1. Nihilism

"To characterise the modern age’s descent into chaos as being driven by nihilism would be mistaken."

Nihilism is the child of idealism. It was born out of Plato’s ‘ideas’, and then adopted and nursed within the cradle of Judaeo-Christian culture. Platonism's contribution to it's character was a lack of confidence in the evidence of the five senses, while Christianity supplied an idealised ‘Father’ remote and austere beyond the skies, an idealised ‘Son’ on Earth and an idealised woman in the form of mother. Such unachievable ideals and ideas are the preconditions for despair and nihilism. In the secular age, the invention of science set out to reclaim both empirical and theoretical certainty as the foundation for its worldview and society. However, the result of this new departure was that everything not amenable to its methods fell into the realms of doubt. Thus, a great deal of human culture began to disappear. Moreover, science’s methodological tenacity was to undermine its own foundations, which then also fell into doubt. As individuals we now live in an era in which the mind is assailed on every side by contending and contradictory input from every scientific and pseudo-scientific source, resulting in chronic uncertainty and paralysis. However, this is not the case for an impersonal politico-economic complex programmed to pursue the goals of the Enlightenment to their technological limits, generating along the way a trail of mass destruction, social alienation, mental psychosis, systemic suicide... nihilism.