About ANUS.COM
ANUSThe American Nihilist Underground Society has existed in various forms since 1987, and is a group aimed at changing philosophical attitudes in the west to include nihilism.
Nihilism, in our definition, is not to be confused with fatalism, or the belief that one can do nothing to change the world or give it value. Our goal is to combat fatalism with an awareness that there is no inherent meaning to life itself except the physical world, and thus we must give it meaning through our actions upholding higher ideals than mere survival.
Our goal is not to relapse into the passive and self-pleasing nature of most modern Western philosophies, which suggest that if the individual has comfort and an external self-identity that is respected by others, the process of seeking meaning in life is complete. We believe that only the individual can interpret meaning, and that not all individuals have the same capabilities, thus interpretations vary in accuracy.
Inspired primarily by the work of German idealist philosophers, our belief system embraces the physical world and cosmology as the ultimate reality, thus tends to be very pro-Green, to the degree that we are ecofascists. It is impossible to have any philosophy in this time without recognizing the coming holocaust of nature, and the inward decay of Western civilization, and thus we do not shirk from these unpopular and taboo truths.
For this reason, among other taboos that we break, we are considered to be non-serious, a joke, and just trolls by most people you find on the Internet. However, these people also have clearly perceptible mental and physical and character defects, so their fear of us and our smashing of the domination of philosophy by individualist, humanist concerns is natural.
ANUS publishes weekly columns, trolls many parts of the internet, and is responsible for research materials on neoclassical music, art and literature, heavy metal music, philosophy and politics.
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We are individual beings who live in a world composed of nature, and of a society of other individual beings. When we assert ourselves on the world, we are addresses ourselves and an external reality composed those two divisions. Since civilization depends on individuals working in concert to operate, we then must not only adapt to nature but to society; a large part of adapting to society consists in giving it better methods, objects and ideas wherever we can. ANUS exists to suggest a fundamental idea to society, which is an end of denial.
There are pleasant truths about life and unpleasant ones. Some of the ugly ones include the need for every thing that eats to also defecate, and for every thing that has a birth to also die. At this point in history, our civilization is the product in part of 2,000 years of death denial, which translates into our civilization upholding certain illusions to avoid facing the inevitable unpleasant truth of death. Our belief at ANUS is that we can either deny truth, become self-pitying, or accept unpleasant truths alongside pleasant truths as the mechanism of an ideal, namely life itself.
We do not view this mechanism as separate from its goal, but recognize that by seeing life as a means to an end, we do not become fixated on the preservation of life as the highest goal, but are able to develop a flexible series of goals to keep life interesting. This places the existential value of being as higher than the preservation of its physical conduit, the physical body, and enables us to get over our fear of death and defecation, and thus attract ourselves to higher goals. Better art. More noble, intelligent people of a better character. Greater physical feats. Ever upward!
In the conventional usage, "nihilism" refers to a belief in nothing and in no value. Our use of the word nihilism conveys instead of a belief of no Absolute value, leaving it to us to interpret value subjectively; however, as we ultimately exist in the same objective world, the barrier between subjective/objective is not a valid one: we interpret according to our abilities, and test those abilities on a world that operates consistently. For this reason, nihilism is not an end state of philosophy but a gateway by which we can open our minds to the experience of life and thus find meaning within it.
Our philosophy on this site is one of nihilism leading to a form of "cosmic idealism," which breaks down into two components: cosmic, or addressing the whole of existence at once and thus demoting the importance of divisions within it such as mind/body, self/world or thought/physicality; and idealism, signifying that we find meaning in the importance of events in the structure of the whole as opposed to the physicality or symbolic intensity of events (in art, symbolism is a means of communicating an ideal, not an ideal in and of itself). If these beliefs were applied to our society, it would more resemble a place in which we would want to live.
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Those who work on this site are not alienated in the sense of a fatalistic embrace of inability to change the system, or to live within it; we recognize that it is trivial to eke out an existence in modern society, as it requires some kind of employment and a credit card, and if you're marginally intelligent and can apply yourself, the world of riches and social status opens before you. However, to us, this is not an ideal or a lifestyle we find appealing, so instead we live normal lives and in our "spare time," create articles and artifacts on the ANUS.com site to entice people of a similar capacity to see what lies behind door #3 (door #1 is material Absolutes, where door #2 is religious-symbolic absolutes).
Our belief system involves breaking of all taboo, and then re-assessment of what is taboo to find out if it is meaningful. For example, all of us agree that the taboo on incest and child molestation is a meaningful one. We do not agree about taboos on drugs, hacking, race and eugenics, and interestingly, these beliefs alone cause most modern people to object to this site. We are not a populist movement, therefore do not aim to "prove" our ideas to the average person nor do we aim to make a decorative aesthetic object for them to pursue and thus consider themselves "enlightened," therefore we are not concerned about those who are offended. This path is esoteric: it opens only to those who are ready, by breeding and by conditioned mindset, for it.
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ANUS.com, as a website to convey the ideas of the American Nihilist Underground Society, is the work of a group of people who call themselves "mock Him productions." The idea of a symbolic or incarnate god appalls us; it removes god from nature and from the ongoing process of life, and makes it a dead thing to worship when you're afraid of dying. This is not a healthy outlook, nor one with any part in the future of humanity. For this reason we joyfully and gleefully mock God and any other religious tradition that takes the gods out of the earth, out of nature, and out of our individual souls.
The belief systems of mock Him and ANUS do not fall on the right or the left, but borrow freely from them. Our root belief is in a traditional (pre-Christian, Indo-European) society which is feudal in its nature, which means that it respects specialization of the individual and bloodline but also guarantees a living for all but the defective, who are bred out of existence. This is the only sustainable form of human government. We have experimented in the past with extreme Marxism, and borrow many ideas from both Chomskian leftism and "Neue Droit" philosophies from Europe, but our fundamental connection is with the ancient societies of Greece, Rome, Scandinavia and India, when they were in our prime.
Writings here are targetted at Indo-Europeans; we can only speak for our own ethnic groups, and do not attempt to address concerns of black people, Asians, or people of mixed heritage such as Middle Eastern Semites (Arabs, Jews). We feel it would be condescending and authoritarian to tell people of other groups how to live their lives, thus we speak only to our own, and within it, to the different tribes such as Scots, Germans, Italians, Basque, French and Spanish, urging each to act according to our beliefs as interpreted according to local tradition. Our work is essentially that of thinkers, writers and those who advise leaders; we are not an organization which solicits membership and wastes time and paper through "demonstrations" and flyering of neighborhoods.
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If one ideal must be held up above all else at ANUS.com, it is that life is good, and is a product of the cosmos, whose visible manifestation on earth is the nature from which we all originate. We believe in living for the sake of life, and that life itself is a means to this abstract "living," which is probably best described in the terms of existentialist and Romantic writers. We believe that life is good as a whole, meaning that death and defecation are as natural as birth and eating, and we praise food, friends and love alongside war, debauchery and eugenics. These factors cannot be separated from one another, but are all means to life itself, which is inseparable from the cosmos and nature.
As people, we live pragmatically in a modern time. Our use of resources is probably less than might be expected from our stature in the social and political and economic structure of this modern world, but this is not from some guilt or "save the world" impetus, but from a strong preference to live well and to live in justice to nature and humanity as a whole. We follow all laws, and believe that every means of change we advocate can be accomplished in a democratic system, although in that process our system will abolish liberal democracy and other utilitarian forms of government.
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If you would like to participate in our activities, consider this: the primary action you can take is to absorb our philosophies and translate them into your own, and then spread those ideas among others by becoming a productive member of society, differentiated from the rest by your upholding of those views in your actions and lifestyle. You are not an identity defined by a philosophy, but are defined by to what degree you apply your beliefs in a normal life. That alone is the root of change.
For those who wish to join something, our Initiate program offers immersion in these beliefs and provides a starting guide to discovering the breadth and depth of these belief systems for yourself. As part of its requirement, you will aid in the daily operations of this site and its publication, the exponentiation ezine (ezines, unlike print zines, do not generate disposable paper). In the future, we plan to have long term paper publications in book form, and will make those available (but not required) to any who wish to purchase them.
You can join this force of change from any background; if this belief system is applicable to your ethnoculture, and you can adapt it according to local tradition, we encourage you to do so. The major religious traditions have all had dissidents in our vein of thought, for example Johannes Eckhart for Christians and Baruch Spinoza for Jews and Osama bin Laden for Muslims; your religion's highest ideals can be interpreted in the terms we offer here, and you can in fact effect positive change both in that religion and through it. The problem with religions is not the name on the Holy Book, but how it is interpreted, as we live in the same world and thus the same truths apply to us all, regardless of in what era or spiritual tradition we live.
Some are atheists, and we believe the same truth applies, in that mysticism can be interpreted in a material sense, and that our beliefs while including mystical aspects are not confined to mysticism; they are structural and philosophical, and can both be adapted to and force adaption upon any belief system. Even Republicans and Democrats are welcome, if they are willing to take this step. Doing this requires that you abandon the symbolic certainty of dogma in favor of analysis of philosophical structure, and will result in both a higher interpretation of your own beliefs and a knowledge of the belief system - the beliefs of tradition espoused on this site - that are the origins of all systems of thought.
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Those who are willing to undergo initiation in the fusion of ancient belief and modern knowledge presented here will find the structure of argument and philosophy opening before them as a landscape, to the degree of their individual mental powers and commitment to learning. However, not all must fully explore every detail; for some, fulfillment will come in having found a generalized belief that furthers enjoyment of life, and thus they will wish to work with us as well. We welcome them and embrace a non-judgmental recognition of the difference in individual abilities and inclinations, much as among ourselves we recognize inequality in every task.
An aphorism for those who wish to master the world of thought, and thus enhance the world, is this: you do nothing for solely personal effect, as even you are part of this world. Talent matched with knowledge, applied by determination, creates change, but lacking any one of the three guarantees the effort is lost. Additionally, there are many excuses one can make, and only one path to achieving change which will make one feel better about world and self; saying "I didn't have the time" feels really stupid years later when an opportunity has passed and will not come again. The world rewards those who work to change it.
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If we understand "good" and "evil" on this site, it is in a wholly subjective fashion, as in "the defecation that happened this afternoon was evil: the stench drove away my girlfriend, it clogged the pipes and the dog died licking up the overflow." Moreover, we find it important to posit that "good" is the only meaningful term, as in success, as all that is not success passes into the mundane and frustrating and boring in life, and is not important. In that light, it makes sense to say there is also "meta-good," which is the state of permanent good achieved by life itself, which requires both good and evil to maintain itself.
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Human beings in unhealthy times tend to put things into absolute categories such as "good" and "bad." This comes from a desire to find a pure reference point, something like a guarantee, which gives one a clear path through life avoiding all pitfalls. There is a religious root to this, namely dualism, and a social root, populism - or the idea that in order to have something be true you must "prove" it to the broadest segments of society with something so linear and obvious they can all agree it is so. For this reason, we train our children that that feces and urine are "bad" so that they do not put such things into their living spaces, and we deny the presence of the anus, death, or other bodily factors in society, as if pretending we are immortal as our thoughts appear to be. The A.N.U.S. organization takes its name from this principle: only when the anus is viewed as being as holy as the mouth do we understand that both are essential, and nothing is equal or absolute, and while the two should probably never meet, without either we are lost.
ANUS mention
― latebloomer: damn cheapskate satanists (latebloomer), Sunday, 13 March 2005 23:02 (twenty years ago)