Then the author's use of the word nihilism in this article is a redefinition of what is the accepted definition of the term.
It raises a red flag…why didn’t an author just define a new term for the concept instead of distorting an old term? Why the required effort for a reader to make the translation from accepted definition to the author’s “special language”? This is prose, not poetry. Redefining accepted terminology is the intellectual equivalent of cultural appropriation and, at best, leads to confusion and empty bickering over terminology. Just sounds sloppy to me…imagine doing that in a STEM discipline, you’d be laughed out of the room.
Could be a useful strategy in cult psychology, though, I grant you that.
And if the accepted definition is already the dishonest and dangerous type?