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Weird Male Heroes: Miserable Assholes
Camus needed therapy, not a purpose
Warning 1: This story is very pretentious. I’m sorry. I can’t help it.
Warning 2: I make a lot of statements that might be difficult to follow if you haven’t read The Stranger. It’s a short read, if you’re interested. And once you’ve read it, you’ll get to be as pretentious as me.
Being a non-man in a patriarchal world isn’t all doom and gloom. Sometimes, it’s just funny.
A majority of the deep, philosophical literature I’ve read revolves around problems that privileged men from the 19th or 20ths centuries seem to think are universal.
That’s not an unjustified generalization of men: it’s an unjustified generalization of a certain kind of man.
“Western Civilization” has many toxic and troubling hero tropes: the Byronic Hero, the Stoic, the Don Juan, and my personal favorite, the Skeptic. I’m interested in sharing my thoughts on some of these archetypes, specifically toward the end of demonstrating that the subjects that interest these men are not universal: they are contingent, corporeal, and sometimes just vapid.
In this article, I’ll discuss the most tolerable of these archetypes: the Nihilist. While nihilism, loosely defined as a belief that life is meaningless, is…
