A happy nihilist’s response to toxic gods & meaning mandates
Words & images © Paul Ransom
We have all heard of PC, but I wonder how many of us realise that political correctness has a more pervasive counterpart, the largely unquestioned spiritual correctness that permeates religion and frames most of our ideas about life-meanings and so-called ‘higher’ purposes.
Although we have concocted a plethora of gods and philosophies to help navigate the deeper mysteries of our existence, there is an underlying unity to most of our musings on these matters. And, like all orthodoxies, it is defended passionately. Often with violence.
It is surely one of the most awful ironies that, in the name of all-loving deities and in the pursuit of divine oneness, we have signed off on the regular slaughter of those deemed not to be part of our sacred choir. So much for universal harmony.
However, I am not here to remind you of our ongoing proclivity for tribalised bloodshed, but to tease out the rarely acknowledged intellectual and psycho-emotional traditions of human spirituality
Most of us have mystical (or metaphysical) moments. Faced with an unpredictable, uncontrollable environment, and saddled with the knowledge of our own mortality, we look beyond the everyday and wonder about our place in the greater scheme. On occasions we may attain a sense of profound connection and/or gratitude. Sometimes, this can be sublime or ecstatic. Yet, even if we don’t quite reach these bliss points, we retain a desire for transcendence, seeking to burst the regular bounds of our being and see ourselves in a light not normally available. Or, more pointedly, to help us deal with death.1
Theorising about higher consciousness, ultimate meaning and grand purpose is therefore an understandable response to our common existential condition. Cue everything from mass religion to uniquely personal spiritual beliefs.
What unites these multiple expressions – even as the expressors vilify and murder one another – is a mostly unconscious mechanism that underwrites nearly all spiritual ideation and plays a foundational role in the construction of our identity.
By calling out this embedded orthodoxy we can begin to liberate ourselves from the onerous command & control mantras that come with it, and, in doing so, dodge the destiny trap and escape the karma police. Because, when we refuse to sit the cosmically mandated worthiness exams of the mainstream holy order, we no longer need to be spiritually correct. Which means we can truly live.
How does spiritual correctness manifest?
It will not surprise you to see reflected in the architecture of human spiritual belief and practise the telltale signs of a more basic psychology. Our preferred pantheons – whether staffed by personality gods or infused with more abstract divinities – tend to embed us in a power relationship we instinctively understand. Whilst true that God figures resemble a ‘great other’, acting like a Platonic form of the other, our deities and various numina are also monitors. Judges. Indeed, how like parents our spiritual overseers usually are. Affection, protection. Coercion, correction. Unconditional love on one hand, a thousand caveats on the other. Approval always pending.
Are you good enough?
I have previously referred2 to this phenomenon as an External/Parental Authority Complex. As a psychological mechanism it works to:
- Fix us in relation to our environment – personal, socio-cultural, cosmic, etc
- Underwrite notions of self-importance & life meaning, and define our roles in family, tribe, greater scheme, etc
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- Entrench us in an approval-seeking, please/appease mindset – a child/applicant drama
- Tether us to the pass/fail criteria of regulatory gods & karmic score keepers
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- Legitimise & lionise individual & group identity and, by extension, our beliefs and actions
- Provide us with ‘had to’ and ‘meant to be’ excuses – enabling us to abdicate responsibility, ignore cruelty, and pass blame
In short, the External/Parental Authority Complex is a one-size-fits-all higher authority to which we can appeal whenever the desire strikes. We see it in action everywhere. From ‘it is written’ to ‘trust the science’, we commonly posit unimpeachable founts of wisdom, arbitration, and bottom-line truth. This mummy/daddy/deity/sage/spirit construction is a canny combo of casting director, safety officer, coach, and executioner. Script, map, opium, gaoler.
As it relates to spiritual matters, it maps out as a blend of orientation and validation. By supplying us with a pre-approved source of worth, goals, and meanings – and locating us within a grand historical/universal unfolding, or cosmic hero drama – it fleshes out our identity, gives us direction and supplies an abiding justification.
“What could possibly be wrong with that?” you ask. On the face of it, spiritual correctness delivers, if only by giving us anchors in an ever-shifting sea of change and uncertainty. Indeed, the psychology of such assurance is clearly appealing.
Yet, as discussed, there is a sting. If we want the pudding, we will surely be required to eat our vegetables. Indeed, almost all spiritual constructions are heavily salted with a punitive and authoritarian overlay. From hellish after-lives to relentless, performance-related reincarnation marathons, we have created a metaphysical surveillance-state fuelled by a childlike fear of getting caught and being punished and shamed. As such, virtue (wisdom, enlightenment, etc) is routinely conflated with obedience, with being in accordance with this or that master plan.
In this framework we are effectively slaves. At best, cheap labour. Performing functions, observing rituals, and pursuing objectives we have scant say in. Even if our galactic guardians deign to give us free will, they tend to operate along reliably Orwellian lines. After all, it’s meant to be. This is what we’re here for.
- Curiously, despite spiritual correctness manifesting as a series of slave narratives3, there is a related phenomenon at play. Just as many of our gods demand obedience, it is not uncommon to discover deities who crave our affection. Here again, we see a primal parent/child dynamic. Students of Hegel will also point out similarities with his now famed Lord/bondsman, (or master/slave), dialectic. Moreover, there are telltale signs of an immature and toxic co-dependence evident in most spiritual doctrines.
The other common feature of metaphysical orthodoxy is narrative reduction. Storybook spirituality. This is when we boil a complex universe down to a neat set of plot points, erasing detail and ambiguity in favour of a Disney existence. One in which we are endowed with special significance, like characters in a cosmic evolutionary blockbuster, fighting evil on our way to higher vibrations and heavenly happy endings. Whether it’s the cool hand of fate or the workings of a mysterious super-being, the cute and self-justifying story arcs of textbook spirituality are not only simplistic but locate believers in an ethical and existential Goldilocks zone, where self-importance and exonerating helplessness coalesce to create an intoxicating mix of ego-stroke and get-out clause, (with a lick of shame and holy terror to give it more oomph.)
In essence, most spiritual traditions are framed as a form of drama. Whether pitched as a battle or laid out as an obstacle course, they provide a theatrical prism through which to view self and world. And who doesn’t love a good yarn?
Yet, beyond the spectacle of light v dark and the gamified treadmills of enlightenment seeking, there is an existential and metaphysical framework that offers to:
- Free us from fate
- End the endless holy war
- And let us grow up.
This may seem counter-intuitive, but I can assure you it works – if only because it helped me turn my life around. As a result, I am the happiest and lightest I have ever been.
Spiritually incorrect and loving it
Recently, I saw an online video in which the two participants launched a scathing assault on what they called nihilism. Like most others, they were operating on a belief that nihilists live a life of cold, amoral isolation, bereft and stranded in a monochromatically material world stripped of beauty and meaning. In this spiritless tundra, the nihilist is never far from crushing ennui and ‘yeah, whatever’ atrocity. They are sad, listless, unmotivated. Join the dots.4
The tone of pity, horror, and righteousness these pundits exuded parallels the response of doctrinal religions to atheism, apostasy, heresy, etcetera. Although our two spiritually correct commentators stopped short of advocating the death sentence, the tenor of their virtue signals suggested an attitude somewhere between incomprehension and revulsion. It is why I am writing this.
Since my early forties I have been evolving a practise of happy cosmic nihilism. Indeed, I usually call it ecstatic nihilism. Why? Because it is more than simply a relief – as in, there is no god to judge me, no karmic Simon Cowell to rubbish my act. It is instead a source of beauty and wonder so clean and profound that it can take my breath away. In my experience, nihilism is a door to moments of ego-dissolving flow and euphoria. It is a liberation from should. From the universally mandated snakes & ladders routine of relentless striving and compulsory failure. From the heavily censored script.
Yet, by making me the author of my own meaning movie, it also makes me responsible. I can no longer blame the spiritual studio execs, nor languish in the ready excuse of problem parents. Happy/Ecstatic Nihilism is an adult only pursuit.
I do not wish to claim superior virtue here, nor suggest that I have stumbled upon a silver bullet recipe for cosmic insight. Rather, I have found a way of imbuing life with a sense of meaning and purpose that does not rely on external approval and is not measured against the yardstick of pre-determined goals. As such, it does not feel like my life is an exam or audition. Nothing seems meant to be. It’s all just happening.
And here is where I anchor. In the unfolding. The process. Within this frame, I not only witness the process, I am the process. ‘I’ am action. Verb. In this, I am at one with everything else. In the act of becoming something else.
I am the process of witnessing my own (un)becoming.
Therefore, despite living without gods, pre-packaged meaning, and fixed identity, I would argue that my experience is very much a mystical stance.
Nihilism – or existentialism if you prefer – is not always the heartless horror show that New Age You Tubers, earnest theologians, and sundry pan-psychists would have us believe. Neither is it necessarily un-spiritual.
NB: Clearly, there is a lively philosophical discussion to be had here. However, since this is not the principal purpose of this piece, I invite those preferring a deeper dive to peruse previous posts. In The Divine Absence I examine the idea of the void and unpack what I like to call the ecstasy of nothingness. In Radical Lightness, I look at this in real-life terms as I explore further what it means to be anchored in process.
Escaping the spiritual police state
Far from being an intrinsically anti-spiritual or reductively naturalist perspective, happy nihilism is an invitation to a form of gratitude, presence, and humility that transforms our understanding of life, self, and world. Though it typically lacks the articles and lingua franca of standard faith models, it can encompass elements of ego-transcendence and mystical experience usually associated with spirituality.
Borrowing from both Hindu/Jain/Buddhist and Taoist philosophical traditions, it offers to de-clutter our awareness and appreciation by stripping out ornament. With a combination of Ockham’s Razor and minimalist architecture, it foregoes moral theatrics and inflated self-importance in favour of an accent on process.
As I suggested earlier, the emphasis is on emergence – continuous unfolding – rather than on the decoding of cosmic secrets or the pursuit of pre-determined wisdom & worthiness objectives. It acknowledges without dread or drama that all states are liminal, including those of self.
Yet rather than being merely intellectual, the happy nihilist view encourages us to take note of, and be thankful for, the awe-inducing experience of existing. On one level ‘this is it’ is humdrum, almost cliche. On another it is cleansing. A liberating and potentially ecstatic sense of presence and connection. Of wonder and thanks.
Here there is no judge, no assessment criteria, no need for a moral of the story. The central miracle is existence itself.
Whereas the standard response is to ask what it all means – or what it’s for – the spiritual existentialist contends that to exist is the reason. What could be more mysterious, encompassing, and awesome than existence itself? Indeed, perhaps existence is the purest form of meaning. Meaning in motion. Meaning as action.
The highest purpose is simply to be.
By now you get the point. Un-checking the essentialist defaults of human spirituality moves the locos of meaning-making from the external to the internal. In this, there is both freedom and accountability, for the one entails the other.
Thus, rather than a lazy, disengaged less, this is an effortful less, a discipline of less. It is a practise and, should you wish, you may approach it religiously.5
As someone who has embraced a life of less – a minimalist approach to things and thinking – I have enjoyed multiple benefits, some of which have been ecstatic and revelatory, others more pragmatic. It is no exaggeration to say that nihilism saved my sanity and, quite probably, my life.
- For more on this, check out Why I Never Got Round To Killing Myself elsewhere on this site.
To reiterate, happy cosmic nihilism is a form of spirituality. However, unlike the spiritually correct alternatives, it does not require us to locate reward at a distance – on a mountaintop or in another life. Neither are the pay-offs contingent on the approval of higher meaning police or the climbing of karmic ladders. Instead, oceanic awe and profound connection are available here. In the flesh. On the bus.
Furthermore, in the Godless/nihilist universe I choose to inhabit, the feeling of transcendence is one of amplified presence.
Cold? Heartless? Authoritarian? Not in my experience.
1: This has been referred to as the ‘mystical stance’. For further insight, see Robin Dunbar, How Religion Evolved. (Pelican, 2022.)
2: In The Pointless Revolution, (Everytime Press, 2019), I explore the workings of the External/Parental Authority Complex as it relates to spiritual, political, and moral beliefs. In addition, I examine its role in legitimising popular striving mantras and mandating the pass/fail objective models associated with mainstream faiths, hyper-individualist culture, and New Age spiritual constructions.
3: Another idea from The Pointless Revolution. The classic slave narrative is seeded in a complex of ‘fantasies of righteous victimhood and impending apocalypse’ that allow us to ‘blame the system for just about everything and remain rooted in ironically passive alt-smugness.’ In other words, the citizen martyr. The holy warrior/victim locked in a self-legitimising love/hate tango with the forces of Orwellian awfulness or divine authority.
4: To be fair, there is a strain of nihilism/existentialism that lends itself to the kind of selfish cynicism and caustic ennui that critics of the post-Enlightenment humanist/naturalist worldview frequently cite as evidence of a society in crisis. The ‘triumph of reason’ (modernity) is represented as having come at an intolerable cost; and godless nihilism is seen as both a symptom and accelerator of unsustainable materialism, dangerous cultural fracture, and creeping authoritarianism. We hear this broad-based critique, and sense the related unease, everywhere around us. Indeed, declinism appears to be the current communal default, finding outlet in a proliferation of holy war and end-of-everything dramas.
5: For more on less, check out Leidy Klotz’s, Subtract (Flatiron, 2021). It looks at what he calls ‘subtraction neglect’ as it plays out across design, time management, problem solving.
As If You Were Listening 