Links to other sites on the Web
Comedy Central
Comedy links:
How to breed consumers - A manual
This page is dedicated to our Lord Jesus "I Run It All" Christ.
-Seymore 8:13
...may the angels of reason fly eloquently out of your ears and,
in passing, sing John Cougar Melonhead songs while stealing your seratonin...
-Sigmund 6:69
...and thus the creator brings Christmas presents to us that upon
opening, smell not unlike the decks of a disoriented fishing boat adrift on the
sea of unfulfilled life...
Dr. Saladtosser 6:66
Links to other sites on the Web
The great scriptures of the ancients.
The great "Staying Alive Note" found in the temple of the Slaw.
Jocular Nihilism was started in the fifth century BBM (before bad mark) which
translates into roughly the beginning of the new Christian Renaissance or
1400 AD. It is a secular belief which tenets include: dichotomy,
cthonianism, paganism, rebellion and millerism. The first American
roots of Jocular Nihilism started in 1848 in northwestern Illinois,
where a small band of nomadic writers broke from the Church of Latter
Day Saints. The prophet Joseph Smith fathered an illegitimate son
named Henrique Smith who, as a recalcitrant youth, found his own
unique way in life. He was a boy who "was like no other" according
to Brigham Young, Joseph's right-hand man, he was like a voice
from another time. "His charisma was undeniable, but his tactics
were highly irreverent and his methods anti-social to say the least."
Henrique moved to Carthage, Illinois where he witnessed his father's
murder in the coming years. His livelyhood depended on his career
as a writer and he succeeded in selling books disquised as Christian
literature. In this books were subterranean messages esoteric to
most that, when put together, formed the beginnings of a religion
or a philosophy so powerful that nothing in its wake could compare.
The ideals expressed by Henrique Smith were used in clandestine
form throughout American literature, and even today. He was said
to influence Walt Whitman, Anais Nin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel
Kant, Ayn Rand, Albert Einstein, Adolph Hitler, and even JFK. Most of
his theology, though he wouldn't call it that, is little known
in the Occident, but the threads it has woven are discreetly undeniable.
One of the main tenets of Henrique Smith are the issues of personal
responsibility; his most famous, perhaps, being the theories regarding
the mutilation of the self by parenthood. Smith saw child-rearing as
a self-denial, a humilation to the individual in that the adult
trades value of the self for value of the "other", the progeny, as
a form of supreme dereliction. The self has failed me, the adult
says, and I must try again in failure. This message to the self is
undeniable. Another life cannot be created, to paraphrase another
prophet, until the first life is attained. Metaphysical attainment
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been overlooked and
undervalued, for certain, and thus the dereliction of the self has
reigned as victor. Through this, Smith believes, there is a moral
and intelletual decay, marked by a rise in basic, hypocritical
Christain belief.
One of Smith's most controversial topics is his theory on Hilterian
rebellion. He lived in Germany during the end of his life and
talks of a sense of Germanic anti-religion sentiment. It is believed that
Smith would have thought Hitler to be a perverse expression of existentialism's Superman, an
icon perhaps, that went crazy and brought internecine poison to a land
wanting pragmatism. Hitler, as we know, relied heavily on the nihilism
wrought on Occidental thought by Friedrich Nietzsche, using these
ideas out of context and in a controlling un-existential methodology.
Nietzsche himself was blamed for much of this decline and terror though he
was long since crazy and dead. To Smith's predecessors, Hitler was the fin de siecle out of
place and time, the angel of reason that was perverted by an insane
world. To revere Germanic terror (not anti-semitism in particular) as an
idea and not and end, said post-Smith writers, is the greatest expression of
intellectual discourse.
This idea is easily understood and taken out of context. Smith never
lived during WWII and he may have taken a different stance on these
issued. His predecessors certainly debated these issues and wrote
blasphemous remarks about Germanic rebellion and authoritative
terror in general. Many late twentieth century critics, though,
have come to understand that Smith's rebellion was not as easily
categorized as simple philosophy and that any specific remarks
by him and his followers may be made for reaction rather than
content.
It is important to note then that Smith's anti-Christain feelings
were based in simple existentialism and came full force a decade
before those of Nietzsche. It is important to note that the great
German nihilist did make reference to the psuedo-theism of the
jocular nihilist in his least known work "a moral pedometer for
existence" written in 1887 during a manic weekend in Northern France.
He wrote of Henrique Smith: "Let there be a man of this world
who speaks his mind freely and openly and the weight of the minions
will crush his spine and forever stall and paralyze the ideology
of even the most sagacious mind...". It was discovered years later
that when Nietzsche wrote this book he was concurrently reading and
collecting papers by Smith that were being distributed throughout Paris
by a group known as the Popular Nihilists (see: "The Brigans of
Nihilism" by Albert Despot, Grove Press, 1922). In one of the papers
that Nietzsche had until his death in 1900 by Smith, there was a
reference to "the world breaking my back, burdening me with the
very enemy of nihilism, the very horrific idea that one is as yet
so sure of anything... especially existence."
Jocular Nihilism is then rich in cultural history though its roots
are hidden somewhat carefully under the pavement of modern intellectual
enlightenment. The full discussion of the theology itself is contained
in the more complex, longer documents in the many books written
by Smith and containing the Paradigm of Social Nihilism or the
backbone of the movement. This paper is too small in scope to excerpt
from these tomes.
Let it be known though that the main thrust is that belief is
transitory and ethereal, not of heavenly ether but of the ether itself,
the nothingness of space, and that nothing is in itself "something" and
perhaps, paradoxically, the most powerful knowledge attained by
man. True rebellion comes from a defense of "nothing" and the right
to be ruled by "nothing" (in that it is "something") and that
the unknowable is as powerful as the known only in that it is
uncalculable, but it is still reasonable. The word reasonable seeeingly
the crux of Smith's idealogy because of his assertion that blind
faith is the weak man's cry for help, the paroxism of the
afflicted and the last hand-hold of the existentially sick. Smith
once said at an academic conference in Bainsfield, Ma something
that has henceforth stayed with most of his critics. He said, "My dear sirs and madams and
few compatriots, it pains me to say as aphorism that most people
are not much." It is interesting also as the critics jeer and
balk that this phrase, the last five words, comprise the epitaph
on his grave in Big Sur, California.
