Casey Gilfillan

How does the existentialist cope with the collapse of society? She doesn’t – she is validated in a way that she didn’t necessarily hope to be. The boiled down, husk and bones of the philosophy is the position that existence precedes essence. This means that your life is defined by the choices and actions you take rather than some predetermined form or characterization, i.e . ‘human nature.’ The confines of one’s facticity does not seal one’s purpose, as it would with an inanimate object that is created for a specific purpose, such as a letter opener; you are not born a coward in the same way something is made to be a letter opener. Existentialists believe in the free fall of godlessness, the absence of predetermined fate and the accompanying responsibility held by each individual to actualize their experience.

When you step away from the notion that your life has a meaning you have been tasked to decipher, it allows you to open your eyes. Once you acknowledge that you wield the purpose-creating power, and it is merely a matter of giving your own existence that sought-after “value” of meaning through fulfillment, there are two natural responses and it is normal to experience both. One: the revelation is comforting, I am the captain of my ship and there is no standard against which its experiential value can be weighed. Two: the revelation is overwhelming, I am driving blind into the dark abyss without a guide, the helplessness of having nowhere I am “supposed” to go. Once it settles, I find that you mostly exist within the first mindset and experience flickering moments of  the second, best characterized as the feeling you get when you look off the top of a really tall thing and see the great expanse of falling capacity before you.

But when you realize that nothing has meaning unless we give the meaning to it, you might wonder, what means anything? Government, bureaucracy, money, rules, administration, legality, etc. all rests upon human adherence to arbitrary structure established by other humans. The current administration does whatever they want; they break laws, defy judicial orders, and impede constitutional rights without consequence. If not for lacking in common morality what we have in partisan loyalty, the president could have easily been impeached 10 times. Instead, he sits comfortably in his office with his finger on the war button and his other hand stuffed in a McDonald’s bag. So, what about it? What means anything – nothing, obviously! Nothing means  anything if we all stop listening. Just as Donald and ICE demonstrate  the impermanence of man’s law – what are rules and decrees that can be violated with impunity? What is murder if you call it something else? What is the right to bear arms if lawfully doing so warrants the spray of lead into your chest; what is the right to protest peacefully if your actions of assembly and witness become grounds for state-sanctioned execution? Orders being shouted into the void, gavels hammered to no avail. None of it means anything, unless we give the meaning to it.

This is not a call for hopelessness, though this perspective often gets confused with such a tone. There is still a fight to be had for the tattered remains of the nation’s soul, now is not the time to delve into woeful pessimism. Rather, it is the time to recognize the need for unorthodox methods, radical philosophy, and rejection of “rules” that your enemy themselves spits in the face of.