In my dad’s defense, Novak’s 1970 book was in no way a prescription for fatalism. Accepting life’s despair and emptiness, Novak argued, was a prerequisite for becoming a liberated and fully conscious human being. 'Because it lies so near madness, the experience of nothingness is a dangerous, possibly destructive experience.' Eschewing facile political or religious explanations for the rise of nihilistic social movements around the world, Mishra points to a crisis of meaning wrought by globalization. He sees the destruction of local, intimate, long-rooted systems of meaning as opening a spiritual Pandora’s box within which lies infinite doubt and disillusion.

Source: Huffington Post March 09, 2017 17:03 UTC