Annihilism
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Annihilism
/əˈnʌɪ(h)ɪlɪz(ə)m/ (n.)
A philosophy advocating not just the nihilistic rejection of all cultural, religious and moral principles but their wilful obliteration, in the belief that there is but a single moral truth: that life is meaningless, and that therefore any attempt to make sense of it, or reduce it to a kind of moral or political framework, is a sacrilege. In this way some philosophers regard annihilism as a kind of radical nihilism.
The term is credited to Otto Büchstein, and coming from Herculio’s soliloquy in Die Schweizer Heulsuse, cited below, even though Büchstein did not, exactly, use it.
Herculio: This is the excellent foppery of man,
To defile the random stars with base and mortal patterns:
To lay the spoils of canny fortune at the altar of the state —
Yet pin guilt for our disasters upon the untam’d cosmic wilds.
How now! O blasphemy!
Aye so: would we be brutes but for our philosophy
And not because of’t?
Would there be villainy but for kindly guiding hands
And not despite them?
We are but fools, knaves, and blighters: Heav’n compels it.
Heav’n? Real heaven: th’ unvarnish’d cosmos in its native state:
Not some twee artisanal paradise of tiny minds. Unbounded space
Which moves by rules no mortal mind can fathom.
So, Nature: rage and blow, and crack your leathery cheeks!
Grind, you plates of Tecton! Shift and grate!
Eradicate the rathaus! Annihilate our spindly-buttress’d spires!
Weave your snaking lava through our mealy testaments!
Singe those pompous beards within whose peppered whiskers
Our collected, piffling, wisdom nests!