Brief Letter To a Young Nihilist

Firstly, let me thank you for writing. After all, communication is the key to a better world, as sappy as that sounds. We both know that the particular frustrations versed in your letter could be dealt with through words or violence, and so to those ready to point fingers, understand that the shotguns, pistols, Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs are always lurking around the corner. In an empire born out of genocide and slavery, what else would you expect?

Know that in being told that you are “too young to be jaded,” you are in fact being written off. Your opinion is said not to count by those who hold power, because you they feel that they have you properly pinned down. The fact that you hold no power means that you have no voice, and therefore, who should listen to what you have to say? Those who want you to flow in the direction of the stream most likely see your youth as something of a detriment to their program. The fact that you are not buying what they are selling, enrages them to a point in which you are told that your ‘pessimism” is something that is normally accrued with age. Your feelings are barely seen as roadblocks in the greater initiative, and it is assumed that by the time you have to enter the work force, you will conform, submissively withering into silence, as was hoped by those that initially wrote you off. While at first glance, you feel that this disrespectful condemnation of your own ideas is something of a wall in which you yourself must climb over, understand that if you are written off, you are categorized already. It is that very categorization which makes you safer to those that finger-point, the elders, the powerful, who think that in labeling you, lecturing you, and putting you under wraps, that you no longer pose a threat to the status-quo.

However, your very existence is a threat to the fakery that surrounds you. Your influence of others echoes, and it pushes down barriers like dominoes. In casting out the conventional routes, you demand more from life. You start at a point of nothingness, and in accepting this as your only true reality, you are able to build yourself up on your own, without the need of the failing fictions that others believe in and follow blindly. In this, you are your own creation, and you amass the experiences and intelligence that comes with carving your own path regardless of any other possibility or consequence.

Why the absence of a belief in objective truth or some kind of pan-human essence is seen as negative, can certainly baffle those that just want proof. Those of us that value evidence over all else, understand that there is no good or bad reality that comes with the want to test all statements and acts, only then establishing their overall merit, until that day wherein they are tested again, and found to be false. The inherent value of anything can only be realized in its utility, and that utility is only really valid for as long as it profits one or more of us interested in its use.

In your letter you spoke of a feeling of desperation when looking out at the world. You spoke of an inability to act accordingly with your own ideas due to the check and balance component of the system in which you live. Firstly, you must understand that attacking the system physically, on your own, in the attempt to destroy it, will simply give the majority of those that want it to continue reason to arrest you, imprison you and possibly execute you. At the very best, you will be thoroughly silenced against your will, and this will keep you from communicating so successfully with others. It is this communication that is feared by those who wield power, because like a burning ember, it can start a great fire if given enough time.

Your best bet then is not to become frustrated by this lame attempt to silence you. Instead, working from within and utilizing all modes of cultural production, you can destroy the insides first. As evidence of the failing status-quo seeps into all forms of media and then into everyday conversation, much of your work is already done. But as there is a campaign to stop conversation concerning the flaws of religion, governments and supposed “accepted” ways of life, there must be one which never lets these monoliths of conformity to stop it. Simply by being one who devotes time to keeping these conversations going, shows that you refuse to allow to be written off.

It is great to hear from such an ambitious individual as yourself!

In Solidarity,

Delapruch