The delusion that things (or everything, including the self) do not exist

Usage examples of nihilism.

But even apart from this perversity, his philosophy itself inclines towards a nihilism akin to Satanism.

It abandons us in this contradiction with no grounds either for preventing or for justifying murder, menacing and menaced, swept along with a whole generation intoxicated by nihilism, and yet lost in loneliness, with weapons in our hands and a lump in our throats.

And in that case, incidentally, what makes flagellantism worse than nihilism, Jesuitism, atheism?

What in the midst of the crisis in the 1920s appeared as transcendence against history, redemption against corruption, and messianism against nihilism now was constructed as an ontologically definite position outside and against, and thus beyond every possible residue of the dialectic.

This form of nihilism, despite appearances, is still nihilism in the Nietzschean sense, to the extent that it is a calumny of the present life to the advantage of a historical future in which one tries to believe.

This new Rousseauist nihilism of Gershenzon found a poignantly sincere expression in his part of that remarkable dialogue of letters in which he took part in 1920 with Vyacheslav Ivanov when the two were lying in a nursing home near Moscow.

Nagarjuna, the deconstruction of relative truths leaves not nihilism but Emptiness: it clears away the conceptual rubble in the mind's eye and thus allows the space of nondual intuition to disclose itself, and thus it follows to the limit the whole point of the IOU game: if you don't want to be a complete self-contradiction, then you must come to rest in infinite Emptiness, which alone redeems all IOUs, and which alone sets the soul free on the ocean of infinite Mystery.

The striking signs of confusional breakdown we see around us--the spreading use of drugs, the rise of mysticism, the recurrent outbreaks of vandalism and undirected violence, the politics of nihilism and nostalgia, the sick apathy of millions--can all be understood better by recognizing their relationship to future shock.

Illiterate punks defacing public property with spray-painted graffiti, suicide bombers, semicoherent pop stars selling rage and nihilism set to an infectious beat, attorneys specializing in tort law and filing massive class-action suits with the express intention of destroying major corporations and age-old institutions, serial killers, drug dealers, crooked cops, corrupted corporate executives cooking the books and stealing from pension funds, faithless priests molesting children, politicians riding to reelection by the agitation of class envy: All these and numerous others, working at different levels, some as destructive as runaway freight trains hurtling off the tracks, others quietly chewing like termites at the fabric of civility and reason, were necessary to cause the current order to collapse into ruin.

On April 28, while Dillinger loaded his gun and the kachinas of Orabi began the drum-beating, the Acapulco Gold-Diggers arrived, followed by the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Dracula and His Brides, the Iron Curtain, the Noisy Minority, the International Debt, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, the Cloud of Unknowing, the Birth of a Nation, the Zombies, Attila and His Huns, Nihilism, the Catatonics.

Nihilism even more often born of a walk through the Old Town in mid-August.

Illiterate punks defacing public property with spray-painted graffiti, suicide bombers, semicoherent pop stars selling rage and nihilism set to an infectious beat, attorneys specializing in tort law and filing massive class-action suits with the express intention of destroying major corporations and age-old institutions, serial killers, drug dealers, crooked cops, corrupted corporate executives cooking the books and stealing from pension funds, faithless priests molesting children, politicians riding to reelection by the agitation of class envy: All these and numerous others, working at different levels, some as destructive as runaway .