i'm already gone

Wormtown

The Course of Empire

The Course of Empire is a five-part series of paintings created by Thomas Cole in the years 1834-36. It is notable in part for reflecting popular American sentiments of the times, when many saw pastoralism as the ideal phase of human civilization, while fearing that empire would lead to gluttony and inevitable decay



Pt1. The Savage State


Pt2. The Arcadian or Pastoral State


Pt3. The Consummation of Empire


Pt4. The Destruction of Empire


Pt5. Desolation

move forward

Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, nothing) is a philosophical position which argues that existence is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Nihilists generally assert some or all of the following:

*Objective morality does not exist; therefore no action is logically preferable to any other.
*In the absence of morality, existence has no higher meaning or goal.
* There is no reasonable proof or argument for the existence of a higher ruler or creator. (do not agree)
*Even if there exists a higher ruler or creator, mankind has no moral obligation to worship them. (do not agree)

The term nihilism is sometimes used synonymously with anomie to denote a general mood of despair at the pointlessness of existence.[1]

A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought NOT to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos — at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power,


**********MORE IMPORTANTLY**************

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength!

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Complete Works Vol. 13