how he's barely not misanthropic enough so he can make albums for those filthy humans, organize gigs and gain money off them, find a wife and make statements in magazines just how misanthropic he is and how well it's personified in his next album... Git.

- Here in Belgium we have a lot of people with dreadlocks, expensive rags and a dog who looks better than its owner, hoping for anarchy and the destruction of all authority. I wonder who'll pay for their dole or who will protect them when they're getting mugged for their dog's collar once all authority is gone; apparently none of them has ever thought about it thoroughly enough to come up with a decent alternative, as long as they can moan and complain.

-  Lovely, how some people think that the solution to mental slaughter obviously is the genocide of some specific population, who obviously deliberately have been oppressing them and their thoughts for their own gain. It's a good sign of persistence (and stupidity)to be convinced of something that's been disproven so many times.

- Fight or flight. When people choose to flight because they can't cope with reality, they often literally try to fly away. Marihuana, LSD, MDMA, opiates, cocaine, alcohol,... They don't change reality, they distort the way you see it. Oh, and they fuck up your body as well, I'm not too sure, but I heard something about it, or read it in some tabloid, but it might just be a rumor though. Just get wasted enough and you'll see.


Whether you escape life by ending it, by avoiding it, by striving for extreme socio-political goals or by distorting it: you change nothing, you gain nothing, the trouble you avoid is still the same when you get back.
Pity that these countermeasures screw you up more than they do you good at all, if you get back from them at all.


Fire Back                                                                                                                                             top

I'm getting off-topic a bit. In any case, the feeling that you need to make any of the aforementioned countermeasures as to deal with daily life trouble, are merely consequences of atypical thought, not necessarily nihilist in nature though. But these are consequences you can control, you can make a choice whether or not to go through with them.

Distance from society, humanity and morality also has more physical consequences, which you only notice later on. When the damage is done.

I've noticably been becoming more rude (one could say assertive, but I'm tending more to the aggressive side a bit) towards people who fuck me over the past few years. I used to try and be empathic, which is nice and all, but to be honest, I'm past caring. I'm past wasting time on thinking whether I fucked someone over or not; I never believed in the God of Guilt to be waiting in the sky when I die, to look me over and decided whether I was a good boy or not. Luckily I'm aware that I'm becoming a prick, so I have the opportunity to decide whether I want to carry on with it or not.

Maybe just turn it up a notch. Or three.
There's only one limit: I never want to treat people in a way that I don't wish to be treated myself. Ever. So when I fuck people over, they just had it coming one day or another.


I've been through my share of shit, most of which was self-inflicted; I've had my share of escapism and extremism. No doubt there is still plenty to come as well. For the past few months, I've been experiencing the physical consequences of my actions, most of them having to do with communication, hearing and speech.

I don't feel like going into detail. Well, I did, but I erased it, I couldn't avoid sounding moaning and pitiful, which I'm not. I've made my decisions, and now it's time for me to suffer the consequences.

I have learned, though, how immensely important it is to communicate, discuss and read. Train rethorics, vocabulary, speech, intellect, knowledge, interaction, perception, vision, hearing (not wisdom!!!). Knowledge and skills are the keys to intelligence and fearlessness; they teach you how to avoid Mr. Cockup. Not that cockups are so bad, you learn a lot of them, but still.


Life, Time, Death

The fatalist in me brings a sombre conclusion yet again.

SocioNihil.com seeks a constructive solution to the consequences of atypical thinking, a balance between the (post)modern good and evil; not every quest ends in success.

There is nothing that wards me from reaching insanity or death before I achieve my goal, which is exactly why there isn't a very clear goal or idea at all. In the end, it's all pointless anyhow, every lesson I'll have learned will be too late, as is common with humans.
Whenever you learn something new, you're too late, you should have learned it before. If not, if there was no event leading to you learning that lesson, then there was no need to learn it at all.

Hence, either we learn nothing, or we learn it too late. Besides, even if the lesson was forcefed before the event occurred when the lesson learned would be needed, I doubt it'd be of much use. Mankind never was too good at intelligence preemptive intelligence.

Fact is, there's nothing we can do about the pointlessness of all this, but we can change our way of dealing with it. So I take the pain, try to see through escapist and extremist behviour, force myself to think through every possible situation and outcome yet again, most likely fucking up whatever got minced in my head even more.

It's the after-taste that keeps me going. Realizing that I'm in control, taking every chance I got, considering the limits of my intelligence, fears and skills.

Die free, or at least free of regret. That's good enough for me.


Surt                                                                                                                                                  top
31-07-08