The audio file below is a short talk I gave nearly three months ago to a gathering of Iranian friends in Sydney on the nihilism of the modern world. An important part of this short talk concerns Nietzsche’s famous but often misunderstood statement that “God is dead.”

By depriving human life of meaning and stripping it of myth, modern nihilism and meaninglessness have rendered not only life but also human suffering meaningless, even though our suffering remains.

In the modern world, the human being is a statistical unit and a small cog in the immense machinery of cities that, as they grow larger, make human individuality smaller.

John Stuart Mill once asked whether, in removing the external restraints upon human freedom, we might destroy our freedom from within: the day when every human being submits only to what is conventional in society and accepted by public opinion, and even in the depths of the heart desires nothing else. Human individuality, threatened for thousands of years by tribal ways of thinking and later by traditional religion, is today threatened by a modern world that has taken from the human being both the meaning of life and individuality.

And now it is time for the human being—this bravest of creatures, in Nietzsche’s terms—to rise, defend the meaning of life and of one’s suffering, and accept responsibility for one’s own journey in the myth of the hero.