Maybe Nihilism is the Real Enemy?
And if so, what non-oppressive things can be done about it? (Trigger warning: somewhat uplifting ending.)
When I was a teenager, the spiritual enemy was clear: conformity, dullness, the fact that so many people (it seemed to me) seemed to be asleep in their lives. I was a frustrated, pre-closeted, over-intelligent and lonely kid. I looked around at the cheerleaders and the football players, and I thought ugh. I didn’t rebel all that much, really, but I read books and listened to the music of rebellion. And the films: Heathers, The Breakfast Club, Dead Poets Society. I wanted to escape the system, seize the day, make my life extraordinary — not to find, when it came time for me to die, that I had not lived.
These were the privileged, adolescent dreams of someone safe enough to dream them. I understand that. And yet I don’t want simply to dismiss them. They were right, in their way, and they reflected an emotional reality.
As I grew older, the enemy shifted a bit. It turned out, I learned, that the dull, enforced conformity of Reagan-era suburbia was just one face of the Machine, and and that others were more fearsome: oppression, racism, war-mongering, capitalistic greed, environmental devastation, and a conservative moralism which insisted upon imposing itself on everyone else. (In college, I also discovered irony, which I quickly applied to my earlier sincerity.) I protested the first Gulf War and the second Gulf War. In New York, went to RNC protests, WTO protests, I went to Occupy – eventually to Black Lives Matter as well. I worked as an LGBTQ activist for a decade.
I soon learned that the ‘enemy’ was more a coalition than a hydra. There wasn’t just one big patriarchy or oligarchy — there were multiple factions, often competing with one another: corporatist plutocrats, the Christian Right, Tea Party lunatics (later to become MAGA nationalists), bigots in various forms. And, among them, sincere conservatives and moderates who were perfectly fine people except insofar as they allied themselves with un-fine ones. Turned out, there were many vectors of oppression, some parallel and some intersecting.
Of course, the ‘enemy’ was never a group of people. It was a constellation of emotions, ideas, qualities of human nature that we all possess, like favoring the in-group over the out-group, or making decisions based on ignorance, fear, rage and disgust. The enemy was within me and you, not a matter of us and them. And these aspects of human nature weren’t even an enemy: they had evolved over millennia for very good, articulable reasons, but now harmed more than they helped.
Now, in 2026, I wonder if the real enemy isn’t something else: nihilism.
