The fatal sickness, a pandemic in this age, is not Covid, though Covid may be a symptom of it. Definite symptoms are “Marxism, “progressivism”, climate alarmism, and – most fashionably – “wokeism”.

What is it?

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard called it despair in his book The Sickness Unto Death.*

We think he is right about that.

Despair is the giving up of all hope: the total loss of reasons to go on existing.

Is collective despair possible? Global collective despair?

Has a time come when the human race is willing to destroy itself because it can see no reason to continue to exist? 

Out of innumerable examples of published statements calling for the end of the human species, we select three:

Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental. … The optimum human population of earth is zero.– Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run. – From an editorial in The Economist

We should not have children.  – From Better Never To Have Been by David Benatar

In fairness to Benatar it needs to be said that his ardent advocacy for human extinction arises not from disgust with human beings as in the case of the other would-be terminators, but from the sincerest pity for their inevitable suffering. Still –  and therefore – in his opinion, go they should.

A group of Jewish Marxists known  as the “Frankfurt School”, doubly infected with intellectual despair by European nihilism and self-hatred, fled from the killer dictator of Germany and brought their own killing misanthropy to America.

In the fetor of their hubris

It was borne across the sea

With a cruelty in their bosoms

That’s destroying you and me.

They were haters of civilization, and what they advocated is destructive of it to such an extent that human survival would be unlikely. Examples by quotation from the (arguably) most extreme of them – Herbert Marcuse – may be found here.

Their philosophy, reinforced by their intellectual epigones, now dominates the universities and public education in America and emanates from there.

It is the only true human pollution of the planet.

It informs the agenda of the Democratic Party, and so of the “Biden” administration and the majority of both houses of Congress.

Out of a fair number of articles whose authors notice the anti-human tenor of contemporary nihilistic Leftism and condemn it, here are three, all found recently at American Greatness:

No society that has stopped believing in its right to exist and the majesty of its laws can deter lawlessness. – Christopher Roach

Statements calling for human extermination come easily to the woke Left’s lips …  Paul Gottfried

Best of all:

Few have described wokeism as the cruel creed that it is. Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda. It is nihilist and destroys everything it touches. – Victor Davis Hanson

Nihilism is the philosophy of despair.

Is there a case to be made for the continuation of our species?

What is the value of human life?

We say it is impossible to measure, because human life is itself the only measure of value. No human life, no human consciousness – no such thing as value.

 

Footnote:

* Kierkegaard, though an ironist, considered himself a Christian, sole member of his own singular denomination, so he prescribes an esoteric remedy unavailable to anyone else.

There is a danger to democracy in democracy itself: majorities can vote against it.

Two recent articles express, in deep pessimism, the conviction that America has chosen its own irreversible doom.

Mark Steyn thinks it may be all over for America. Its system has brought in forces of self-destruction driven by trivial concerns over climate, race, and sex.

He writes:

Is America past the point of no return? The more lavishly funded any activity is, the more it’s a racket. Fresh from taking two decades to lose a war to goatherds and reducing itself to a global laughingstock to allies and enemies alike, the Government of the United States decided that what a six-star joke really needed was the first four-star transgender admiral.

Now we have an incoming vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff telling the world that what a bloated lavishly funded military that can’t win a war needs to prioritize is “gender advisors”. …

Chairman Xi was a no-show at COP-26, because he has no intention of joining the west in committing economic suicide. But, if Joe and Justin and Boris are so eager to tank what remains of their livelihoods, he’s happy to sell them expensive ineffective “green solutions”. In other words, having annexed American manufacturing and American high-tech and American intellectual property, Beijing is happy to annex American virtue-signaling and profit from that, too.

There is no equivalent (not even Rome’s) to America’s form of great-power suicide. Britain lost global dominance because, for eighteen critical months , London and the British Dominions stood alone among the great democratic powers in resisting the Third Reich. It was a sacrifice that exhausted and bankrupted a mighty empire, but it was at least for something recognizable as a great cause. America is exiting the world stage because it’s hot for trannies and MS-13 cartels: has there ever been anything more pathetic?

Paul Gottfried points out at American Greatness that many an oppressive regime is in power not because their power was seized illegitimately, but because they were voted for.

Regimes that embattled minorities are on the streets protesting are not there by accident. Voters made choices.

And even when they do their worst, they can safely submit themselves for re-election:

Majorities, and often overwhelming ones, voted for the ruling class; and if an election were held tomorrow, the same rulers would likely win. …

He gives examples of popular authoritarian rulers in America:

Bill de Blasio won a second term as New York City’s mayor in 2017 with 65.4 percent of the tabulated vote. On November 4, 2020, Kim Klacik, an earnest young black woman, ran against Kweisi Mfume, the longtime incumbent in Maryland’s seventh congressional district, which includes Baltimore’s inner city. Klacik promised to fight for more police protection, and, unlike Mfume, she pledged to bring the races together. Against a notoriously philandering politician who gave up his birth name to assume an African one, Klacik lost the congressional race by 40 points, although remarkably enough, she amassed a large war chest. Politicians such as Mfume, Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, Maxine Waters in Los Angeles, Gavin Newsom in California, and Bill de Blasio in New York have all reached high political positions for the same reason: they attract lots of votes. …

If it is argued that almost as many Americans have voted for freedom as voted for dictatorship, the inherent danger in democracy is only emphasized: the will of many can be frustrated by the will of a few more. The choice of democracy itself is the hazard.

In which case, since all other systems are worse than democracy, there is no way that a free republic such as the Founders tried to establish can be secured.

If the “Biden” administration came in by cheating, it means that cheating is not just possible but practicable in a democracy.

How likely is it that after this turn to oppression, with another election another day America can go back to being the free nation it has been in the past?

Even if it can, even if it does, what will preserve it?

… is what we have now.

Paul Gottfried writes at American Greatness:

[The Democrats’] actions will likely accelerate the violence they have already unleashed.

Given the Biden Administration’s control of the military, which is now indoctrinating soldiers in Critical Race Theory, the Left’s growing influence over secret surveillance operations… and an educational system and popular culture that tirelessly push the Left’s agenda, we on the other side may be in for a rocky ride.

The Left and its Democratic enablers are also bringing bedlam to our cities by facilitating the entry into our country of criminal illegals. It will continue along this path while weakening the power of the police if such moves are thought to strengthen its hand.

Biden and his advisors have already refused to send back illegals who have committed truly heinous crimes, and we may reasonably conclude that the Democrats and their media and woke capitalist allies hope to make the likely increase of violence work to their benefit. …

Last summer’s paid mobs, subsidized by the Democratic Party, ushered in more than mayhem and chaos. In that moment, this country crossed the line from the government we used to have to the more sinister arrangement we suffer under now. Those who carried out the violence enjoyed the patronage of the party that subsequently won the presidential election and then the Georgia Senate runoff race (both in suspect circumstances).

Violence is enhancing the power of those who can use it with total impunity.

Add to all that:

District Attorneys brought to power with massive funding by the arch villain George Soros – most notably in California – are letting violent criminals out of prison, and have actually legalized crime.

Hundreds of people are being held in prison without trial, and threatened with long sentences, for having merely been present during the unarmed occupation of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The 74 million (or more) who voted for Donald Trump in November 2020 are being officially designated “white supremacist terrorists”, which makes them vulnerable to extreme punitive measures, such as years in the newly conceived – though not yet named – American gulag.