When everything is meaningless, isn't it also meaningless to start a party? Isn't it a performative contradiction to do anything at all – start a party, for instance – when you are a nihilist? Why don't you just kill yourselves, if everything is meaningless? What is a nihilist? Are there different ways of being a nihilist? Are there different currents or wings within NFP? Do you have to be indifferent to everything, because everything is meaningless? You seem very negative and grumpy. Are you? What would you change if you gained political influence? Wouldn't NDP be the correct abbreviation for the Nihilistic Democratic Party? What will you do if you get a candidate elected to a local council or Copenhagen City Council? What will you do if you win an absolute majority? Are you terrorists like the Russian nihilists? What do you think of democracy? Aren't you violating the logical principle of non-contradiction? Isn't nihilism just the same as anarchism? If you rebel in hell to show Lucifer how God felt, doesn't that make you Christians? What is your position on Nietzsche's critique of nihilism? What is your position on Jacob Haugaard?
Yes, it is meaningless. But it is no more meaningless than anything else one might do. Why not start a party, when there is no purpose to one's life anyway?
No. It is only a contradiction if you are a fundamentalist! The fundamentalist performs a puritanical narrowing of what it means to be a nihilist, which amounts to saying that you can only call yourself a socialist if you always gladly share all your beer and your toothbrush with everyone. Or that you can only call yourself a Christian if you are a monk with pure thoughts. The fundamentalist's conception of nihilism makes it impossible to be a nihilist, because every action constitutes a performative contradiction, since it implies that you prefer something and thereby make a value judgement. Even breathing is, for the fundamentalist, to ascribe value to life, and so one can only be a nihilist – in the fundamentalist's view – if one is a vegetable on a ventilator. NFP does not recognise the fundamentalist ban on action. You do not have to be a vegetable to be a nihilist! The nihilist has realised that it is all meaningless anyway. This means the nihilist may do as he pleases, as long as he does not start believing in a purpose behind his actions or harbouring hope that they mean anything.
Why would we? In a meaningless universe, taking one's own life is neither a more nor a less meaningless act than anything else one might do. There is no reason to grant suicide a privileged status among all the meaningless actions available. A nihilist may just as well start a party, smear himself in liver pâté or go to work as commit suicide; it makes no difference! In fact suicide seems a little stupid, when one is free to do as one pleases, since it is all meaningless anyway. Even on a fundamentalist conception of nihilism (see above), suicide is no more nihilistic than anything else. Suicide, too, contains a performative value judgement about life; a negative one, but a value judgement all the same. We humans live in an absurd universe in which death is the certain conclusion. We are condemned to death – not suicides. We refuse to do the universe's dirty work as its executioner; we will not be its useful idiots!
A nihilist is a person who has realised that nothing is valid and everything is meaningless. Any attempt to state a "nihilist essence", or a definition with necessary and sufficient conditions, will therefore fall to the nihilist's merciless analysis. There is thus no unambiguous definition or description of the "true nihilist" that could constitute a normative ideal against which one's degree of nihilism might be measured.
Yes, there are different types of nihilist. Nihilism has had different faces, forms and formulations through the ages, and no single formulation can claim a patent on expressing "genuine nihilism". World literature, for instance, offers several candidates who have been canonised as nihilists: Camus' description of the absurd man in "The Myth of Sisyphus" is a description of a nihilist: "The absurd man glimpses a burning and ice-cold, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given; beyond it lies chaos and darkness. He can decide to live in such a universe and draw from it his strength, his courage to deny hope and his will to bear witness to the possibility of living without consolation." Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky's novel "The Brothers Karamazov" is another canonical example of a nihilist (canonised by Camus, among others, in "The Rebel"). Ivan's nihilism consists in the refusal of salvation. Even if there were a God and a rational metaphysical world order that gave the suffering of innocent children a higher purpose, Ivan would decline salvation. The ticket to heaven is too expensive when it has to be bought with the tears of suffering children. Ivan's nihilism does not consist in indifference, but in his rage against – and his no to – a world he will not accept. Ole Jastrau in Tom Kristensen's 1930 novel "Havoc" is also a nihilist hero. He makes a conscious choice to go to the dogs, because man has no soul anyway and so it makes no difference. There is room not only for diversity but for outright contradiction within nihilism.
Yes, absolute unanimity is not a value NFP subscribes to. There is room for contradiction in NFP. At rock bottom, the ceiling is high! NFP has two wings: right-nihilists and left-nihilists. They share the same nihilist point of departure in Nothing, but where the left-nihilists see Nothing as the starting point, the right-nihilists see Nothing as the goal. Roughly sketched, left-nihilism starts from the death of God and the normative vacuum that follows. There is no normative yardstick and there is no purpose to existence for us to realise. That existence has no purpose, because the world does not care, gives one the freedom to do as one pleases, because there is no goal one could miss anyway. A number of left-nihilists live out this absurd freedom through heavy drinking, drugs and casual fornication – in some cases combined with party work. Right-nihilism starts from the gnostic credo that the world is evil. That which is, is evil – and must go. Destruction as a goal comes from the nihilist right wing, which wants revenge on a universe that has always pissed on everything and everyone. When we, for example, regard Schopenhauer as a right-nihilist, it is partly because for him the goal of human existence is to annihilate the universe by annihilating the will that produces the representations (illusions) we take to be reality. Behind the representations there is Nothing. And Nothing is better! (See the last chapter of "The World as Will and Representation".) The division into two "wings" is itself a crude simplification of the diversity nihilism is able to contain, but for communicative purposes it is very practical.
No. A nihilist is not necessarily an emotionally cold sociopath. There are other ways of being a nihilist than the alienated hero of Camus' "The Stranger". One can be furious that it is all meaningless and that existence has no purpose. One can also be painfully torn between indignation that the world is unacceptable and the realisation that it will never get better. Or one can cheerfully seize the absurd freedom that lies in giving up all hope, and laugh one's loud, scornful laugh at a universe that is simply too silly.
No. We have a great deal of fun in NFP. Once you have given up all hope that things will get better, you might as well enjoy life. When existence has no purpose, you are free. It is not possible to fail when it is not possible to win. Enjoy it!
Change has never been change for the better – only change to more of the same. NFP is like Barack Obama: the status quo with a human face.
Yes. But NFP just sounds better! "I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar." Friedrich Nietzsche
First and foremost we will implement our pledges. It is a matter of leaving nihilistic fingerprints on political decisions. If you vote NFP, you can be certain that your vote is wasted, but also that it has been wasted cheerfully. Although we say no to everything, that does not mean a nihilist on the city council will go unnoticed in the streets.
First and foremost we will find it amusing. We will laugh at the end of politics. Then we will implement our pledges and dissolve the party.
No. Terrorism requires that you believe in something. Even the Russian nihilists only wanted the collapse of society because they hoped something better would follow. Something they could believe in. Besides, terrorism does not work anyway. People start believing their values are valid when terror strikes. It takes a democratic process and a change of attitude to wind down all values.
NFP worships democracy. Democracy is democratic – and "democratic" is always a plus word. Everyone without exception claims to be fighting for democracy – from which it follows logically that NFP does too, naturally. The only justification for a democratic party's existence is Denmark's unique democracy, which has given us everything we are today. Danish nihilism must be democratic nihilism! We naturally respect the views and opinions of voters who do not agree with NFP's manifesto. We encourage them to start parties of their own, so that their opinions, too, become part of the free and fair democratic debate.
The argument goes that nihilism refutes itself on purely logical grounds, because it rejects everything. And if nihilism rejects everything, it must also reject truth. So it falls to the liar paradox: "There are no true sentences." If the sentence is true, it is false. [A → not-A]. A self-contradiction that violates the principle of non-contradiction. Answer: Fuck non-contradiction in an absurd world that cannot be made intelligible anyway by a bivalent logic in which the semantic content of sentences is reduced to the simple pair: true or false. The principle of non-contradiction may have some bearing on a heated discussion about whether the cat is on the mat, but when the subject is something slightly more interesting, such as the basic conditions of human existence, logic's naive hope of preserving truth through valid inference becomes a shackle on thought. The world as it appears in the crown jewel of the natural sciences, quantum mechanics, is incidentally also indifferent to the principle: there are German cats in small boxes that are both dead and alive at the same time. It is relevant here to recall Nietzsche's critical naturalisation of logic and the principle of contradiction. In "The Gay Science", aphorism 111, Nietzsche writes that identity and the principle of contradiction rest on an "illogical tendency" to see the "same" in what is different. This has been clever for survival, but has no validity as a binding principle of reason. Life comes before logic. Reason and logic are secondary to the existential situation of human beings. Our situation is that we are condemned to death – and paradoxes of formal logic are relatively irrelevant to someone who is already condemned to death. The principle of contradiction is therefore not our greatest concern.
No. Anarchism holds the hope of a better world without state or authority, in which man's true nature can unfold in non-oppressive, self-organising communities. We nihilists know that this is merely a naive hope, which overlooks the fact that the injuries of existence are caused not by society but by the ontological structure of man and the universe.
We look forward to finding out.
There are many misunderstandings about Nietzsche's relationship to nihilism. Many have taken Nietzsche at his word when he declares himself an opponent of nihilism, and regard it as something to be overcome. But NFP understands Nietzsche better than he understood himself! It is true that Nietzsche claims nihilism is what the overman must overcome. When one reads his philosophy, however, the relationship to nihilism turns out to be more complex than that. For Nietzsche, nihilism consists in denying life its value because one cannot bear suffering, and therefore inventing a "true world" in which one hopes to be saved in the afterlife. Hope of salvation is the weak person's way of betraying life, out of bitterness at suffering. Christianity, too, is nihilistic according to Nietzsche. However, Nietzsche's conception of nihilism – which, by Nietzsche's own thinking, is only one perspective on nihilism – in fact allows the overman, paradoxically enough, to be regarded as a cheerful nihilist himself. What Nietzsche fights is hope. Hope is an expression of weakness, bitterness and ressentiment. The active human being, who is beyond good and evil and can create new perspectives, has no need of hope. Only the reactive human being needs it, hoping that the others will leave him alone if he calls them evil, and that at some point it will all stop being tiresome. It is the hope of a life without suffering and an existence without injury that the overman must overcome. The overman can will his life – including all the suffering it has contained – repeated in exactly the same way again and again for eternity. To be without hope is to will one's suffering life. In the Nihilistic Democratic Party we have got over that hope. An intense life without hope of salvation, in which only one's actions performatively posit values in a universe that is absolutely indifferent and worthless, is also the life of the nihilist. The overman is simply a nihilist in a good mood.
Jacob Haugaard, the comedian who in 1994 was actually elected to the Danish parliament, is a great political talent. NFP can only admire a politician clear-sighted enough to stand for the Union of Consciously Work-Shy Elements with the pledge: 8 hours of leisure, 8 hours of rest and 8 hours of sleep. Haugaard had a nihilistic employment policy, and he had grasped the all-decisive truth that Danish politics is irrelevant anyway. Haugaard himself says he wanted to show "that the meaning is that there is no meaning!" NFP therefore openly acknowledges its Haugaardian heritage.
Unfortunately Haugaard failed to hold on to his nihilistic insight into the irrelevance and impotence of politics once he had been elected to parliament. The other politicians managed to silence his nihilistic protest by insisting on the lie that Danish politics matters and is not just a game of spinning one's way to power.
Haugaard therefore never finished the job. We intend to finish it in NFP. We promise that no pressure from the other politicians and opinion-formers will silence our nihilistic protest once we have gained political influence.