The post-American present

The future of 'no future' thinking

At present, there are two forms of nihilism about the present. They both have to do with the relationship of the present to the future. The first form of nihilism—let’s call it nihilism omega—urges you to erase the concerns of the present in favor of your aim at some desirable future. The second form of nihilism—let’s call it nihilism alpha—explodes and erodes the concept of the future itself, trapping us in a perpetual present; a time loop like Groundhog Day, where nothing ever changes, only the images get sharper and sharper.

I am not wedded to this terminology. There might end up being a better way to describe what I am seeing. Nevertheless, I write this in the hopes that it might stir some thoughts and conversation about where we find ourselves, at the moment, and what might be a way forward from here. If you have thoughts (and I hope you do), I welcome them.

Nihilism Omega

We’re all probably most familiar with omega-style nihilism. It is literally taught to us from our earliest moments of interaction with any contemporary institution, whether it is the institution of school, the economy, or the family. It’s logic is baked-in to the interactions we have with time itself. Imagine: you are standing at the window of the candy store, or you are at the counter with the cookie jar, and above you, over your shoulder, you hear the voice of the adult telling you that it will be better (for you, for the world, for everybody) if you learn to let go of your desire for the sweet and shiny thing right now, so that you can have a better sweet and shiny thing later.

Now granted, often that promise was predicated on a kind of lie. Often the sweet and shiny thing your parents wanted you to enjoy in the future was not a better cookie, but broccoli. That is, it would be something that they deemed good for you, even as you had your own budding ideas about what was good, and what was not good. You were learning discipline, and discipline was seen to be a virtue that worked in the present toward the future, so that you could enjoy the fruits of seeds sown now, that would not blossom until the season was nearly done.

As we grew older, of course, the promises and the lies grew more sophisticated, even as the language became more like a mantra, or a bumper sticker. Live like nobody else so you can live like nobody else, chirped financial evangelist Dave Ramsey, encouraging his callers and readers to abort their present desires for good things so that they might one day birth a life full of better things.

This logic, of course, did not begin with financial advisors and hedge fund managers. We can trace it in part back to Sigmund Freud, and his ideas about the pleasure principle and how we might (and should) move beyond the pleasure principle. For Freud, learning to defer our desires from the present into the future was a major part of moving from an appetite-ruled cretin to a mature and functioning adult. We’ll return to this idea, because there’s a bit more going on in Freud here, but for now, we can see the conceptual framework of “beyond the pleasure principle” summed up as forego the cookie now so you get a nice investment portfolio later.

The power of omega-style nihilism is that it seems so mature and rational. We can use its logic to convince ourselves that we are all steely-eyed missile men, foregoing the pleasures of the moment for the rewards of eternity. God and country will commend us, even if everything we love right now is going up in flames. As they used to sing it, in the sweet by-and-by, we will live on that beautiful shore. When it comes to omega-style nihilism, the future (whenever that is) is the only game in town.

Nihilism Omega in Practice

Probably the best example of omega-style nihilism is the American practice of chattel slavery. Standing at a safe distance, observers like us might ask, “Why didn’t the slaves rise up? Why didn’t they rebel and revolt against the violence they faced?” Of course, we know that many slaves did, in fact, revolt. They organized, and they communicated, and they found their ways out of the murderous system.

Nevertheless, there were many more who did not rebel, and who lived lives of futile desperation, with their authenticity and agency given over to the masters. In these cases, we can analyze the fruit of nihilism omega, over-ripe to the point of rot. The so-called Christian “owners” propagated the narrative that the god who condoned slavery in this life would welcome and reward slaves in the next life for their good service. The result being that, for those who believed the lie, there was a willingness to endure and ignore the violence of the present, in hopes of something better yet to come.

As Nolen Gertz puts it, in his book on nihilism, “To be a worker, to have to work for a living, is to be—as George A. Romero made clear in multiple subtext-rich movies—a member of the living dead.”¹ This is the result of a logic of infinite deferral: one’s life is bartered away in the hopes of a greater life to come, which never, in fact, arrives.

Nihilism Alpha

It’s 1978 and Johnny Rotten has just come on stage and grabbed the mic in the Winterland Ballroom as the Sex Pistols launch into “God Save the Queen.” They don’t quite know it at the time (though it becomes more evident as the concert progresses) but this will be their last show. Their bassist, Sid Vicious, is reaching the apogee (or is it the nadir?) of self-immolation, and everybody—Johnny especially—is just about sick of it. Here at the first song, though, all hands are still on deck, and everybody on stage is holding it relatively together. As well as can be expected, at least, for a goddamned punk rock band.

They run through “God Save the Queen” basically by the numbers. Except for a couple verse swaps by Johnny, it sounds pretty much just like the album. That means, as they gather steam towards the end of the final verse, everybody launches into the final refrain:

No future! No future! No future for you! No future! No future! No future for me!

It’s odd and awkward because the lines are literally true. The Sex Pistols, as the world knew them, would cease to exist that night. They had no future, just as Johnny promised. But beyond the literal, this idea of no future took up its own momentum in the world, and has spun out strange fruits in a myriad of directions.

Probably the most evident incorporation of this idea of no future comes to us in the philosophy and social commentary of the late Mark Fisher, particularly in his remarkable little book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? In the work, Fisher explores what it might mean to really inhabit what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history.” The results are dystopian, to say the least. For Fisher, capitalism has brought us to the point where our imaginations have atrophied, in every possible sense. We have lost the ability to imagine a future different from the present in which we are living right now. More than this, however, the present itself has lost its ability to imagine a future, and so it simply begins to mine and reproduce the past, in ever-more-detailed repetitions. To paraphrase a line or two from Capitalist Realism, we find ourselves watching 1970s sitcoms on high-definition television screens.

Fisher’s not wrong, of course. Look at all the ways we saturate ourselves with media that can only look backwards. Endless reboots and revisitations of franchises and intellectual properties that have already proven themselves in the marketplace. There is no more possibility of risk on any new idea; only those enterprises that are already well-established will be considered viable or bankable. So the animated film The Lion King is reimagined as a Broadway musical, only then to be reimagined again as a live-action motion picture. Meanwhile, the capital that is tied up in telling a new version of this old story, again and again, is unavailable for more original (and therefore riskier) ventures. The world of media is the bellwether, and soon all of our reality begins to curve inward upon itself. No future. No future for you. No future for me.

The temptation of alpha-style nihilism is the oubliette of solipsism—a mass delusion in which we forget the possibility of a future, and only remember the past insofar as it becomes a wash of the perpetual present.

Nihilism Alpha in Practice

The climate crisis is really the best example of a metastasization of alpha-style nihilism. We are stuck in a state where we can imagine the world ending, yes, but we simultaneously have the mass delusion that we will be observers of this fact, rather than participants in the horror. We have the delusion that we will be riding out the collapse in our armchairs, comfortable and comforted, rather than screaming in agony as we watch our loved ones suffer and as we suffer.

(If you haven’t read Timothy K. Beal’s excellent little book, When Time Is Short, this is a good time to do so.)

The delusion of alpha-style nihilism is that our greed is sustainable, and that our entertainment is reality. But no matter how much we declare parts of our media landscape to be “reality television,” we remain stuck in the stasis that David Bowie described so well, when he observed that we “are barred from the event.”

The Alpha Male meets the Omegaman

Of course, both these forms of nihilism are opposite sides of the same coin. Capitalism invites us to live perpetually toward a future that is never allowed to arrive. We certaily feel this whenever we look up from the grindstone long enough to realize that the cost of living has once again outstripped our ability to save or invest our way into a more comfortable income bracket. It always seems as if the benefits for which we have been working so diligently are skimmed off at the last minute and go to someone or somewhere else.

We were told that a college education was the path to higher wages and a better future, only to have that promise sponged away by unrelenting and incessant student loan payments. Now the gig economy is everywhere, and every form of employment has been rendered precarious. When we complain that the future we were promised never seemed to arrive, we are told that it is all our fault. We simply failed to plan properly, or work hard enough, or pay enough attention to the fine print. Or, worst of all, we are scolded, and told that we allowed ourselves too many joys in the short term. Did you buy a cup of coffee on the way to work each morning, or go to brunch and have the avocado toast? Well no wonder you are suffering now. No wonder.

Even though nihilism is touted as the ultimate form of disaffection and disconnection, it never actually works that way. We may imagine that nihilism is a way out of care and caring and being part of the “system,” when in fact it is very much the way in. The alpha male is the competent macho man. The omegaman is the survivor, the last man standing. In both cases, these strange archetypes are empty shells surrounding the walking corpses of hollow men. Life, even bare life, seems always to be elsewhere. The promise of life, however, is ever-present. If only we are a little more frugal, the good life awaits us. At the same time, we must abandon the hope of improvement. The best we will be able to manage is a rebrand, a reboot, or a sequel.

The post-American present

To borrow a popular phrase, one might hope to make America great again. This sounds like an arrow pointed toward the future, yes? At some point in time, yet to come, we will find ourselves great (again). And yet, the arrow also seems only to point backwards. How will we know when we are great? Only when we have become great again, that is, great like we were great the last time we were great. Which was when? When were we great? Oh, you know. You know.

At first, my instinct was to title this essay “Our Post-American Future.” I quickly realized, however, that part of the problem is that there is no future. There is no linear trajectory to get out of our continued regurgitation of the past into the unending present.

Or let me say it a different way: There seems to be no future for America. This experiment, however we understand it, seems to have run its course. So too, capitalism. The old stories of my youth are being repeated over, and over, with no end in sight, even as the batteries run down in the boom box.

We may yet live to see the abandonment of America by the rest of the world. Those with the means may flee, and some might even break through the walls of the glass house and get to a real future. The rest of us, unfortunately, know it is already far too late. Whatever might come next, it will be unrecognizable and unimaginable to those who now live as Americans.

Help me think this through

Again, I am not wedded to this language of nihilism alpha and nihilism omega as enduring concepts. Rather, they are placeholders to help me begin to think more fully about the circumstances that face us. As you have time and interest, dear reader, I would love to hear how you are thinking about and analyzing our “present unpleasantness.” Please feel free to leave a comment here, and my hope is that you will share this essay with your friends, so that they might weigh in as well. Thank you.

1. Nolen Gertz, NIhilism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019), 131.