Nihilism and the Crisis of the West

I am interrupting my series of essays on the problem of self-interest and self-sacrifice to address developments of recent weeks. I wrote the following essay yesterday in an attempt to understand the state of our world. Because of the importance of the topic, I am making the audio recording of this essay available to unpaid subscribers. I would also ask that you please share this essay with family and friends.

We live in troubled times.

The moral culture of Western civilization is unraveling before our eyes. This seems self-evident for those with eyes to see.

Nor is it possible to unsee the things that we’ve witnessed even if only in recent days. One’s daily doom scroll through X, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube has unleashed a barrage of hitherto unimaginable acts of cruelty and savagery. These images are not from some war torn Third World hellhole but from the beacon of Western civilization.

We live in a time of routinized vulgarity and barbarism. Our cultural conscience has been desensitized. What’s worse is that we are becoming anesthetized to what Hannah Arendt referred to as the “banality of evil.” We meet it with a shrug or titillation.

Those who care about our civilization—a civilization built on reason, objectivity, freedom, science, technology, individual rights, self-government, constitutionalism, and laissez-faire capitalism—must confront the spiritual, moral, and cultural crisis of our time. We must search for the deepest cause of that crisis, which can be summed up in one word: nihilism.

Ours is what we might call “The Age of Nihilism.” A recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word nihilism as: “Total rejection of prevailing religious or moral beliefs or social and political institutions; the belief that nothing has any value, esp. the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless; (also) spec. a revolutionary doctrine advocating the destruction of social and political institutions as a prerequisite to radical reform.”

Implicit in this definition is the suggestion that nihilism is simply the means toward unnamed end, which we all know to be socialism. For the postmodern, anti-civilizational Left, nihilism replaced the proletarian revolution as the means by which the free society is to be overturned and destroyed.

The OED definition of nihilism is a start but ultimately inadequate for our purposes. We need to go further and establish a deeper understanding of what nihilism is and its relationship to our current maladies. Again, what is nihilism? Where did it come from? How does it work?

The Genealogy of Nihilism

The philosophy of nihilism reached its peak philosophically with the late nineteenth century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. He was both a chronicler and a proponent of nihilism. He announced in his last book, The Will to Power, that the advent of “nihilism stands at the door” of Western civilization, and he helped to push it through the door. Nihilism, he wrote, is “the will to destruction as the will of a still deeper instinct, the instinct of self-destruction, the will for nothingness.” Nihilism has manifested itself in twenty-first century America as a death cult. It means destruction for the sake of destruction, and it means cultural suicide.

The state of the world in 2025 reminds me of the powerful and haunting lines of William Butler Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

When Yeats wrote these somber lines in January 1919, he captured the profound sense of disenchantment and the shattered illusions of progress, civilization, moral order, and common decency that were overwhelming the post World War I generation. Things were indeed falling apart and morally anarchy was loosed upon the world. Gutted by the war’s senselessness, brutality, and devastation, Yeats identified poetically the deepest maladies that were convulsing and causing the West to implode philosophically, morally, culturally, and politically. The Irishman saw the greatest civilization in world history spiraling downward in a sinkhole of nihilism. The poem evokes the deep sense of hopelessness and ennui that had fallen as a funeral veil upon the Western world.

Twenty-seven years later, in the wake of World War II, the French novelist and philosopher, Albert Camus delivered an extraordinary lecture at Columbia University titled, “The Crisis of Man.” Camus and his generation followed immediately after Yeats’. Camus’ generation was born just before or during World War I; they experienced the Great Depression, the rise of communism and Nazism, and the destruction of World War II. The philosophic nihilism that broke loose after WWI was magnified and multiplied tenfold by the time that Camus delivered his lecture.

The Frenchman’s lecture, which I highly recommend, is a brilliant distillation and summing up of how the philosophy of nihilism was percolating down and through Western civilization during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The men and women of Camus’ generation (he was referring to the so-called “intellectuals”) “believed in nothing and lived in rebellion.” The mid-twentieth century was, he said, the period when philosophic nihilism was galloping through the fashionable circles of the intellectual elites.

The literature of the age was rebelling against clarity, stories and even sentences. Painting was rebelling against subjects, reality and mere harmony. Music was rejecting melody. As for philosophy, it taught that there was no truth, only phenomena.

Twentieth-century nihilism also ushered in the twin doctrines of cultural and moral relativism, which taught that all cultures are equal (thus there could be no distinction between barbarism and civilization) and that no one moral code was any better or worse than any other (thus justifying all forms of polymorphous perversity). This situation, according to Camus, represented the crisis of Western civilization.

All the traditional manners and mores that once provided the moral and cultural glue holding society together were now mocked, attacked, deconstructed, abandoned, and replaced by the trans-valuation of all values. In such a world, if nothing is valued, then everything is permitted. At that point, there can be no right and wrong, and all human thoughts and actions are beyond good and evil.

What, then, is left to men and women in a world of nothingness? More particularly, what is left for children? What will fill the void of nothingness? On what basis will men pursue life-enhancing values? What are the existential consequences for a society that adopts nihilism?

Morally and then culturally, the post-WWII world has been defined at the highest level of abstraction by two related approaches to moral thought and action—both connected to nihilism: 1) the will to power; and 2) the end justifies the means.

The former rejects the idea that there is an objective moral order that should guide human thought and action. It means that moral decision-making should be guided not by one’s reason and the boundaries of nature and human nature but by the assertion of the untethered will propelled by one’s subjective whims. The will to power liberates men from all traditional, religious, or objective moral codes, so that they may pursue their individual desires and impulses.

The latter—the principle that the end justifies the means—means that any means may be used to achieve all ends. It says that the rightness or wrongness of an action depends on whether it achieves a desired goal, regardless of the methods used. By this standard, lying, cheating, stealing, coercion, cruelty, and violence can be used to achieve one’s subjective ends.

Taken together, both approaches lead to one moral end: the open-ended and unlimited assertion of one’s individual or collective will and power and violence over others in the name of the subjectively willed “right” ideas. Without socially accepted moral constraints, the unlimited drive for power will inevitably lead to and justify oppressive or harmful actions, so long as they achieve the desired end which is defined by subjective whim. The combination of these two moral anti-principles accelerates and intensifies the relativism inherent in both concepts. If values are created through power and justified by outcomes, there can be no stable moral ground for society. The result will inevitably be physical conflict between competing visions of power.

What we have witnessed in the Western world over the course of the last 75 years is the existential working out of the philosophy of nihilism. With every passing year, the nihilism spreads and deepens its influence. A multi-volume encyclopedia or supercomputer couldn’t record all the real instances of our cultural experiment with nihilism.

What are we to say of a nation that covered up and excused rape gangs that abused thousands of girls? What are we to say of a nation in which its various governments sanction the drugging and mutilation of children? What are we to say of a nation where scores of its children have committed mass murder killing other children at school? There is something wrong, deeply wrong, with our dystopian culture.

Nihilism comes in many forms (too many to mention here), so I shall highlight and comment on the two most egregious recent examples of how nihilism has affected and is destroying American culture.

You’re Next: The Case of Iryna Zarutska

A few weeks ago, on the evening of August 22, 2025, a stunningly beautiful young woman named Iryna Zarutska boarded a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina. Iryna was an immigrant to the United State from Ukraine, where she fled to escape the violence of war and the destruction of her country. She came to America to start her life over and to live out the promise of American life. Iryna, a waifish and slender 23-year-old women, had just finished work at a Pizza parlor and was on her way home. She boarded the train and sat down in the first available seat and spent the rest of her all-too-short life looking at her phone. She looked at no one, said nothing, and did nothing.

A few minutes later, she was dead—brutally murdered.

Sitting directly behind Iryna was DeCarlo Brown Jr., a large, hooded man. His demeanor might be characterized as simultaneously lifeless and yet somehow menacing. Brown we now know was a career criminal having been previously arrested at least 14 times for crimes such as armed robbery, breaking and entering, larceny, and assault. Oddly, Brown was sent to jail only three times for his 14 arrests.

A few minutes after Iryna sat down, Brown pulled out a knife, stood up, and stabbed her three times in the neck. The attack was savage and entirely unprovoked. He then walked away as calmly as can be and was overheard saying, “I got that white girl. I got that white girl.” Iryna slumped over, bled out, and died a few minutes later.

The murder was captured on train’s video camera, which has now been seen by millions of people. For those of us who have seen the video, particularly the entire unedited video, the effect is existentially traumatizing. It cuts to the core of one’s soul. We shall never unsee what happened to Iryna, and we shall never forget it. Every father in America who has a daughter wishes he were there to protect Iryna from this vile monster.

Three things stand out about this heinous murder: first, was the utter savagery of the attack; second, was the unbearable sadness on Iryna’s face as she realized what had just happened to her; and third, was the fact that no fewer than five people sitting within sight of Iryna did nothing to help her. They just sat there and watched her die.

Iryna Zarutska died alone surrounded by people.

How are we to understand and make sense of this “senseless” murder? Brown savagely murdered an innocent stranger who had been in his presence for a just a few minutes. Why? What was his psychological state when he murdered Iryna Zarutska? She was in his presence for just a few minutes. What triggered him to murder this beautiful woman?

Many argue that the cause of this random act of violence was mental illness. This is not true. This explanation is a feckless evasion. Brown knew what he was doing. At the very least, he knew that he had targeted and killed a “white girl.” He did this knowingly and intentionally. The murder was self-evidently racial in nature.

How did DeCarlo Brown become a murdering racist?

From the day he entered Kindergarten until his last day in school, Brown was no doubt taught that he was a member of an oppressed racial minority, that he was the victim of systemic racism, that he was a second-class citizen of an evil nation dedicated to promoting “whiteness.” This is what the government school system teaches.

This message was reinforced on the TV he watched and in the music he listened to. The whole Soros funded, DEI-Industrial Complex that he met in the court system told him that his actions were not his fault, that he was a victim of systemic racism. Victims become vengeful. DeCarlos Brown was taught to hate because he was taught from childhood that he was a victim. It became a part of his psychology and cultural DNA.

But I strongly suspect there was something else at work. Not only was Iryna white, but she was stunningly beautiful. And not only was she white and beautiful, but, most importantly, she ignored Brown. She did not even look at him. She did not recognize his existence.

The paragraphs that follow are, I admit, speculative, but they ring true. There is something deeper at work that we must come to understand.

DeCarlo Brown’s murder of Iryna Zarutska reminds me of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov’s brutal murder of an innocent, defenseless, elderly woman in Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov slammed an axe into an old woman’s head to test a theory—a theory that bears a remarkable resemblance to Nietzsche’s theory of nihilism. (Whether Dostoyevsky actually read or was influenced by Nietzsche’s theories is a story for another day.)

Raskolnikov believed that he had a “right,” that he was “entitled to commit all sorts of crimes and excesses.” This right is above or goes beyond all recognized standards or laws of right and wrong. The men who claim this right, Raskolnikov says, may “transgress the law.”

The crimes of these people, naturally, are relative and variegated; for the most part they call, in quite diverse declarations, for the destruction of the present in the name of the better. But if such a one needs for the sake of his idea, to step even over a dead body, over blood, then within himself, in his conscience, he can, in my opinion, allow himself to step over blood.

Here we have in Raskolnikov’s defense of his actions a near perfect description of DeCarlo Brown’s murder of Iryna Zarutska. Brown literally stepped over blood to nonchalantly walk off the train. But unlike Raskolnikov, Brown did not kill in the name of the übermensch. Quite the opposite. His motives represent the inversion of Raskolnikov’s. It’s the revenge of the oppressed; the revenge of the victimized; the revenge of society’s losers.

Brown’s deepest motive for butchering Iryna Zarutska (a motive that he himself almost certainly did not understand) can be summed up in Ayn Rand’s definition of nihilism: “hatred of the good for being the good.” Iryna represented for Brown everything that he hated: whiteness and beauty, which, in his ideologically twisted mind, means privilege.

To add fuel to his burning hatred, Iryna didn’t recognize his existence. She simply did not look at him as she sat down. She ignored him. But modern egalitarianism says that DeCarlo Brown—a total moral reprobate and evil man—is entitled to be recognized no matter who or what he is. His entitlement to recognition is a right. In that moment, this lowlife, career criminal demanded he be recognized because he had been taught that he deserves to be recognized, that he is entitled to be recognized, that he has a right to be recognized, and that if he isn’t he has a right to demand it.

The murder of the beautiful Iryna Zarutska represents the nihilistic rage of man who demanded the respect he did not deserve.

“Prove Me Wrong”: The Case of Charlie Kirk

On September 11, 2025, Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, podcaster, writer, TV personality, and a well-known civil rights leader, was assassinated while doing an outdoor public event at Utah Valley University in Orem Utah. Several thousand students were in attendance and witnessed his murder firsthand. It has since been seen by tens of millions of people around the world. Charlie was 31. He leaves a widow and two young children.

For years, Charlie had travelled around the United States to hundreds of college campuses speaking to and debating with students about the controversial issues of the day. Charlie was a principled conservative who loved nothing more than talking to young people of all political persuasions. He loved his job, and it showed. His benevolence shone brightly.

Charlies’ tradition at these university events was to encourage those who disagreed with him to go to the front of the line to ask the first questions and to challenge him face-to-face. Shortly after the Utah event began, Charlie took a question from a young man who asked if he knew how many mass shootings had been committed in the United States, and, more particularly, how many had been transgender mass shootings had occurred in the U.S.

Seconds later a bullet shot from a high-powered rifle at 142 yards blew through Charlie’s neck. I won’t describe the bloody scene other than to say that even the most hardened combat veterans would have been traumatized by what they saw. Now tens of millions of people around the world have been traumatized because the whole thing was captured on video and has now been shown repeatedly on social media.

Charlie Kirk’s assassin was arrested two days later. Tyler Robinson, 22-year-old from St. George Utah, confessed to murdering Charlie. All the news reports indicate that Robinson was ideologically motivated to kill Kirk. The murderer had inscribed on the bullet’s shell casing, “Hey fascist! Catch!” (a demented taunt implying Kirk was a fascist), “Bella Ciao” (an antifascist Italian partisan song popularized in leftist and Antifa discussion boards), and references to transgender ideology or memes (e.g., “OwO what's this?” from online furry and left-wing gaming communities). Robinson was also involved in homosexual relationship with a man pretending to be a woman. Utah Governor, Spencer Cox, stated in a press conference that all the evidence he had seen indicated that Robinson was “deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology.”

Superficially, Robinson’s alleged ideological motivations are no doubt true. But let us go deeper and attempt to identify the deeper philosophic or ideological reasons behind Charlie’s assassination.

On that fateful day at UVU when Charlie Kirk was gunned down, he sat outside under a tent canopy with a banner wrapped around it, which read: “Prove me Wrong!” Think about that for a moment. Let it sink in. At the deepest philosophic level, this is why he was assassinated.

Prove me wrong! What does this slogan or principle mean? For Charlie Kirk, it meant first that he appealed to reason, objectivity, and logic, and he encouraged his interlocutors to do the same. It also means that Charlie recognized right and wrong, truth and untruth, good and bad. He believed that honest men and women could reason their way to moral and political truths.

These are the core values and principles of Western civilization, and they are precisely what the postmodern Left has spent 75 years trying to destroy. Charlie Kirk categorically rejected the twin anti-principles of nihilism: might makes right and the end justifies the means.

At the deepest level, Charlie Kirk was executed because he attempted to live out his animating principle, “Prove Me Wrong.” The anti-civilization Left could tolerate his conservative values and policy prescriptions, but they could not tolerate his method of public discussion. Charlie was winning over tens of thousands of young people to his cause because of his benevolent, reasoned approach to public debate. The Left was losing to Charlie’s benevolence and his reason, and they knew it. This is what they hated most.

I have no doubt that the public assassination of Charlie Kirk is a defining moment in American history in the way that, say, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. was. It will be engraved on the public psyche for decades to come.

The Turning Point of No Return

In the wake of the murders of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk, the American people—Left and Right—have crossed a cultural Rubicon. There is no going back.

In the minutes, hours, days, and weeks after the barbaric murders of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk, hundreds and hundreds (probably thousands if not tens of thousands) of Americans went online to express their satisfaction if not glee at the deaths if Iryna and Charlie. Indeed, they have been nothing less than celebratory at the murders of two innocent people.

Not surprisingly, many of the loudest voices supporting this targeted violence have come from college professors and K-12 teachers. The videos that have been posted on X, Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube demonstrate a form of unhinged, collective psychosis. The moral compass of the postmodern Left is spinning out of control.

Of this there can be no doubt: America’s nihilistic, anti-civilizational Left now openly seeks to destroy the values and institutions of Western civilization. They want it burned to the ground—literally. They say so. But wait, there’s more. They want to murder those who defend these ideas and institutions. Some have literally called for what can only be described as ideological genocide.

We have known for decades that the postmodern Left rejects reason, reality, objectivity, science, technology, individual rights, constitutionalism, and capitalism, but now it has openly embraced violence, chaos, murder, and destruction. The nihilistic Left has taught America’s young people to hate themselves, to hate their parents, and to hate America as evil. Indeed, the anti-civilization Left hopes for—literally—the fall of the United States of America. They’re saying the quiet part out load, and the ideological cat is out of the institutional bag.

Let’s bring our analysis back to the present moment. We should be morally clear and we should speak in simple terms about what has happened in the last few days: Today a mother and a father are without a daughter, and a wife and two small children are without a father. Common decency would suggest that America’s postmodern Leftists denounce savagery, violence, and murder, but they can’t and won’t because their ideological bloodlust calls for it. Instead, they cheer it on.

This is not normal. You do know that, right?

According to the anti-civilization Left, Iryna and Charlie deserved to die. Iryna was white and beautiful, therefore she deserved to die. Charlie was a conservative who loved to debate with his ideological opponents, therefore he deserved to die.

What can’t go on forever, won’t, and this can’t go on.

At the deepest philosophic level, Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk were murdered by ideas. They were murdered by an ideology of violence. They were murdered because great ideological forces spent the last 75 years marching through our educational and cultural institutions reshaping America’s social norms and institutions. These ideological forces created an army of Manchurian candidates waiting to be activated to commit acts of violence and mayhem against anyone prepared to disagree with them. DeCarlo Brown and Tyler Robinson were not lone wolves. They were sleeper agents without knowing it.

Finally, I would like you to consider the following question: you do know, right, that if they can kill Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk, they can kill you? On principle, by their principles, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t murder you, me, and anyone else who wants to live in a free society. If you don’t believe me, see here: Okay, Now Leftists Are Posting Hit Lists of the People They Want to Murder Next. .

The time has come for all of us to recognize the painful reality of our situation. We are now engaged in a great war—a war of ideas—for the future of America and Western civilization. It is incumbent upon us to recognize a fundamental truth: “ideas have consequences.” The vicious murder of an unknown women on a train and the assassination of a young man defending freedom of speech have causes—deep causes—philosophic causes.

For good or ill, philosophy is the motor of history, and it shapes the world we live in. We must therefore arm ourselves with ideas—the right ideas—ideas that are grounded in objective truth. Persuasion and not force is the way forward. The battleground is America’s universities. It’s the universities that shape and guide the ideological direction of a nation. If your nation is philosophically and morally bankrupt, it’s because your universities are philosophically and morally bankrupt.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You know that, right?

It's time for change. It’s time for decent men and women to come together to defend the principles, institutions, and culture of a rational and free society. Just do it! The clock is ticking.

Je suis Charlie!