In which way are you not a nihilist?

Jennifer Armstrong

Painter, Sculpt, PhD African lit, author, performance artistJust now

Something I have tended to do in life is to take on other people’s burdens. Now I suppose in some sense this was actually nihilistic, because self-negating, although that would only be true if life and one’s relationship to others really is a zero-sum game, rather than having any sort of other meaning.

IN my young and immature days, if someone suggested I was to blame for something, I always assumed that they must be right. I was always thinking how can I stretch myself out further and do more for the war effort. I thought that one must be heroic, to survive. But this was all based on a false premise that society is inherently good and people are inherently benevolent. In most cases, there is a huge gap that defies my expectation of this being true. Nonetheless, given the topsy-turvy interpretation of the world we are susceptible to, my parents always beat me for not giving my all to others. Or, if I unconsciously took on the blame for systems way beyond my control, they would practice “tough love” and beat me some more for not coming out of that experience in one piece. I’m sure it never really crossed their minds to give me their support, rather than telling me that if life were imperfect, it was my fault.

As a result of having this extreme Christian stoicism engendered in me, I did not fair well in life, but was everybody’s Patsy or whipping girl. It’s not that I had any desire to sacrifice myself at all, I just thought that if I didn’t accept blame and try to improve myself the whole system of society would fall apart. But this was untrue (although the feeling of it tends to linger).

Given this rather sordid and destructive state of affairs, I consider myself lucky in an enormous way for coming across Nietzsche and his writings, just when I was in the midst of being allocated the role of office scapegoat for — you guessed it — circumstances beyond my control. Nietzsche began to reverse the whole dizzying Christian experience by teaching me that all such extremes or absolutes, especially moral absolutes, “belong to pathology”.

Since I first began to learn this lesson, I have been reversing the damage done to my health from the paternal side of my family. I resist philosophical idealism, because it leads me back down the same direction, towards damage through obliviousness to my own needs. It takes me down the wrong garden path. My own needs for survival keep me on track, to make sure that I never again become a nihilist.