#title Anarcho-Nihilism Review
#subtitle The Ideology of Insurrection
#author Jreg
#date Jan 11, 2021
#source <[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug][www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-05-11T05:40:44
#topics anarcho-nihilism, anarchism, existentialism,
Eco-nihilism (according to eco-nihilists rofl) is not so much “do nothing” as it is “focus on local communities and maintaining autonomy in the face of inevitable climate catastrophe” I got the meme at the end from here:
[[https://www.instagram.com/p/CFpzbS6nDHo/]]
Timestamps:
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug&t=1s][0:00]] Intro
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug&t=26s][0:26]] Part 1: Russian Nihilism
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug&t=144s][2:24]] Part 2: Post-Leftism
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug&t=223s][3:43]] Part 3: Post-Modernism and Negation
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug&t=331s][5:31]] Part 4: Insurrection
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug&t=432s][7:12]] Part 5: Climate DeNihilism || No Global Future
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug&t=553s][9:13]] Part 6: Struggle As An End
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug&t=589s][9:49]] Part 7: A Post-Modern Right
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug&t=731s][12:11]] Part 8: Praxis
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug&t=804s][13:24]] Conclusion
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug&t=865s][14:25]] Song footnotes
--------------
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5woPQU2uug]]
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*** Intro
Hello, and welcome to Ideology Reviews, a new show where we numerically grade political ideologies in a desperate attempt to figure out which one will fill the hole in our hearts best.
I’m your Jreg, and today we’re going to be looking at a narco-nihilism.
Now before I begin, I just want to say that none of what I’m about to talk about is an endorsement, necessarily, of the ideas.
I’m simply presenting these ideas to you, and you can make your own judgments about them.
That being said, I explicitly endorse everything I’m about to say.
*** Part 1: Russian Nihilism
Ah yes, once again we talk about a wacky ideology, and once again we find ourselves back in Russia.
Something about cold, miserable people lends itself to extremism, apparently.
As a Canadian, I would not know.
Narco-nihilism has its roots in the Russian nihilist movement, although as a current day political ideology, it really...
is really more of a footnote.
It’s not super relevant to how it operates today.
Russian nihilism came about in a very specific historical context, namely that life was marginally worse than it is in current day Russia.
Essentially, this was back when the Tsar was ruling.
Power structures were justified through the Russian Orthodoxy.
Essentially, life was so bad that they invented being edgy.
Russian nihilists just invented the concept of being an edgy teen.
Basically, Russian nihilists were atheistic, materialistic.
Some people really liked nihilism, some people really hated nihilism.
Dostoevsky, for example, was a notorious example of a guy who really didn’t like all those nihilists, calling up the place and here you see what could be described as a little few seeds of anarcho-nihilism starting to sprout in Russia.
They killed the Tsar.
Well, okay, they were accused of killing the Tsar, or at least precipitating the Tsar’s death.
Although at a certain point, everyone just started calling everything bad that happened, the fault of the nihilists and then the state got a little crueler and cracked down on those nihilists, basically ending Russian nihilism right there.
However, even though Russian nihilism ended there, anarcho-nihilism and nihilism as an ideology continued to spread and now, nihilism lives on in insurrectionary anarchist and individualist anarchist circles.
Oh, also, fun fact, the Black Hand that killed the Archduke, Franz Fernand of Austria, was widely decried by the Austria-Hungarian press as nihilist.
So, did the nihilists kickstart World War I, which then started World War II, which then kicked into place every major world event since then? No, probably not.
Let’s move on.
*** Part 2: Post-Leftism
Narco-nihilism is what we call a post-leftist ideology.
What that means is basically on a political compass, they’re over here.
I just want to take a minute to talk about the progress that post-leftism has made ever since I started talking about it on this channel.
You see, before your buddy Drag came along, nobody knew what post-leftism was.
They just thought they did and now...
Nothing has changed.
I regret nothing.
Same political discourse on the internet, not on Dregs Watch.
Gah, gah, gah.
Post-leftist ideology is explicitly not a leftist ideology, although it’s definitely not a right-wing ideology.
According to post-leftists, at least, post-leftists are not leftists.
That’s debatable, but according to the post-leftist, they’re not leftists.
Why is this? Well, here’s an example, right? An anarcho-nihilist differs from your typical leftist in the fact that a nihilist is actively rejecting ideas of state, family, hierarchy, which maybe a leftist might agree with, but then they also reject ideas like equality and human rights on a first principles basis.
Leftist means of organizing, leftist groups, leftist visions of the future, all of that explicitly gets negated.
Another way you could look at it is if leftist critique just ate itself.
Don’t do deconstruction alone, kids.
It’s not safe.
*** Part 3: Post-Modernism and Negation
Okay, real quick, one aspect of post-modernism, one of many aspects of post-modernism, we’re not going to get into it, is a rejection of what we might call the metanarrative.
A metanarrative is essentially just this idea that sort of claims to structure or explain or organize humanity in a certain direction.
So for example, Marxism and the ideas, the utopias of Marxism, all of that from a nihilistic perspective is a meta-narrative and so it would be rejected under that framework.
So the whole post-modern neo-Marxist idea, in theory at least, doesn’t mesh well at all.
Although you could say in practice maybe there’s some cognitive dissonance going on there.
So postmodernism and nihilism both share this active rejection of the metanarrative.
Family, God, Order, Money writes, nihilism is skeptical and contemptuous often of all of these things.
postmodernism continues these critiques into areas like gender and sex, but also mainly the notion of an objective truth.
There’s some similarities between postmodernism and nihilism, but don’t get them confused and Russian nihilism actually had a lot more in common with modernity than it did with postmodernity in the sense that it was rejecting what they viewed as esoteric in favor of science and materialism.
So essentially, when a conservative says, these leftists just want to tear down society because they’re all nihilists and resentful towards the world, and a leftist says, no, that’s not true at all.
We instead want to text, the narco-nihilist is just like, Yeah.
Somewhere at the end of time, there’s a battle between Jordan Peterson and an anarcho-nihilist.
You’ll never make me believe in the metaphysical importance of God, Jordan.
You’re going down, bucko.
*** Part 4: Insurrection
An insurrection is an explicitly violent uprising against the state.
Anarcho-nihilism is an ideology of explicit insurrection.
Why are we talking about insurrection right now? No reason.
narco-nihilism, because they don’t view, for example, human life as having any innate importance, like any metaphysical importance, they are basically more inclined to violence? Because if there’s no god watching you, kneecap a government official with your gun and drive off, then, I mean, it’s not like you’re gonna get cosmically punished for that action.
But what’s important to note is that just because anarcho-nihilism is an insurrectionary ideology, not all insurrectionary ideologies are anarcho-nihilism.
There’s a lot of reasons that one might cause an insurrection, and a lot of those reasons have nothing to do with anarchism whatsoever.
Marxist-Leninists and fascists alike both hate the liberal democratic state, but that doesn’t mean that they’re anarchists.
There’s a lot of reasons an ideology might call for a violent uprising against the state.
Very few of those reasons end up being to just leave the state dismantled.
Insurrectionary anarchism and anarcho-nihilism aren’t separate ideologies.
Insurrectionary anarchism is a form of anarchist praxis that uses violence against the state.
Anarcho-nihilism is the ideology that underpins and justifies using insurrection as an anarchist.
Violent insurrection is justified through anarcho-nihilism, because anarcho-nihilism doesn’t value something like human rights or even human life, inherently.
So if you kneecap a government official, for example, there’s not going to be any cosmic punishment awaiting you for doing crime and punishment, et cetera, et cetera.
Get out of here, Dostoevsky.
You’re not my real dad.
*** Part 5: Climate DeNihilism; No Global Future
Anarcho-nihilists don’t have the prettiest view of the future.
Nihilists, like a lot of post-left anarchists, don’t subscribe to this idea of human progress.
Whether it’s anti-civ anarchists who view society as an abomination, or nihilists that outright rejects the idea of human progress as a meta-narrative, post-leftists don’t tend to like the way that human society is heading.
You could even say that of extremist ideologies, they are the most society type of ideology out there.
Desert, for example, is basically a critique of leftist ideas that say that we can do something about climate change.
Basically, it says, no, we’re ****** and we’re ****** real bad, too? And you trying to peddle this hope that if we all band together and work as a team, we’ll be able to reverse it? We’ll just make everything worse.
Essentially, the anarcho-nihilist position on climate change is, yeah, it’s real.
Oh, you want me to come to your protest so we can increase the marginal tax rate by 3%? Nah, I’m not sure you’ve realized this yet, but you’re gonna ******* die.
You can definitely see this tension between leftist ideology and anarchist post-left anarcho-nihilist ideology.
Left environmentalists obviously think that leftism is the solution to climate change by nipping capitalism the bud and the general environmentalist critique of this kind of boomerism is, well, you know, it’s not Exactly helpful to be complaining that there’s nothing we can do about it, but the nihilists’ response to that is basically, Let’s accept that there’s nothing we can do about it, and then go from there.
Here’s a fun quote: So, nihilists being against meta-narratives are also against...
the idea of progress and by being against progress, they’re in a way kind of against time.
Every attempt to block the global system, every movement, every revolt, every uprising should be seen as a vertical attempt to stop time.
Yes, the anarcho-nihilist seeks to stop time.
Very based.
You can also see this as antithetical to an accelerationist kind of philosophy that wants to accelerate time.
The nihilist conception of time is that the past and future are only constructs, and so all that exists is the present and if all that matters is the present, then theorizing in academia and coming up with all these great ideas in your head sound nice, doesn’t really matter.
*** Part 6: Struggle As An End
In the anarcho-nihilist framework, struggle against the state is not a transitionary period towards a greater utopia.
A struggle is not a means to an end, it is the end.
The nihilist has no grand utopia he’s working towards.
Resistance is is just kind of something you do.
This is from an article about anarcho-nihilists.
The members aren’t out to represent you or to protect anybody from the ruthless grip of inequality.
They are not Hugo Chavez or Vladimir Lenin.
They don’t care if your plight isn’t represented if you’re just standing by with your hands in your pockets.
But if you’re fighting like they are, if you are reaching into those pockets of yours and pulling out a letter bomb or a pistol, for example, then they’re most definitely with you.
*** Part 7: A Post-Modern Right
Alright, brief pause here.
Let’s zoom out and apply the ideas of nihilism and post-modernism to a broader sense, outside of a leftist or anarchist frame, and let’s go into the right.
It might be fun to try to describe something called a postmodern right.
A postmodern right would either consciously or unconsciously adopt some of the tenets of postmodernism to benefit their movement.
This, by the way, might go against the conception you might have in your head as the right standing against postmodernism and the left kind of advancing postmodernism.
Anarchism and nihilism are obviously extremely compatible philosophic, but can nihilism and nationalism be something that is compatible.
Now, right-wingers often accept the idea of the meta-narrative because it goes with their beliefs.
But what happens if the meta-narrative stops going with their belief and instead starts pointing in the other direction? What if this myth of human progress starts to apply more to other groups of people rather than their own ideology and they don’t like it? Essentially what I’m saying here is what if the right-wing rejects the meta-narrative? Whereas a traditional right-winger might be a right-winger because they believe that the facts are on their side and they can definitely defend their arguments with facts and logic, a new postmodern right-winger may not really be interested in what the mainstream consensus of facts are.
A postmodern right is a right-wing that rejects the general consensus of absolute truth and does so with gusto, because they know that it’s beneficial for their ideology, for them as a group.
Because if you reject the broader consensus of capital T truth, you can instead focus on the group truth, which is its own subjective reality, but still truth.
Essentially, a new postmodern right might act out the tenets of postmodern nihilism for explicitly anti-nihilist and anti-anarchist purposes.
A bitter rejection of an overly leftist or overly neoliberal status quo.
A new postmodern right explicitly doesn’t care about the facts peddled by the mainstream.
Choosing local narratives over the meta-narratives as post-modernists are wont to do.
When capital T Truth does not fit with or is actively harmful towards the ideological framework, the ideological framework spits it out like a poison.
So basically, the right wing can de-territorialize post-modernism and nihilism from the left taking the ideas and removing them from their cultural origins.
It’s a really great time to be alive right now.
*** Part 8: Praxis
But all of this is just wacky nonsense, right? Anarcho-nihilism is just some edgy ideology cooked up by a 14-year-old in Russia, and now it’s just some idea in people’s heads, and it has no actual bearing on reality...
Oh, what’s that? Oh, it’s actually the ideological underpinning of several left-wing terrorists.
I find this extremely upsetting and absolutely not based.
Instead of peacefully handing out leaflets, they mask up and employ the full force of direct action, proven by their many attacks, like the bombing of private banks in Rome, the torching of surveillance towers in Russia, and the destruction of rail lines in the UK.
They’ve also tried to send letter bombs to MEPs, which were either intercepted or didn’t explode, something the FAI says was an intentional scare tactic.
The FAI is one of these insurrectionary anarchist nihilist groups.
They send mail bombs to people, they shoot government officials in the knee.
It’s, uh, terrible.
I disavow.
The FAI isn’t the only insurrectionary anarchist nihilist group in the world, but it is one of the more well-known ones, and they’re still active today, in September 12.
2020, they sent multiple mail bombs across Italy, which is really too bad, and I do cry in the strongest possible terms.
*** Conclusion
It’s time we grade anarcho-nihilism on how extreme the ideology is.
Now, because this is an anti-centrist channel, we’re going to be removing all numbers between 1 and 10, because we don’t give middling opinions around here.
Fun fact, if you want to know if something is actually against the status quo or is just posturing to be, check if they’re on terrorist watch lists.
If they’re on terrorist watch lists, It’s probably a safe bet that they’re against the status quo.
With that in mind, anarcho-nihilism is an easy 10.
Will anarcho-nihilism fill the hole in your heart? No, but it might help you understand that nothing will fill that hole in your heart.
Nobody understands me for the last time.
Dad, get out of my room and final question, will anarcho-nihilism get you laid? The answer is yes, but only from somebody who is currently wanted by the FBI or someone who is pretending to be someone who’s interested in you.
It actually works for the FBI.
That or somebody who works at Hot Topic.
Let me know other ideologies you would like to see me cover.
I’d like to thank one of my patrons, Anarcho-Deluzian, for sending me a reading list about anarcho-nihilism.
If you like this format and want to see more of it, let me know in the comments.
If you don’t like this format and don’t want to see more of it.
Too bad, what does this look like? A fucking democracy?
*** Final Meme
[Anarcho-communist singing:] This land is your land, this land is my land. From California to the New York Island. From the redwood forests, to the gulf stream waters...
[Anarcho-nihilist rap interruption:] [screams] Triple 9, eat a dick. Deathkult, break shit. Raise hell, rob shit. Triple 9, eat a dick. Deathkult, break shit. Raise hell, rob shit.