A Re-Evaluation of Values: Where The Beat Philosopher Community Goes From Here

Collection: Ad Hominem
Cross-Collection: Some Other Beginning’s End

Format: Memoir
Length: 4,500 Words | 18 Min
Author: Melissa Nadia Viviana
Date: February 23, 2025

Tags: Memoir, Grief, Timeline Of Life, Propaganda

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Ad Hominem is a reader-supported publication by Melissa Nadia Viviana; Author, Activist, Existentialist, & Philosopher.

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Friedrich Nietzsche’s book A Will To Power was initially called “The Re-Evaluation of All Values.”

(Or Transvaluation of All Values).

I love that title. Even though he never completed this book.

Nietzsche was always trying to question the paradigms he existed within. Including the paradigms he had once accepted in his own mind.

Breaking down even the meaning he once took to be true, and intentionally creating an alternate explanation for that meaning.

That was part of the authentic philosophical journey for him.

I think about that title often. And I’m going to use that title now: to re-evaluate the purpose and values of The Beat Philosopher.

Last summer, I was getting ready to publish a piece of work that contained some of my earliest foundational Philosophy of Mind writings.

The reason this is complicated is similar to what I said about Nietzsche: sometimes the concept stays with you for decades, but you don’t exactly have the precise language for it.

For many years I didn’t want to become a version of Nietzsche or any of the other philosophers who eventually broke from their earlier writing (because life led them to grow and change).

Jean-Paul Sartre is another example of a writer who seems to have broken with his earlier work. (Although he wasn’t that young when he published it).

But for me, it was mostly that the world was in flux, and I wanted to be fluid enough to flow with these changes, and let them mature my ideas before I chose to publish them.

I didn’t want to set anything in stone too early, because I knew that my interaction with new information would deepen my explanation of older ideas.

And I certainly didn’t want to have to re-issue a book I published, with more depth and nuance, a decade later.

I’d already amassed millions of words (your average book need only be 100,000).

Which means, I had the ability to publish 10 or 20 books… if I could only agree to settle on the final description of that nuanced intuition I’d carried with me.

But to be fair, let’s look at the timeline of my adulthood:

• Age 16: I went to college (and this is when I created my first philosophy ideas—which I still hold to be true today)

• Age 18: The market crash happened (and I learned quite quickly that my adulthood would be plagued by this imbalanced economy)

• Age 20: I moved to DC by myself, to figure out how to be an adult without my parents. (arguably these were the most externally stable years, but I was internally unstable).

• Age 24: I completed my first book. Which was a satirical memoir about figuring out how to be a functional adult in DC (Just when I felt I was starting to figure things out).

• Age 26: Donald Trump got elected. (Just as I was working on publishing that first book. Due to the election, I made the decision to hold back from publishing it)

• Age 27: I began to write philosophical writings that paralleled the events in America

• Age 28: I took an 8 month Road Trip across the U.S. (Which allowed me to dig deep and center myself in my work again)

• Age 29: I was getting ready to publish work and begin podcasting (About the philosophy I’d worked out on my road trip)

• Age 30: The pandemic happened (This derailed a lot of people’s lives, mostly it derailed mine because I have empathy and I’m sensitive to world events)

• Age 32: Roe v Wade was repealed (This consumed that year, because I organized 3 protests and was on the board of 2 non-profits)

• Age 34: The U.S. is in the middle of a coup against a 250 year experiment of democracy (I mean what. the. fuck.)

I know I’m not the only millennial who feels this way. Stability has been elusive and difficult to find because every few years another world-changing event occurs.

Maybe it was a mistake to let life keep putting my philosophical work on hold. Or maybe this was the wisdom of knowing that I wanted my philosophical work to be a reflection of life.

I had no interest in having academic work that was elitist, locked behind a paywall, inapplicable to reality, and simply won me points with a select group of academics.

This was a big line in the sand for me, that changed my career trajectory at 18.

I was not interested in creating academic work for the sake of academia.

I admittedly didn’t know who the Existentialists were when I made this decision, but years later, when I found them, I knew that they reflected a similar journey to mine… (particularly Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre)

In that, they wanted their work to be out there interacting with a messy world.

They wanted philosophy and the chaos of life to go hand-in-hand. Side-by-side.

And if that meant that the philosophy also got messy… then that’s what they intended to let happen.

In a sense, I wanted to let my philosophies interact with the real world, because that’s what they were tested and measured by.

They were there, not to be above the chaos, but to be a sense of clarity amidst the chaos.

And thus, I was reluctant to publish any philosophical work until I had allowed it to be tested by the current events.

I called it my oak-barreled whiskey philosophy.

I knew that the philosophies would get more character and dimension with age.

And, of course, I needed to give myself time to mature too.

2023-2024 was the best year of my life, because I was finally mature enough to have mastery over my adulthood—and because the world was finally stable for about two whole years.

For this reason, I created over 40 podcast episodes, completed two books, and re-read and edited multiple essays from over the years. But I was still hesitant to hit the publish button.

And I’ll be honest, part of the reason was the upcoming election. I was certain Biden would win. But I was also sure that if he lost, I would be swept back up in that tornado again.

I didn’t want to create philosophy podcasts that were released on a weekly schedule, only to suddenly have to put those on hold in order to go back out and begin protesting again.

But the ultimate reason for my delay didn’t end up being the election. It ended up being the loss of my beautiful soul-Dalmatian, Athena.

Athena got ill on her 3rd birthday. She was so linked to my emotional body.

Though I’d had Kennedy longer, Athena was better at connecting to my emotions and reflecting back to me my deepest feelings.

She was extraordinarily loving, smothering me with affection on a daily basis.

She would put both of her paws on each of my shoulders and hug me, fiercely. Brushing up against my face with all of the force of her neck and chest.

And she taught me a lot about gratitude and contentment.

She was the first animal or human that I’d had a relationship with that seemed to be deeply satisfied and fulfilled.

(The other two in the house are quite insatiable and discontent).

As you can imagine from the timeline of my life, this was a new feeling for me.

Feeling satisfied, safe, and content.

I felt like I’d been hatched into adulthood like one of those hatchling iguanas from the BBC Earth video being chased by snakes.

I’d been in a pure adrenaline survival mode for over 10 years and I didn’t know what security felt like.

But alongside Athena, I learned.

Alongside her, I felt like I could become satisfied and fulfilled with my own writing.

The oak-barreled aging could stop and I could simply appreciate what I had, for what it was.

I would often picture Athena with me over the decade of my 30s, helping me let go of my work—and just release it into the universe.

I spent many hours with her in my office, reading over the work, making more certain and critical cuts to let some of it go. And fully committing to the pieces that were left.

I was so happy to reach this apex of peace.

Last August, it started crashing down around my feet.

She became sick, at first. With very few symptoms. Without tests done, it was assumed she had a mild infection, so she was put on antibiotics for a few weeks.

But suddenly she became paralyzed from the waist down.

The vets didn’t know what she had, but the many treatments they gave her weren’t working.

Overall, it took about 6 weeks for her to die.

In that time, along with paralysis, she went into kidney failure. She had spinal surgery to remove an infection that was attacking her spinal cord. This gave her a 50% chance of regaining her ability to walk.

But it was too late.

The kidney failure and pneumonia consumed her.

She had been in the animal hospital for about a week. But she was dying next to me for the rest of that time.

No vet knew what she had. She was seen by at least 10 vets, and they gave just about every guess under the sun.

We could have given up on her earlier, before the surgery—when she first went into kidney failure.

But I’m grateful we didn’t, because keeping her alive for a few weeks longer was the only reason they were able to diagnose what she actually had.

It was a rare fungal disease that most mammals can survive. But in rare cases, it spreads to all of the organs.

They think she was vulnerable to it due to an immunodeficiency. Essentially, her body doesn’t have the antibodies that recognize this fungal disease.

This is why she showed no symptoms for weeks.

Her body was NOT fighting it off because it didn’t recognize that it was being attacked.

So the fungal disease was just slowly spreading, attacking her spine and her organs… killing her without any outward signs.

By the time the paralysis happened (the first big symptom), it was already too late. She needed very heavy anti-fungal medications that vets don’t usually have.

She was only prescribed the anti-fungal for a few days near the end, but it wasn’t soon enough.

I have to tell you that Athena’s death was the single worst moment of my life.

There is absolutely no trauma that has happened to me before her death that I wouldn’t experience 20x over, if it meant getting just a few years of her life back.

I would do anything to be with her again.

The three years of her life changed me forever.

And the 6 weeks of her death changed me forever again.

I have cried anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours every single day since her death. (Which was four months ago).

And the only reason I haven’t published anything about it, is that it was too heartbreaking to edit any of the essays I wrote.

In fact, I had to take a long walk in the middle of writing this essay and sob some more.

Because grief is never quite through with us.

Worse, still, the U.S. election happened 3 weeks after her death.

About 5 or 6 weeks before the election, I told a friend that this was becoming apocalyptic. Between not knowing if Athena would die and not knowing if America’s democracy would die, my world was crashing around my feet.

I had followed the election from Athena’s bedside. I had to stay with her while she rested, so I had a lot of time to watch political rallies on my phone, participate in text banking and phone banking.

I even attended one of Kamala Harris’s rallies, here in Savannah. And attended a protest outside of one of Trump’s rallies, which was just down the street.

But a few days after Athena died, I had to get as far away from the house and my memories of her as I could.

So I rented a cabin in the mountains of North Carolina for a month.

I spent every day hiking with Kennedy, and sobbing wet tears on Kennedy’s fur.

I wanted to confront my pain head-on. And face a life without Athena.

I love Kennedy dearly, but it’s hard for me to imagine ever feeling that connected to another dog again.

Athena felt like the very thing that stabilized me for the first time in my adulthood.

I just want to take a moment to say that stability is a very different thing than survival.

Survival is fight or flight. And believe me, you can be alive in fight mode for decades.

And yes, you’ll be able to survive.

But stability and safety are nervous system regulators. They’re times when your body feels secure enough to turn off its hormonal alarms and deeply feel relaxed, safe, and happy.

There’s a big difference between being alive in a perpetual state of survival, and being alive in a state of relaxation and security.

So when the U.S. careened into the worst decision in its entire history three weeks after Athena’s death, here’s the thing: I couldn’t feel anything. I was too numb to feel sad or despondent. I didn’t even feel angry.

I was already just… on survival mode. All of the stability in my own personal world had been ripped out from underneath me. And thus, the election was like being rained on in the midst of a tornado.

What difference did it make to me?

However, I was slightly more processed.

Numb, but processed. I’d spent the past 3 weeks sobbing and hiking.

Certainly, hiking does have the ability to drain you each day, and that’s one of the reasons I took long walks every day during the pandemic, and one of the reasons I still take 2 hour walks every single day since I returned from North Carolina.

It helps me continually process my grief.

So, while in North Carolina, after the election results, I did the only thing I could do: I began to turn my grief into work.

In some kind of disassociated state.

I was precisely functional because I was numb and I had nothing to lose.

I had very little feeling to process: so I could simply take action.

Although I’d been off of Social Media for a year and a half, I joined Bluesky shortly after the election and began growing my two accounts The Beat Philosopher & Resist Rebel Revolt. (I had already created the Substacks over the summer).

I had intended The Beat Philosopher to be my main account… wanting to take all of those writings I had prepared for publishing and finally release them.

But, of course, with the panic over the election, it’s no surprise that my Resist Rebel Revolt account grew faster. (Philosophy is, after all, a niche subject).

But regardless of which account or blog I used, the one thing that I knew, unequivocally, is that I held an immunity to propaganda within me.

Hear me out: as a professional thinker, it is my passion to traverse truths and understanding about the universe.

Just like there are those who read a book for a grade, a goal, or a purpose. And then there are those who savor reading every single word of it, just for pleasure.

I’m like that with thinking and philosophy. There is no goal or pot at the end of the rainbow. There isn’t a grade. Or even a societal accomplishment. There isn’t even a good reason that I do it.

That’s the thing about a person who spends 6 hours every day, for 20 years, re-evaluating her own values. For the fun of it.

I think about everything, anything, and nothing—all day long, for absolutely no good reason.

I’ve done philosophy for nearly twenty years, not because it was assigned to me. Or because there was an achievement waiting to be unlocked.

It’s because breaking things down into segments of meaning and analyzing the ideas that lay behind the concepts of our current paradigm is just something I love doing. All day, every day.

So when people walk in with propaganda, it’s a bit amusing to me, because I would never accept anybody’s “word for it.”

Propaganda is only successful because there are people who want to know the truth without bothering to think about it.

It’s a form of laziness to accept information or ideology without questioning the meaning or the sources that they come from.

I rarely accept an idea without first integrating it into my own translation of meaning. It’s not that I trust nobody. It’s that I seek to understand where information comes from.

I think it was a professor who once told me that merely memorizing and regurgitating a paragraph from a textbook wasn’t learning. If you could take a paragraph from a textbook and rephrase it in your own words, then that meant you understood it.

And I’ve consistently taken that as a measure of my ability to integrate information since then. What people tell me, I want to understand in my own words.

So if you’re a professional thinker who enjoys understanding the meaning behind everything—you don’t want anyone to create a shortcut for you. Because part of the joy is finding a way of integrating it with your own personal sense of meaning.

You want to get your hands dirty and do some of the investigation yourself.

And that makes you unlikely to be manipulated by a simple, superficial bad agent who comes on the scene and wants to convince you of flat-out false things.

You naturally ask too many questions.

So when I created this blog, I didn’t necessarily have a premise behind it.

Except that I wanted to participate in the counter-culture to propaganda.

I wanted to ask too many questions. I wanted to encourage critical thinking.

Yes, I’d already drafted my podcast, a book, and many essays—so of course I had something to say.

But that wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t WHAT I had to say.

The point was to ENJOY thinking… just for the pure exercise of it.

Like those psychopath marathon runners who enjoy running (not for sensible reasons: like escaping a predator) but for some kind of twisted pleasure they get from it.

Likewise, those who have the capacity to think—for the pure love of it—cease to be capable of being manipulated by bad agents, at least on a widespread scale.

The other day I had the thought that I would certainly rather be in a Beat Philosopher community of 100 people who truly cared about genuinely good ideas—as I do. Than to be in a community of 3,000 people with casual, lazy, or even BAD ideas.

But it’s more than just the ideas themselves. It’s the laziness of adopting an ideology and giving loyalty to it, even when you don’t personally understand the meaning behind it.

Questioning your paradigm ultimately strengthens the meaning of it.

Because you can now phrase it in your own words and integrate it with your own subjective meaning.

If your paradigm can’t handle questions: then you merely have a loyalty to it. But it certainly isn’t a paradigm of truth—or objective meaning.

So, the reasons behind me creating the blog are twofold:

On a personal level and a societal level.

First and foremost: honoring Athena’s legacy.

One of the realizations I had when I was in North Carolina, processing my grief, was that Athena was the best thing to ever happen to me.

But her death was the worst thing to ever happen to me.

So I had to make a choice which legacy I wanted to be left with.

For the time that she’d been in my life, she had been loving and healing. And had changed me immeasurably.

If I let her death strip me of those things, then I proved that her love and her legacy hadn’t really been strong enough to permanently stay with me.

If it makes sense at all—by withdrawing, retreating, and hiding—due to the grief… I would have let Athena’s lasting legacy be only pain and trauma.

If, instead, I become productive and turned my grief into action—especially action I had wanted to take alongside my relationship to her… then I honored the contributions she gave me even after she was gone.

I miss her so much.

But trying to be the person I was when she was beside me is my way of honoring her love and her presence even though she’s no longer here.

Thus, I’m motivated by that need to satisfy my memory of her.

To remain the person she turned me into—and not let death kill both her… and her legacy.

And the second reason: is to survive this American coup on democracy.

Due to my Resist Rebel Revolt research, I am now 90% sure that Elon Musk intends to end American democracy as we know it. I believe he’s mixed up in some ‘philosophical worldviews’ called the Dark Enlightenment or the Neoreactionary Movement.

A worldview that wants to dismantle the democratic form of government and re-establish autocratic “tech-kings” instead of “philosopher-kings.”

These batshit crazy billionaires seek to privatize the U.S. government and have the public sector become a series of corporations, run by Emperor CEOs.

Their goal is to use the village idiot, Donald Trump, like a wrecking ball to create chaos and dismantle the government, and then establish an autocratic Tech-Emperor at the helm.

It’s clear that Elon Musk—being the richest man in the world—intends to make himself that tech leader.

Because of this shift… away from Donald Trump’s first presidency and into a new territory of horror and chaos… I feel compelled to be more clear about my priorities.

Some of this means pulling away from the tech billionaires’ products.

This includes social medias, mainstream media, or Amazon owned by anybody who seems to support this batshit crazy worldview that the Tech Billionaires have on democracy and freedom.

Unfortunately, Substack is actually partially funded by one of the billionaires with this crazy worldview.

How much influence he has on Substack, I don’t know. VC funding is not necessarily control of the values of a company.

But the algorithm in Notes is centralized, the same way Facebook is. And that centralization is what allowed Zuck and Musk to mute content they didn’t like and push content on the American people that they wanted us to believe in.

Essentially, the billionaires who own legacy media and social media ARE the Joseph Goebbels of our day.

And that’s what attracted me to independent voices on Substack in the first place. So don’t get me wrong: that’s why I’m here.

But that’s also why my trust is on a short leash with things like Substack Notes.

I’m not comfortable giving my time and energy to an algorithm that I can’t control.

Because in 6 months, we might have to do this propaganda game all over again. (Given that Marc Andreessen is part of Substack’s funding). And all of the mainstream media newspapers and cable news are also owned by billionaires. (Complicit in the coup or not).

Currently, subscribing to individual Substack users & Bluesky are the only two decentralized platforms that I feel comfortable investing any energy into.

And of course, my own website.

That doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop writing. It just means two things:

1. I’m going to be putting more of my writing on my own website, rather than relying on Substack to aggregate my work to the public.

2. I won’t be leaning as much on the private chat that we have here.

The reason being that at any point, if Substack goes south, I can leave and take my subscribers to a new aggregator - like Ghost. But I won’t be able to take the chat with me.

This won’t affect your subscriptions: free or paid.

But, let’s take it one day at a time. And if need be, I can transfer the paid subscriptions to my website, where you’ll get private access to more archived content.

This also means I might work on releasing some of my podcast, and work on the Existentialism courses I had outlined last year.

Some of these might be biographical courses. Others might be centered on single works from various philosophers.

But all of this will take time and concentration.

So that’s my priority right now: deleting the distractions and focusing on the content that I love to create.

Most of all I intend to continue to process

-The grief & pain that I have over the loss of my beautiful girl, Athena

-The fragile state of the United States democracy

-Sharing more of this content I’ve spent two decades working on

So what’s my goal for this community going forward?

Well, it’s to continue to be part of the Propaganda Counterculture.

To continue to join a movement of people who are choosing to think for themselves—and not fall in line with an autocratic worldview.

If this means:

Finding more direct expressions of my passions

Creating work that isn’t pandering to a consensus

Healing from grief, and honoring Athena’s lasting legacy

& Putting a little bit of critical thinking into a flailing democracy that desperately needs it

Then that’s what I’m going to do.

Organically, I have to take these uncertain times one day at a time.

And I do want to thank all of those who are willing to spend their time with me on this journey.