The Desert Grows
A brief history of nihilism in the 20th and 21st centuries
“The desert grows; woe to him who harbors deserts within.” When Nietzsche wrote these words, he was predicting a change in the human metabolism. His announcement of “the death of God” functions as a diagnostic event, far removed from the celebratory atheism or simple dismissal of the supernatural found in naive readings. It signals the realization that the highest values of Western civilization have exhausted their own logic. We are in the midst of decadent, declining phases of a two-thousand-year trajectory of Platonic-Christian morality. For millennia, the West justified its labor, its suffering, and its political structures by pointing to a “True World,” a transcendental and divine anchor that existed “in another world,” elsewhere. Removing that anchor left us in freefall. We now inhabit a world where the “why” has vanished.
Nihilism signifies the physiological state that follows when the “why” finds no answer. It describes the exhaustion of a spirit that can no longer find a reason to strive.
This did not happen all at once. For the last century, the history of the West has evolved as a series of desperate attempts to hide from this realization. We have constructed shadows of God, such as Progress, Science, the State, and the Market, to avoid the cold draft of the void. These shadows are no longer long enough to hide us. The current geopolitical crisis of illiberalism marks the moment the West has “been found out.” We have reached a spiritual foreclosure where the performance of meaning can no longer be sustained.
The Somme and the Birth of Mass Humanity
Assuming that people of the past thought, acted, and believed like us is one of the many errors of modern liberalism’s universalist claims. The 19th century largely operated under the assumption that history had a direction. This sense of purpose was anchored in two primary myths: Hegelian progress and Romantic heroism. Hegel provided a rational scaffolding for the century, suggesting that history was the unfolding of “Spirit” toward absolute freedom, a process where even the most brutal conflicts were merely the “Cunning of Reason” refining the human soul. Complementing this was the Romantic cult of the Great Man, the Napoleonic figure whose sovereign will could bend the trajectory of nations and impose meaning onto the chaos of existence through sheer vitality. In both views, the individual was the driver of destiny. The Battle of the Somme in 1916 shattered this conceit.
The Somme remains the definitive monument to the industrialization of death. Launched in July 1916, it was intended as a decisive Anglo-French breakthrough on the Western Front, yet it devolved into a five-month war of attrition that claimed over a million casualties. On the first day alone, the British Army suffered nearly 60,000 losses, many of them “Pals Battalions,” groups of friends and neighbors who enlisted together, only to be mowed down in minutes by machine-gun fire. At the Somme, the will to power was expressed by the industrial machine rather than the noble warrior. When over a million men are ground into mud by artillery fired from over the horizon, honour becomes a linguistic fossil.
This was the onset of Mass Humanity. The individual was no longer a creator; he was human material, a cog in a technocratic apparatus that lacked a transcendental goal. This was the first great geopolitical rupture. The West had built a civilization on the value of the soul, yet its most advanced scientific achievements were dedicated to the total erasure of the person. The ascetic ideal turned outward, becoming a mechanical slaughterhouse. The “why” of the war was never found; only the “how” of the logistics remained. This established the template for the 20th-century state: a manager of human material that justifies its existence through efficiency rather than meaning.
Auschwitz and the Administrative Will to Nothingness
If the Somme proved that mass death could be industrialized, Auschwitz proved that it could be rationalized as a biological and bureaucratic necessity. The Holocaust is a reactive expression of ressentiment within the European spirit. Nietzsche understood ressentiment as the reactive venom of those who cannot create and therefore seek to negate. In the death camps, the administrative state reached its most terrifying conclusion. It utilized the language of hygiene, efficiency, and engineering to enact a total purge of the living reminder of the earth’s tragic depth.
The Holocaust was the moment the West found itself out in the most visceral sense. We realized that our most cherished rational systems were perfectly compatible with the meticulous destruction of the human spirit. The “banality of evil” described by Hannah Arendt is a figure of the Nietzschean Last Man. The bureaucrat who schedules the trains to the camps possesses no creative “Why.” He operates solely within the optimized “How” of the system. This was the ultimate victory of the Ascetic Ideal. The desire to find meaning in the negation of life was no longer a religious impulse; it became a state function. Auschwitz represents the fulfillment of a specific kind of herd morality that prizes obedience and "objectivity" over the creative affirmation of life.
Auschwitz transformed the human body into a data point for a system of subtraction. It was the point where the technocrat used the scalpels of science to perform an autopsy on a living civilization. By reducing people to numbers and their lives to industrial waste, the state attempted to engineer a world where nothing “Other” could exist to challenge the hollowed-out values of the regime. The desert reached the human heart in the gas chambers. We found out that our rationality possessed no inherent moral defense against the will to nothingness when that will is armed with a filing cabinet and a timetable.
Trinity and the Deterrent of Nothingness
The Trinity Test in 1945 proved that man could facilitate the nothingness previously reserved for the divine. On July 16, 1945, in the Jornada del Muerto desert of New Mexico, the Manhattan Project culminated in the first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon. This was both a breakthrough in physics and a metaphysical event. J. Robert Oppenheimer famously recalled the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Nietzsche argued that the fundamental drive of the human spirit is the Will to Power, the urge to overcome resistance, expand, create, and impose form on the world. However, he warned that when this will is deprived of a creative goal, it turns inward or downward. He identified the “Ascetic Ideal,” the desire to find meaning in self-denial and the rejection of the earth, as the shadow that would haunt a post-theistic world. At Trinity, the West realized the ultimate ascetic weapon. Man replaced the objective source of value (God) with an objective capacity for total annihilation.
Nietzsche’s famous dictum in On the Genealogy of Morals was that humans “would rather will nothingness than not will at all.” The Cold War doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was the political incarnation of this warning. It was a system where the “peace” of the world was predicated on the technical ability to unmake it. We reached a point where the only thing holding the West together was the shared threat of its total negation.
There was no longer a highest good to strive for, only a highest evil to avoid. This is the hallmark of declining life-force. It is a culture defined by what it fears rather than what it loves. The nuclear age replaced the kingdom of heaven with the glow of the void, a shadow of God that demanded absolute obedience through terror. We traded the pursuit of the sublime for the maintenance of a precarious, radioactive equilibrium. We decided that if we could not have a “True World” in heaven, we would at least have the power to turn this world into nothing.
The Nixon Shock and the Floating World
Nihilism eventually moves from the battlefield to the ledger. In 1971, the “Nixon Shock” represented the de-materialization of value. Since the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, the global financial system had been anchored to the U.S. dollar, which was itself convertible to gold at a fixed rate. This provided a physical “ground” for value. By tethering paper currency to a scarce, heavy element extracted from the earth, the West maintained a final link to the objective world. Gold acted as a material proxy for truth; it was the “thing-in-itself” that prevented value from becoming a mere whim.
Nietzsche famously argued in his essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense that what we call “truth” is actually “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.” For Nietzsche, we forget that our concepts are merely coins that have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal. In 1971, the West took this one step further: we kept the coin but threw away the metal. When President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold, value became a mobile army of digital signifiers. It shifted from being “referential,” where a note pointed to a piece of the earth, to being “performative,” where value exists only because the state declares it and the herd believes it.
This mirrors the death of God in the realm of economics. Just as we lost objective truth in the 19th century by realizing that “God” was a human projection, we lost objective value in the 20th by realizing that “Money” could be a collective hallucination. We entered a state of passive nihilism. We accepted that our entire economic reality was a useful fiction. We no longer demanded that value be grounded in anything; we were content to let it float, provided the consumption continued. This initiated the era of the Last Man, who asks for nothing more than a stable exchange rate for his comforts. It was the beginning of the end for the sovereign state, as power began to dissolve into global, ungrounded flows of capital that no politician could truly control.
The Technocratic Illusion and the Spirit of Gravity
By the mid-20th century, the West attempted to replace the missing “Why” of existence with an obsession with the “How.” This shift found its political expression in technocracy: the governance of human affairs by experts using data, systems theory, and administrative oversight. Nietzsche referred to this weight of bureaucratic necessity as the “Spirit of Gravity.” In this era, characterized by “The Best and the Brightest,” the state began to operate on the premise that all human suffering, conflict, and risk were merely technical bugs to be engineered out of the social program.
The technocrat is a manifestation of the Last Man. He possesses no overarching values, only a set of optimized procedures. Whether through the social engineering of the Great Society or the industrial planning of the post-war consensus, the goal was to manage the “human herd” so effectively that the question of meaning never arose. This period inaugurated a state of ontological fatigue. We ceased to be the authors of a grand drama and became the clients of a system.
The danger of this managed existence is that it demands the sacrifice of the individual’s Will to Power. By seeking to eliminate struggle and suffering, technocracy eliminates the very friction required for the creation of new values. Nietzsche understood that “the discipline of suffering, of great suffering” is the only thing that has ever produced greatness in humans. When the state takes it upon itself to provide safety and comfort as the highest goods, it effectively lobotomizes the spirit. The illiberal turn we observe today is the violent, often incoherent rejection of this sanitized reality. People are discovering that they would rather possess a dangerous and destructive “Why” than live within the confines of an administered “How.”
The 2008 Rupture and the End of the Grand Narrative
The 2008 financial crisis was the moment the passive nihilist was forced to become an active one, though without the strength to create. It destroyed the narrative of progress. For decades, the West operated on the implicit promise that each generation would be wealthier and more comfortable than the last. This was the “Grand Narrative” that replaced religion.
When the subprime mortgage market collapsed, it revealed that the “wealth” of the West was built on a foundation of debt and complex derivatives that even the experts didn’t understand. The subsequent bailout of the institutions that caused the collapse revealed the ressentiment of being found out. The priestly class of the global order, the bankers, the experts, the internationalists, were exposed as having no ground. Their values were shown to be hollow.
The subsequent rise of populist anger is not a new value. It is the poisoned tooth of the herd morality biting back at its own failure. It is a scream of “No” that lacks a “Yes.” We are currently living in the desert that Nietzsche spoke of. The old structures have collapsed, but the heat of the sun makes it impossible to build anything new.
The Geopolitical Crisis of Illiberalism
We have arrived at the moment of Great Politics. This is not the politics of policy, but the politics of planetary domination in the absence of truth. The collapse of the international rules-based order is the geopolitical expression of nihilism. This order, established after 1945 and expanded after 1989, was built on the assumption that liberal democracy was the “final form” of human government. It was a secularized version of the Kingdom of Heaven, promising a world where conflict would be replaced by commerce and suffering by human rights.
The second administration of Donald Trump in 2026 serves as a definitive archetype of this geopolitical rupture. In his rhetoric and policy, we see the Lion roaring at the ruins of the rules-based order. Trump does not seek to “fix” the system; his unintentional effect is to expose its fundamental lack of a “Why” through the airing of grievances, the punishment of his enemies, and the enrichment of his friends. By dismantling trade agreements, questioning the utility of alliances like NATO, and treating international law as a series of negotiable “mobile metaphors,” his administration is enacting the active nihilism Nietzsche predicted. He is the symptom of a civilization that has “found out” that its priests have no ground.
Illiberalism, in this context, is the relief of destruction. It satisfies the ressentiment of a population that feels it has been lied to by the “Last Men” of the liberal order. When the pasture of commerce turned out to be a desert of ungrounded value and ontological fatigue, the people turned to the strongman who would at least acknowledge the heat. However, the Lion can only destroy. He can say “No” to the administrative state and the “Spirit of Gravity,” but he cannot create the “Yes” of a new value system. Can you imagine Trump doing anything really new? The conflicts of 2026 appear directionless and hollow precisely because they are struggles over the inheritance of a dead God, conducted by those who have lost the ability to dance.
Being Found Out and the Digital Void
We are entering a terminal state of exhaustion characterized by “being found out,” the systemic collapse of the performative self. For a century, Western humans have survived by constructing elaborate masks: the mask of the “heroic soldier” at the Somme, the mask of the “rational technocrat” at Trinity, and the mask of “grounded prosperity” before the Nixon Shock. At each historical juncture, we were found out. The Somme found us out as mere biomass; Trinity found us out as beings who would rather possess the power to destroy the world than the purpose to live in it; 1971 found out our wealth as a collective hallucination.
The 2008 crisis was the moment this state became universal. The “priestly class” was found out, and the ressentiment that followed was the sound of a billion performances failing at once. We are now haunted by the realization that there is no “true world” behind our screens or our institutions. We feel ontological fatigue because we are constantly performing a self that we know has no foundation, and we know that everyone else is doing the same. We are caught in a permanent state of high-alert anxiety, waiting for the final exposure.
The digital realm is one of the major spaces of this exhaustion. We reduce our will to power to the clicking of icons, yet the algorithm is the final inquisitor. It knows we are hollow. It tracks our micro-movements, our scrolling speed, and our search histories to reveal the void within us. It feeds our ressentiment because ressentiment is the most engagement-heavy emotion, the last spark of a dying fire. The digital void has become the new Hinterwelt, a world behind the world where we retreat to avoid the pain of our ungrounded existence, only to be found out by the very tools we used to hide. The geopolitical fragmentation we see today is the externalization of this internal digital void. We can no longer agree on a shared reality because we have all been found out in our private nihilisms, curated by code. We are exhausted not by our labor, but by the impossible task of maintaining a groundless existence under a gaze that never blinks.
The Lion in the Desert
The history of the last hundred years follows the trajectory of the spirit’s stalled metamorphoses. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche associates these metamorphoses with three animals: the Camel, the Lion, and the Child. For decades, the West functioned as the Camel. We plodded through the desert of the 20th century under the crushing weight of values that had already devalued themselves. We carried the mass humanity of the Somme, the radioactive deterrence of Trinity, and the floating metaphors of the Nixon Shock as holy burdens. We labored to maintain the mask of grounded prosperity and rational progress until the performance itself became our only reality. We were camels who knelt before the shadow of a dead God, taking on the weight of a “Thou Shalt” that no longer possessed a voice.
Now, we have become the Lion. The geopolitical crises of 2026 and the systemic exhaustion of being found out function as the Lion’s roar in the growing desert. We are tearing down the technocratic order and the rules-based illusions because we have discovered the void at their center. This signifies the moment of Great Politics. The Lion says No to the administrative spirit of gravity and the digital Hinterwelt. Yet, this remains a reactive state. The Lion can clear the desert of its ruins. It cannot dwell in them without succumbing to the very ressentiment it seeks to escape. The Lion destroys the old masks but lacks the capacity to sculpt a new face.
To move forward, we must stop looking for a ground that does not exist. We must learn to dance on the edge of the abyss. The current geopolitical crisis represents the labor pain of a world that has been found out. We can no longer pretend that our values are objective or that our progress is inevitable. We have lost the final shred of absolute certainty. There is nothing left to hold on to.
This total exposure prepares the way for the final metamorphosis: the Child. The Child represents a new beginning, a holy affirmation, and a self-propelling wheel. Rising from the ruins requires the innocence of the Child who no longer seeks to perform for an absent God or a digital inquisitor. The Child creates values out of its own abundance, unburdened by the ressentiment of the Lion or the weight of the Camel.
It will not be easy. Perhaps it is not even possible, by now. Most people die as Camels, and the rest burn out as frustrated Lions.
The perhaps-impossible necessity of the moment is to embrace the exhaustion of being found out as the clearing required for this birth. The world has ended many times. Our task involves ensuring that a spirit capable of holy Yea-saying is born out of the desert—a Child who rises from the wreckage of the West to play the game of creation once more.