Nihilism as Civilizational Symptom: From Lost Purpose to Lynch Mobs

Bard's diagnosis reframes nihilism not as an intellectual stance but as a structural inevitability when a civilization loses what he terms its felic direction — a collectively felt orientation toward something worth striving for. Once that forward-and-upward vector collapses, psychic pressure doesn't dissipate; it converts into resentment. Resentment, in turn, self-organizes into scapegoating formations — lynch mobs — regardless of whether they target from the political left or right. The insight is that these opposing mobs are structurally identical: neither provides a felic direction, and neither constitutes Exology, a viable path from one paradigm into another.

The deeper layer of the argument draws on Nietzsche's concept of the last man, which Bard repurposes as a civilizational archetype: the person who treats the current social operating system as ontologically fixed. This is the Egyptian who tells Moses that slavery is simply the nature of things. The last man is not merely complacent — he is the structural guarantor of nihilism's persistence, because he forecloses the possibility of paradigmatic departure.

Critically, Bard insists that attacking the lynch mobs only generates a third mob. The antidote is heroism in its pre-modern sense: the refusal of resentment coupled with the constructive will to envision and build an alternative. This is what he frames as Grand Project A — not a utopian endpoint but a deliberately chosen direction of collective effort. Without such a project, post-Christian, post-meaning societies will continue to produce exactly the polarization and civilizational self-destruction now visible everywhere.