Nihilism, Fascism, and Utopia

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 21 Jul 2025

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

Human Prospects in the Age of Despair

Background to Nihilism

13 Jul 2025 – With the rise of science in the 17^th century, and the breakdown of the naïve, religiously based mythologies that dominated the Middle Ages, human beings discovered scientific methodologies by which the laws of the natural world could be discerned and confirmed. The holistic cosmos of the Middle Ages envisioned “the great chain of being” leading upward from the lowest forms of mud, dirt, and slithering creatures, through ever more perfect hierarchical levels, to the infinite majesty of the divine ground of being.   However, the rise of science was the beginning of the end for such a spiritualized mythological hierarchy.

This transformation has often been called the “Copernican Revolution,” since it was Copernicus who argued that the Earth was not the center of the cosmos but rather a tiny, contingent planet, spinning on its own axis and located on the periphery of the cosmos as it was then understood. The hierarchy had begun to collapse toward a pervasive horizontal level of matter and energy, the capstone of which (for early modern science) is often taken to be Newton’s Principia Mathematica of 1687.

Over the two centuries after Copernicus this Medieval hierarchical world steadily collapsed and the “reality” of the cosmos appeared to level out onto a horizontal plane in which there was no longer any evidence of the divine in the workings of nature and perhaps no longer any apparent ground for values or any meaningful place for human beings within this scheme of things. I want to briefly trace this process toward “nihilism” to help clarify our situation as we find it today. As a kind of halfway “station” toward these nihilistic conclusions, “Deism” began to appear and flourished by the 18^th century. (Several founding fathers of the USA Constitution, such as Thomas Jefferson, were Deists.) God had started the entire process going, Deism proclaimed, but now was nowhere to be found within the process. God had created the world as a self-perpetuating mechanism that now left us to fend for ourselves within the confines of the natural world.

With the amazing successes achieved by the scientific method (which applied reason and mathematical precision coupled with careful observation), our cosmic situation demanded reformulation by the great thinkers of the time.  In political philosophy, thoughtful human beings were discovering that traditional, hierarchical social roles (from the King on down) were not part of a “great chain of being” ordained by God (as was thought during Medieval times) but were historically contingent social arrangements that could and should be different. People of great intellectual abilities were discerned among the common population and thinkers were postulating that reason was there in all people.

Outstanding 18^th-century philosophers like Immanuel Kant in Prussia distinguished our knowable world of “phenomena” from its vast, unknowable ultimate ground that he called “noumena.”  The gift of freedom coupled with our common human intelligence (reason) gave us the moral law, Kant argued, based on our rational capacity to universalize the principles of our actions beyond any innate bias or personal self-interest. In John Locke, his follower Thomas Jefferson, and others, the moral law centered on God-given human rights and the need to found societies on both these rights and the dignity of human freedom. Democratic theory was born, postulating that the authority of government arises from the people and that people, being rational actors, were capable of establishing and monitoring governments to protect their common good, their freedoms, and their property.

The 19^th century saw a series of developing industrial and technological revolutions resulting in the idea of apparently endless progress. To August Comte, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and many others, there emerged the idea that the methods of rationality that were so successful in science could be applied to human social arrangements so that progress could be made creating ever more just, free, and equitable societies within the framework of perpetual technological progress. This “Enlightenment” of the 18^th century was seen as applicable across the board according to some 19^th century theorists of endless progress. Hegel creatively integrated these ideas into a metaphysics describing a cosmic dialectical movement toward ever-greater freedom, rationality, and awareness of the divine nisus behind all the processes of all human development.

Nihilism and Postmodernism

But the fly in the ointment had to appear sooner or later. As Kierkegaard was to say of Hegel, he built conceptual castles in the air while living next to his creation in a doghouse. In the life-long work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the apparent emptiness of this entire project was exposed. Nietzsche perceived the seeming groundlessness of all these ideas and revealed the tenuous, contingent, irrational, illusory, and self-deceptive aspects of all possible justifications for our human condition in general. He discerned nihilism, nihility, nothingness, at the heart of our human condition and our values. “Since Copernicus, Nietzsche declared, “man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane-now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into-what? into nothingness? into a ‘penetrating sense of his nothingness?’ … all science, natural as well as unnatural—which is what I call the self-critique of knowledge—has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been but a piece of bizarre conceit.”

If the “liberal” ideas of progress, human rationality, human rights, and people acting through a competitive economic system to build societies of justice and freedom can be called “Modernity,” then the heirs of Nietzsche who have seriously called these ideas into question can be called “Postmodernists.”   In the late 20^th century, thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and others have complemented what I have elsewhere termed Nietzsche’s “metaphysical skepticism” through their analyses of language, meaning, and social conventions to the point where it may appear that all the solidity and reliability of even our everyday “common sense” realities have disintegrated.

Nihilism means nothingness. Our situation in the early 21^st century, therefore, appears to include the following consequences:

1. Our values of democracy, freedom, and human rights appear as entirely historically contingent and culturally conditioned (rather than as universal to all humanity): the repudiation of “essentialism,” the idea that things have an essential nature that can be objectively determined.
2. By the same token, the sacred texts of all the world’s religions appear as entirely historically and culturally contingent, thereby calling into question not only their claim to consistent meanings but their assumed authoritative and binding force: the repudiation of any “hierarchy of values.” All values equal, none better than others.
3. Humanity now appears fragmented into innumerable cultures and identities, with everyone having the “right” to embrace their own identity. There are no longer any grounds for a critique of someone else’s identity: absent “essentialism” and “hierarchy,” any “objective grounds” for decision-making have evaporated.
4. There appears to be no overall meaning or purpose to our human situation, leaving everyone free to generate their own local or private ideas of meaning and purpose (or no meaning and purpose) as the case may be: a core claim of “nihilism.”

Human beings are seemingly on their own within a framework of iron-clad laws of nature— a contingent birth for each of us, a fleeting life hardly registered as a blip in the vast impersonal workings of nature, and a certain death within this meaningless cosmic framework. Within this situation, the one thing that appears “real” is power. I (or my group) can claim power over you, or against you, or in spite of you. I seem to have the power to affirm my own version of religion or values independently of what you, science, or anyone else declares.

Postmodernism often claimed to “liberate” us from “grand-narratives,” asserting that all such narratives (such has human rights, human dignity, our common humanity, the need for democracy, etc.) are entirely reducible to particularized culture and history and hence nothing universal is found anywhere. We are therefore left in this situation of total disintegration and fragmentation in which, if we are to avoid despair, we simply affirm whatever we feel like affirming, asserting it on the basis of whatever power we may have, since there are no universal principles against which to measure our choice of identity.

If it is only a matter of power, of who wields it and against whom, then fascism appears as the most effective way to concentrate and use power. Nietzsche himself said that everything reduces to power and the will to power.  My identity can be racist, or my identity can call for nuclear war to bring in the “end times” of the book of Revelation; my identity can be nationalistic and conduct a war on immigrants and immigration or on some official national “enemies.”  There is no right or wrong, no good or evil beyond what I proclaim that my identity entails, and the only transactional feature appears as power.

Fascism, as a clash of arbitrary, incommensurable identities, requires imagined, implacable enemies. I argue that it is necessarily a form of collective madness (a mass-movement) in which some nation or group adopts an exclusive identity that puts them in lethal conflict with the enemies they believe are threatening that identity—their purity, their integrity, or their “traditional way of life.” (From the false point of view of postmodernism, of course, one can ask who am I (or anyone else) to say what is or is not “madness”?)

For the Nazis, fascism became a totalized worldview claiming that the “Aryan” race that was being corrupted and “polluted” by degenerate or alien non-Aryan human species.  Implicit in this Nazi ideology was the extermination or domination of the rest of humanity, since their racism encompassed the whole of the human phenomenon. World war was implicit in their ideology from the beginning.

If American fascists are of the white, nationalist, “Christian” variety, then world war and nuclear Armageddon are implicit in their ideology as well.  Since they have embraced in a literal mode the bizarre symbolism of the Biblical book of Revelation, they are willing to wipe out all of humanity in the service of their mad obsession.  (Needless to say, none of this has anything to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ or authentic Christianity.)

If American fascists are not of the lunatic “Christian” variety, they may obsess over all so called “immigrants” in a mindless drive to try to use governmental power to somehow “cleanse” the nation of those they have designated as “Other.” Fascism requires persons to hate and fear the “Other” and to imagine that they would be better off without them.  They are entirely oblivious of the cosmic principle (discovered throughout the past 100 years of science) which perceives that the entire universe is ordered according to a principle of unity in diversity. (Early modern science has been transcended by a new scientific paradigm.) Fascists have not yet risen to the level of integrative wisdom that embraces both unity and diversity.

They thrive on division, hate and fear, and war. That is why the militarized sovereign nation-state system itself breeds fascism. To embrace an exclusive nation-state identity necessarily means you have excluded all the others. One of the most influential books behind USA foreign policy has been Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (1948). A “realist” foreign policy, Morgenthau declares, relegates morality to private persons, but on the level of nations there exists nothing other than power relations and struggles. That is why US foreign policy has always been fascist at its core: the direct genocidal saturation bombing of civilians in Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s, the support for the massive wiping out of “communists” by Indonesia’s Suharto in 1965-66,  support for the Guatemalan military dictatorship exterminating indigenous peoples from the mid-1950s to the 1980s, or today’s direct military support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The list goes on.

Responding to the Four Bulleted Points Made Above

To the first, I want to affirm that democracy, human rights, and dignity do not require a modernist liberal orientation as derived from Enlightenment. As my recent book Human Dignity and World Order (2024) shows in some detail, human dignity can and must be affirmed independently of any modernist or Lockean notion of a substantial self within which human rights supposedly inhere.

Regarding the second bullet point, it has been known for millennia by all the great religions that the sacred texts of the world carry their messages at a spiritual and symbolic level that is actually obscured when these texts are interpreted “literally” (as if God was somehow a half-literate moron who could not speak in metaphorical or deeply spiritual ways). Yet every great world religion has also offered a path of spiritual growth that opened deeper access to these spiritual symbols. Those who deny a hierarchy of levels of growth are necessarily cutting themselves off from the deeper possibilities of our humanity.

The third bullet point states that for postmodernists humanity is inevitably bound into innumerably different cultures from which arise nothing but ambiguous and ambivalent “textual” meanings ultimately incommensurable with one another. However, as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jürgen Habermas, Ken Wilber, and other (affirmative) postmodern thinkers have pointed out, this view is incoherent and manifestly untrue.  All language, all thought, and all texts invariably include both particular and universal meanings.

The two dimensions necessarily arise together in all languages and discourse is impossible without both. If I declare, for example, “only particulars exist and there is no universal truth,” I am making a universal claim and engaging in what an obvious “performative contradiction.” To recognize this feature of the deep wholeness of our situation need not require an “essentialist” metaphysic. It requires an integralist insight into the wholeness (unity in diversity) of the Cosmos.

The fourth bullet point, claiming there is no universal meaning or purpose to our human situation, likewise assumes a Nietzsche-like metaphysical skepticism, pronouncing on the entire universe as if human beings could somehow stand outside that universe and observe its meaninglessness from a God-like perspective. Authentic religious consciousness (beyond nihilism) lies elsewhere, as thinkers from Kierkegaard to Dostoyevsky to Nicolas Berdyaev to Nishitani Keiji have pointed out. Meaning and purpose are discovered through a radicalized “inwardness” that penetrates beneath these Derridean “traces” to encounter the unsayable “fullness/emptiness” of existence directly. Here is where authentic meaning arises, not from some impossible procedure attempting to objectify the whole of being. This surely is some of what Kierkegaard meant when he proclaimed that “truth is subjectivity.”

Nietzsche passionately called for the “revaluation of all values,” for new values embraced in the face of the nothingness that permeated all dimensions of human existence. But authentic values arise from a living relationship, a realized identity, with the groundless-ground of all cosmic existence. Not from metaphysics, but from direct living awareness. They require a synthesis of what philosopher Raimon Panikkar calls the “three eyes” of human awareness: the eye of the senses (what we empirically discern of the world), the eye of the “logos” (our rational ability to experience intelligibility everywhere which necessarily operates as a dialectical whole of unity within diversity), and, finally, our “third eye” that recognizes the limits of both the senses and language (logos), and opens directly on the unspeakable depths of existence. Integral wisdom emerges with the three eyes in harmonious intersection beyond nihilism and the dilemma of values.

Fascism as a movement appears incorrigibly shallow and mediocre. It may use its monolithic and strictly technical intelligence to genocidally exterminate the “Other” as it is presently doing in Gaza. However, fascism reveals zero integrative wisdom or spiritual insight.  Its advocates have quite simply given up on pursuing both our deeper intelligence and our capacity for spiritual wisdom.  They live in a shallow “one dimensional” world that lacks coherence and can deal only in terms of power relationships. They fail to see that the Cosmos has produced an astonishing creature that has the capacity to become open to the depths of being and has the freedom to create new and ever more profound meanings within a transformed future.

Indeed, the world contains many millions of people who have transcended the internal contradictions of postmodernism, not by returning to modernity but by recognizing higher dimensions of our human situation that are ignored or suppressed by both fascists and modernists. Human beings are recipients of multiple divine gifts, such as self-awareness, intelligence, freedom, the capacity for love, and the capacity for spiritual insight and wisdom (traditionally called “opening the third eye,” as above). In terms of the myriad other creatures on Earth, these gifts appear unique to us alone.

Yet the MAGA fascists, like their ideological relatives elsewhere, trash all of these gifts in exchange “for a mess of pottage.”  We trash our unspeakable freedom for mere money and power.  Like imbeciles, we insist on clinging to the economic carnage of capitalism and on the disastrous “sovereign nation-state” war system.  We demean not only the Other, our endless victims, but ourselves in the process. Wise people, from Mahatma Gandhi to Albert Einstein, demanded a democratic Earth Federation, uniting humanity to end war, establish social justice, and protect our collapsing environment.

The 16th session of the Provisional World Parliament will meet December 7-10, 2025, in Pondicherry, India, and online. The Parliament demands an Earth federation that is premised on our astonishing human dignity, on human freedom, intelligence, and integrated spirituality. Is this not utopian, you ask?   But fascist self-destruction is hardly practical, realistic, nor common sense, nor anything beyond the power-driven mutual self-destruction of humanity. As I show in Human Dignity and World Order, the “utopian imagination” may be the supreme gift to us coming from the cosmic evolutionary process. As Oscar Wilde declared: “A map of the world that does not include utopia is not even worth glancing at.”

Let us instead begin “standing upright” as God (symbolically) demands of us in the Hebrew scriptures!  Let us not bend the knee to these morons, but let us act on what is highest in us and move humanity forward to a new age of ever-greater peace and freedom within the framework of unity in diversity. These are our true human prospects within this age of despair. It is up to each of us to make this choice. Not to choose is a choice we cannot afford to make.

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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 21 Jul 2025.

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