Against Nihilism

Politics in the age of stupidity. Against the senile vibe shift.

My mom and I in late 90s Moscow

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Since my debut as a Twitter troll and a crusader against the Red Scare broads and the ethos they promote, I felt that I had almost by accident picked up a rock and all the vipers, worms, and bugs crawled out from under it and tried to bite me. It didn’t sting though because I had been injected with anti-poison — anti-nihilism.

My little crusade was not just about some particular person or people who have “bad politics”. What I wanted to convey (and Twitter is obviously not a great place for it) was that the nihilism I see being pushed on young people by the “cool” downtown crowd isn’t hip or new or edgy. I spent more than half my life in a society where this nihilism has reigned supreme and to me it was never a symptom of rebirth but of societal collapse.

As a person who grew up in Moscow in the 1990s on the rubble of the Soviet Union — a cynical vibe surrounded me. It became dominant long before I could be cognizant of it. This vibe was the only thing I knew: pervasive cynicism, apathy, and a mockery of anything that wasn’t just about making money. There was the widespread belief that anything that sounded like a “do gooder” slogan had a hidden agenda behind it…that any politics that even vaguely tried to help people was a scam. Everyone is for themselves — that’s just how the world works. That’s how people thought. Meanwhile, the country was looted by top Soviet apparatchiks and industrious upstarts who became billionaires almost overnight, privatizing the natural resources of the 1/6th of the earth.

This kind of cynicism, which was so pervasive in my childhood and youth, seemed to not be a big thing in America when I moved here in 2011. I didn’t think too deeply about it back then but its absence was refreshing. I was in my early twenties and here many people my age had a sort of naiveté. They believed in a better future, in political solutions to societal problems. When I first came here it was the height of Occupy Wall Street and it felt inspiring. All these people cared…cared enough to try to do something. Yasha even got arrested in a raid on the Occupy camp in LA and spent two nights in jail and then later infected me with scabies. So I felt I like I was a bit in the trenches too, that I was part of it.

Still I couldn’t shake my old culture. The political optimism and activism that I saw here seemed naive to me, and I was alienated by it. I felt deficient because of how I grew up in Moscow — steeped in apathy and end of history rhetoric. I felt jaded in comparison to my peers in America. I didn’t think I was cooler or wiser or that I was right and all these optimistic young people were wrong — no, not at all. I was confused by this discrepancy in the attitude of my “liberal” circle in Moscow and the people I knew in NY and LA.

Most of my friends back home solely thought about their careers and fitting into the capitalist world order as it existed. They had no doubts or complaints about the status quo — they thought this was the only possible world. That this was how things should be, and any questioning of the validity of the capitalist status quo sounded to them like the stupid Soviet idealism of the past. But here in the U.S. many people were actually kind of idealistic and critical of the capitalism realism they grew up in. They didn’t want to accept it as the only possible way to live. They believed that another world was possible and within their grasp.

But America changed and things are different now among a lot of people my age.

Sometime in the last four or five years, a big push started among the young-ish influencer class — with a lot of former leftwing media people suddenly taking a right turn and selling their move as the most natural thing in the world: an organic process of growing out of their young optimistic Marxist phase and becoming “realist” adults. I had noticed it happening here and there but only recently realized how big and powerful this trend has been.

I guess this turn to cynicism coincided with the collapse of the Bernie movement and Covid and was a rejection of woke liberal culture and politics pushed by the Democratic Party wing of American society.

I was never into woke liberalism to begin with. In fact, after joining an MFA program in non-fiction filmmaking a decade ago at CUNY, I realized that this woke culture is actually quite insidious and manipulative, especially on the level of media. Until then I had been aloof from it. I hadn’t been in America for long and I didn’t really understand it. But my close contact with it during my MFA program turned me off from it and inspired me to make a satirical film about a woke documentary filmmaker. So I understand why people didn’t like this culture — and why they’d want to turn away from it and mock it, like Red Scare did when it was first getting popular.

What I couldn’t imagine back then was that in turning away from liberal wokeness, a lot of people simply switch to the opposing side. It’s been interesting to watch. I didn’t expect people to turn on a dime and become anti-woke right-wingers so easily… to so quickly adopt the values of the opposing dominant cultural and political establishment.

In 2018, these left media types called themselves socialists and Marxists and posted about the Frankfurt School and talked about capitalist exploitation. In 2025, all pretense to morality or social justice is gone. Nothing matters, all empathy is “emotional manipulation”, and any attempt to make the world a better place through politics is cringe and demented. They changed their politics as quickly as they changed their clothes — now they are all into laces and heels and tight leather outfits, rather than a unisex grungy look. In doing so they engaged in the same simplistic herd mentality as the woke libs they supposedly hated.

The Red Scare women have been at the forefront of this new wave of a literal red scare. Anna K keeps hammering this idea into the young minds who listen to her podcast — that all leftists who want to make the world a better place are just psychos who project their mental illness onto the world. This pathologizing of any activism or even a humanist ethos seems to be at the crux of this transformation. It is at the core of this neo-nihilist movement. The Red Scare women, along with other media figures in their circle, are rebranding this cynical vibe shift as cool and avant garde…as rebellion against the establishment, despite the fact that Trump and the Republican Party is very much the establishment. You can’t be transgressive and be an apparatchik for the ruling party at the same time. I mean…it’s about as transgressive as Lean In feminists rooting for Kamala Harris. How is this not obvious?

But the surprising thing is that a lot of people buy this act. They really think that being cynical and nihilistic and being on the side of powerful corporations is some sort of transgressive act. That’s how warped the culture is here.

To me, this sudden turn to nihilism under the guise of embracing realism is a sign of a big seismic shift coming to America — maybe it’s already here. I can’t unsee the parallels from what I used to think was my irrelevant former life in Russia. Maybe because both USSR and USA were two big Enlightenment utopian projects fighting each other for their version of utopia to win, they are bound to have similarities in their respective disillusionment. The USSR just went through this 35 years earlier. And now America’s time has come…

I love and keep returning to Cynics, a book by Russian writer and poet Anatoly Mariengof. He was a friend of Esenin and a founder of a poetic movement called Imaginism. Cynics is about the early years after the October Revolution. It’s dark and very funny and it captured really well what it’s like to lose belief in everything, and to have only snark and cynicism remain. I don’t want to spoil the novel but it’s about a married couple, Olga and Vladimir, bourgeois intellectuals of of pre-revolutionary Russia world who remained in Moscow after the Bolsheviks took power rather than emigrated like many of their class. We witness up close how Olga was excited about the revolutionary potential at first and wanted to participate in this new life but then got disappointed, became apathetic, and allowed the cynicism and the horrors she witnessed to weigh her spirit down…to destroy her. Vladimir’s lack of enthusiasm and skepticism in the beginning allowed him to fare better and not get disenchanted with this new life. He wasn’t that enchanted in the first place.

Obviously it’s too distant of a parallel to draw — Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie movement was not anywhere close to the October Revolution. But it seems for many millennials and maybe even some older zoomers and younger Gen X’ers, the defeat of that movement had a similar effect. Many turned into versions of Olga. The dream died. All the hope was gone and nothing changed. For them it was the last straw, and they turned cynical, or “realist” — as they see it.

It’s very unsettling for young Americans to take this path. It’s like they want to come back to a 19th century America — with railroad barons and child labor and diseased city slums…a time when society was segregated by race and women had no power. And what’s shocking is that they’re trying to rebrand this regression as transgressive and fun, unlike the boring progressive lib woke world that shames you for saying faggot and retard.

The lib world may be annoying and repressive in its own way. But I don’t think this cynical “realism” is a viable or cool alternative to it, or even some kind of return to normality.

If cynicism is realism, like the Red Scare women claim, then why not aspire to become a prostitute? Or sell yourself to a highest bidder — to a trad husband in finance twice as old as you? Or get pregnant by a rich man out of wedlock as a way to get your bills paid and a comfortable life financed for the foreseeable future? Oh wait, women are starting to do it here— think of Ashley St. Clair, Elon Musk’s latest babymama, who seemed to have plotted getting pregnant and having his baby. This kind of thing still might be shocking and scandalous to some here. But in Russia this is mainstream behavior — what I saw all around me.

To a large extent these sexual-economic unions/prostitution deals were the direct consequence of the capitalist counter-revolution of the 1990s and the country-wide impoverishment that followed. When all resources get concentrated in the hands of literally a few men, what are women to do? I don’t blame women for going that way. The world of Epstein that so scandalized people here in America was the norm where I grew up. And men in Russia didn’t need a special island to hide that they live like this. The entire Russia was their oyster. It was all out in the open and socially acceptable. It still is.

And there is another reason why all these media people pushing the “cynicism as realism” line remind me of Russia. Back where I grew up, journalism was mostly a joke. Outside a few heroes and martyrs, the profession had no morals — it was about getting to hobnob with powerful people, to suck up to them, and to do propaganda for the moneyed class. The end goal for most journalists was to jump ship — to transition from being a poor media whore to a very rich media whore — to become a capitalist, someone with property and dividends from an oil/gas conglomerate. There was not even a pretense to a fourth estate, even in the Yeltsin years…what now people recall as Russia’s pre-Putin “democratic” phase. There were just billionaires who owned all the media outlets and used them to feud with each other. Eventually it led to Putin being put in power by these oligarchs. He then outsmarted and defeated them, pushed them out, centralized the power in his hands, and made his old friends the new oligarchs beholden only to him.

It feels that America is well on its way to the same kind of set up. The fact that so many people view any mention of social justice as purely hypocritical and lame and not to believed is very alarming. Things are not going well here.

And one more thing. The newly nihilist crowd rejects the politicization of art, which they see as fake and bad. They champion pure entertainment and the aesthetization of politics — a position that leads them straight to unironically embracing fascism. Walter Benjamin, running away from the Nazi Germany, wrote about all this almost a century ago in his Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. But who cares? It’s all so boring. He must’ve been just mentally ill.

—Evgenia

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