Both modern nihilists and anarchists can trace roots to the intense personality of Mikhael Bakunin in the 19th century who succinctly reflected the nihilist sentiment with his famous statement: "Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source of all." Politically anarchism and nihilism are often confused and in a limited yet tangible sense nihilism is the struggle between law/government (forces of anti-natural order) and liberty (nihilism). Here anarchism and nihilism seem to have certain elements in common. For example the anarchist will say 'no one has the authority to tell another what to do'. But the nihilist would say that if the one giving orders has a gun and the other not, then what do rights or authority matter? Indeed what good is constitution at the moment of any criminal event? This is a fundamental flaw of anarchism; its success is predicated on the good conduct of the constituents!


Anarchists are idealists, they believe in subjective concepts such as peace, justice, and especially the ultimately noble nature of the individual (at least under the proper social conditions). The nihilist reality is devoid of such foolishness. The nihilist realizes that history is often abused and misconstrued therough the formation of artificial lines and erroneous connections between disparate events only to substantiate preconceived interpretations of reality, the classic teleological myth.


"We draw an imaginary thread through the ages to chart the course we judge to be the 'correct' one. All wrong views are ignored. This approach was dubbed the 'Whig' theory of history by Herbert Butterfield. The name derived from those past historians who treated history as a record of events that culminated in the political system dear to their own hearts: the liberal democracy." It's an understandable product of human evolution to not only detect patterns but get carried away and concoct them as well. "It appears that the human mind has evolved an ability to recognize geometrical patterns where none exist. What else might it be recognizing that does not exist?"


Human nature see's things that aren't realy there, just think of optical illusions or Rorschach ink-blot tests. Much of life is nothing interpreted as something. This is because dealing with the yawning nothing necessitates the concoction of a something to grasp the nothing thereby ignoring the perilous obvious by manufacturing a more malleable artificial myth. Yet the attitude of a nihilist is contradictory to this because they desire to discern a more accurate understanding of reality at the moment not as they wish to see which is the tragically typical way divorced from evidence and reasoned hypothesis. This includes the desire to view human character as it actually is and understand purpose within context.