4.6 Nihilists see nurturance as an existential threat
The very worst result of child abuse is when…
The abuser turns nurturance into a threat.
He tells his daughter, This is love, as he sexually assaults her. He hurts her, he scares her, he makes her feel bad about herself, he isolates her from her mother, her siblings, her friends, and then he says…
This is love.
And I am the only one who really loves you. And I am the only one teaching you about love.
And the lesson settles in. Into the daughter’s body, into her soul. So later, when someone comes along offering help, she has an instant, reflexive fear reaction. She pulls back, she resists, she refuses, she runs away because she feels herself to be under attack.
When you destroy nurturance for a child, you are trapping her inside her suffering, and…
There’s no exit.
How could we not call this evil?
In cases like this it takes a particularly adept and determined therapist to break through the threat and bring the abuse survivor back to safety. It can be done but it’s really hard work, first for the therapist, but especially for the survivor.
Now let’s shift into the political realm and look at the burgeoning tribe of nihilists in our country, and ask…
What have they done to themselves?
They’ve surrendered to utter despair and erupted into bitter rage. And this is nihilistic rage, meaning it takes them deeper into their despair which takes them deeper into their rage, which is a death spiral.
And in the process they…
Destroy nurturance for themselves.
They close the exit and make themselves…
Dependent on a culture of death.
And dependent on the tribe of death that earnestly promotes that culture.
Then along comes someone offering nurturance. And how do these nihilists react? Do they say…
“Oh, good you can help me. You can help make things better for me and my tribe. Welcome!”
If they’ve only taken a step or two into nihilism, if they’re nihilism newbies, nurturance might bring them back out.
But the deeper in they go, the more likely…
They’ll see nurturance as a threat.
An existential threat.
At first glance this makes no sense. Nurturance is life–giving. It’s not going to kill you. So what exactly is it threatening?
For the far–gone nihilists, the death culture is their…
Defense system.
It defends them from having to feel how much they’re hurting. And how hopeless they are. And how their most basic core human need for love and care is not being met.
What nurturance threatens then is not their lives but their defense system.
So when activists offer help, nihilists see them as the…
Enemy.
They might even take the benefits being offered, but still consider those bringing the benefits as the enemy.
For example, many in the nihilistic Tribe of Trump depend on Social Security and Medicare which the Democrats have steadfastly protected over the years. But still the Democrats are the enemy.
And maybe it fills the nihilists with even more rage to realize they have to depend on their enemies for benefits that their own tribe is not only not giving them, but is eagerly trying to take away.
And maybe it enrages them that they’re dependent on a death tribe, when there is nurturance out there in the world.
And how crazy–making is it to…
Depend for your life on a culture of death.
Nurturance, the very thing nihilists need most, and urgently and desperately…
Is the very thing that scares nihilists the most.
And so no wonder tens of millions of people in our country are losing their minds.
