A Quote by Kenneth Smith on philosophy, values, character, and nihilism

There is no natural or divine gift or grace or worldly privilege or economic asset that will compensate for a profound, vicious and virulent vacuum at the core of HUMAN values—and we have, as a civilization, the most massive and deliberately composed such vacuum in world-history (scientism, capitalist nihilism, radical value-neutralization or anomie).  Which is, all in all, to make of course a characteristically Greek point about values, that every principle or virtue or form of intelligence and insight is always liable to peripeteia, i.e. to an utter reversal in value-polarities:  "freedom," "rationality," and all other banausically graspable and desirable "goods-in-abstracto" inevitably and eventually slue around to become malignancies, mind-eating and personality-snuffing cancers and obsessions.  Contrary to the delusions of Christian fideism and authoritarianism, values are inherently incapable of being presented or comprehended in an ABSOLUTE form:  a malignant or delusive mentality, a malformed personality or character, can SUBVERT anything—and of course conceal from itself utterly that it itself has such a warpage or privation.