Unmoored values lose force but persist as fungible instruments

Evidence

However, for Nietzsche, the age of nihilism heralds not the end of values, but a world in which “the highest values devaluate themselves” as they are unmoored from their foundations. These values, which include the Christian virtues along with democracy, equality, truth, reason, and accountability, do not vanish as they lose their foundations, but become fungible and trivial, superficial and easily instrumentalized. This trivialization and instrumentalization, ubiquitous in commercial, political, and even religious life today, further degrade the value of values, which further abets the nihilism … an unending spiral shaping political culture and subjectivity. When a Martin Luther King Jr. speech about public service is used to advertise Dodge trucks during the Super Bowl, when Catholic clergy are revealed to have molested thousands of children while their superiors looked away, when “moral values” politicians are exposed for consorting with prostitutes or making abortion payments for mistresses—these things bring not shock, but a knowing grimace, nihilism’s signature. — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 278

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that nihilism, for Nietzsche, is not values vanishing but their devaluation into fungibility — the key technical sense Brown builds on.
• XREF: connects to: Nihilism frees the will from the very values meant to discipline it — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 291; Nihilism is value-unmooring, not value-absence, dissolving truth and fake news distinctions — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 657; The stridency of asserted values varies inversely with their lived substance — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 221 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The stridency of asserted values varies inversely with their lived substance #expands (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 221
• Value emerges from relational valuation practices, not from objects themselves. #corroborates (0.75) — Ève Chiapello, Financialisation of Valuation, 23