At Least It's An Ethos

I'm not sure what the distance between cynicism and nihilism really is. In the former I guess you understand what the stakes are, but lack any faith in humans or human systems to behave with those stakes foremost in mind. People will do something, but probably something stupid and selfish and ultimately self-defeating and probably in the name of immediate gratification. This is why we sell so many French fries in this country, diabetes be damned.

The latter, an actual absence of care whatsoever in a consequence; action not just at cross-purposes with the moral best outcome, but arrived at without a consideration of the moral options at any level, seems almost fancifully harsh. It's an sort of ethical absurdity probably best demonstrated in The Big Lebowski when the self-described nihilists would loudly proclaim "we believe in nothing" while in the midst of actually doing something. A true absence of meaning is as contemplatable as the infinitude of everything. The human mind isn't really equipped to absorb and metabolize a void, so we're stuck with the idea that dedication to the idea that one believes in nothing still bears all the hallmarks of a cosmology of some description. Or in other words, carving nothing out of something still leaves borders around which the nothing can be defined, which therefore makes it a measurable something, even if it's empty. There's nothing that doesn't exist outside of the relative space of human conception or perception. And the stuff that actually does, we usually find a way to find it anyway.

Impossible though it is, I still think the current president is probably a nihilist in some relativistic sense.* If he has any measurable beliefs, I don't really know what they are, but that's only because I'm limiting myself to using weights and scales calibrated by recognizable human behavior driven by conscience and consciousness, not the moment-to-moment survival flailings of a creature made feral by the lack of empathetic contact or example in the most crucial stages of socialization in childhood and adolescence. He doesn't believe anything compared to what I grew up with understanding to be D's and R's in the conventional American political two-party climate. He stands apart because he isn't driven by anything we normally understand as ambition or ideology, unless "ideology" can simply contain an unsustainable drive for pussy and the lamentation of one's enemies (where everyone is potentially and eventually an enemy).

The rest of us carry on, struggling, incapable of nihilism but the presence of it, like a black hole, warps and erodes the edges of normal space before it devours the old familiar lodestars one by catastrophic one. And our inability to match him nihilism for nihilism leaves us with cynicism as the only option. What's the point of anticipating good faith if the idea of good faith itself is being pummeled into a sticky, unrecognizable paste by two tiny fists wielding mendacity as a default bludgeon of first resort?

The antidote for cynicism is hope. It's tough to find in a process as interminable and prone to clusterfuckery as an American presidential nomination cycle. I really want a candidate to get behind, but what are we supposed to do when after one contest, the two frontrunners for the Democratic nominee for president are a socialist and a Republican?

There's something wrong with the prospects if the only thing about the Iowa debacle that gave me any kind of relief was that Joe Biden finished in fourth. Joe Biden, the only one it seems who is capable of turning out the crucial, decisive African-American vote. But I'm buoyed by his poor showing. Super. Look at me, in my own way.

All I can do is leave the door open for the best possible outcome to occur. Although to be honest (and this is true) the last time I left a door open too long, a rat moved in to my garage.

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*Yes, I already agree the idea of "relative nihilism" is one of the worst ideas I've ever committed to digital paper. It's late, ok? I'm out here trying.