True Detective | The Angry River

True Detective Rust Cohle True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto has recently talked about texts that influenced his writing of Rust, describing him as an “anti-natalist nihilism.“ What can we learn about Rust as a person informed by works like Jim Crawford’s Confessions of an Antinatalist, Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet, David Benatar’s Better to Have Never Been? We would know that he is drawn to the extreme fringes of philosophical speculation and that much of the material he is reading is unpalatable to most people. We would also know that he sought out these texts perhaps after being dissatisfied with more mainstream mediations on our place in the universe. He is not at home in the world, expects nothing from it, and has a fundamental mistrust of all discourse of hope. It is also likely that he sees hypocrisy as the norm and is attuned to delusion as the natural state of the human mind. This is perhaps why he is so good at soliciting confessions. Nuances dividing these thinkers aside, I’d say philosophically Rust considers consciousness an aberration or evolutionary error/mistake, that he is not concerned with filtering knowledge according to “the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem“ [to quote philosopher Ray Brassier], and that, as an anti-natalist, he subscribes to the old maxim of “better to have never been born.“ Better yet, many of these thinkers argue, as Rust mentions, that we should stop reproducing in order to end the cycle of existence. This worldview is often correlated with self-destructiveness and I would say Rust’s fascination with murders, drugs, and the criminal lifestyle flower naturally from it. Despite this, I do not expect him to be the killer. It’s the fact that apparently normal people are killers that, I suspect, intrigues Rust, and since he knows what he is, the need to act out violently against others is likely lacking. He’s a bad man, but he knows the real bad men wear masks. Pizzolatto is also quick to refute the notion that Rust is a pure nihilist, suggesting that compassion keeps him from being that easy to boil down. Do you see conflict in Rust between nihilism and a more hopeful life philosophy? What makes a “true” nihilist by the definitions of those who shaped the doctrine? I’ve not seen it clearly yet, but there are signs of empathy in Rust that is not entirely alien to the nihilistic worldview, given the centrality of suffering, nihilism is pretty empathetic. I would say he is passionate and sensitive to those he sees as being crushed by various forms of power, which is often sustained by moral hypocrisy. I wouldn’t say hopefulness is quite the right word, but I would say a nihilist could find drive, if not meaning, from undermining those with power.