Are Absurdists Just Nihilists With Stockholm Syndrome? Camus vs Nietzsche

Last updated: October 22, 2026

Are absurdists just nihilists? They share the premise that the universe offers no built-in meaning, and they part ways over what follows. Nihilism, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s notebook formula, means “That the highest values are losing their value” (The Will to Power, aphorism 2, Ludovici translation). Absurdism, Albert Camus’s position, treats that loss as a starting point and keeps two things in play: our demand for meaning and the world’s refusal to supply it. In a preface dated March 1955 that opens Justin O’Brien’s English translation of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus summed up the book’s claim: within nihilism itself one can find “the means to proceed beyond nihilism”. The nihilist reads the empty sky as a verdict; Camus read it as the first line of an argument about how to live.

The meme at the top of this page makes the opposite case in seven words: “Absurdists are just nihilists with Stockholm syndrome.” In other words, the absurdist has been held captive by a meaningless cosmos so long that he has started to like it. The joke deserves a proper answer, which starts with the hostage label itself.

Stockholm Syndrome: A Hostage Label Psychiatrists Still Dispute

Stockholm syndrome, the label the meme borrows, comes from a single 1973 bank siege and, according to the Karolinska psychiatrist Christoffer Rahm, is not a psychiatric diagnosis at all.

On 23 August 1973 a robber took four employees of Kreditbanken on Stockholm’s Norrmalmstorg hostage, and the siege lasted six days, as AFP reported for The Local in 2023. The psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, part of the negotiating team, later coined the term; during the siege the hostage Kristin Enmark told Prime Minister Olof Palme by phone that she feared the police, not her captors. Enmark has since said that there was “no love or physical attraction” on her side and described one of the men as her “chance for survival”. Christoffer Rahm of the Karolinska Institute, whose research article asks in its title whether the syndrome is a psychiatric diagnosis or an urban myth, told AFP it is “not a psychiatric diagnosis”, and the gender studies scholar Cecilia Åse called it a “constructed concept”, used to explain hostages’ behaviour when the authorities fail to protect them.

That history changes the joke. If the hostages were making a rational survival bet, then an absurdist who “bonds” with a silent universe might be doing the same: choosing the attitude that lets him keep living. Ideas can work like captors too. People who have spent years defending a theory tend to find it hard to walk away, and an -ism can hold its followers the way a siege holds its hostages, absurdism included. Camus was alert to it: in the note that opens The Myth of Sisyphus he says the book describes “an absurd sensitivity” widespread in his time, and explicitly not an “absurd philosophy”, which he said his time had not known.

Nietzsche’s Two Nihilisms: The Weary and the Destructive

In notes published after his death, Nietzsche split nihilism into a passive form, a sign of declining strength, and an active form, a sign of growing strength that turns destructive.

The source needs a warning label. The Will to Power is a selection from Nietzsche’s notebooks that his sister Elisabeth published under that title after his collapse, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says the editing “was not well founded” in his surviving plans. Read with that caution, aphorism 22 in the Ludovici translation says nihilism “may be two things”: on one side “a sign of enhanced spiritual strength”, active nihilism; on the other “the collapse and decline of spiritual strength”, passive nihilism. Aphorism 23 adds that the active kind peaks “as a powerful destructive force”, while its opposite is a “weary Nihilism, which no longer attacks”, its “most renowned form being Buddhism”. Nietzsche was diagnosing a condition he wanted to get through, which our post on what nihilism is and isn’t traces from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons onward.

Set next to absurdism, the two nihilisms look like this:

A Premise, Not a Verdict: Camus on Nihilism

Camus agreed with the nihilist’s premise and rejected the conclusion: for him the absurd opened the inquiry.

The opening note of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) says so in plain words: “the absurd, hitherto taken as a conclusion”, is treated in the essay “as a starting-point”. The absurd, in O’Brien’s translation, is born of the confrontation between human need and “the unreasonable silence of the world”, and it “depends as much on man as on the world”; for the moment it is “the only bond uniting them”. This is the structural difference from nihilism. The absurdist keeps the demand alive on purpose, because dropping it would settle the conflict by pretending one side does not exist. How this sets Camus apart from Sartre is a separate story, told in our comparison of absurdism, existentialism and nihilism.

The 1955 preface reads the book backwards from its result. Camus says he wrote it in 1940, “amid the French and European disaster”, and that it argues even an unbeliever has no licence for suicide; the sentence about moving beyond nihilism follows directly, and he adds that all his later books pursued that direction. That is a strong claim for a book that opens by calling suicide the one serious philosophical problem, and it shows how Camus wanted the essay read: as an argument for staying.

If that question is personal for you right now, free, confidential support is available in your country via Find A Helpline.

The Absurd Can Make Murder Look Indifferent

For Camus the most dangerous consequence of the absurd was practical: if nothing has value, killing has no value either, and he wrote The Rebel (1951) to block that inference.

The book’s introduction states the problem bluntly. In the translation quoted by the SEP, the absurd “makes murder seem a matter of indifference, to say the least, and hence possible”. Camus then turns the absurdist’s own reasoning against that result. The refusal of suicide already treats life as a value, and he presses the point with lines the SEP quotes: “To say that life is absurd, consciousness must be alive”, and “To breathe is to judge”. An absurdist who wants to stay consistent cannot claim that his own life matters while other people’s lives do not.

Nietzsche gets a central role in this argument. In the section on metaphysical rebellion, Camus writes that “with him, nihilism becomes conscious for the first time”, and that Nietzsche examined it “like a clinical fact” in order to turn the coming catastrophe into a renaissance. The SEP shows where the fear points: in Camus’s account, it is by an “inevitable logic of nihilism” that Communism climaxes the modern trend to deify man. Camus’s fear, in other words, was that a philosophical diagnosis could harden into a political licence to kill.

He had already tested this in wartime. In Letters to a German Friend, published clandestinely in 1943 and 1944, Camus addresses an imagined German who began, like him, from the world’s absurdity. According to the SEP, the Germans “sought to overcome it by dominating the world”, while the French could fight with “clean hands” for “justice and national survival”.

Heat Death and “the Vast Death of the Solar System”

The bleak backdrop of the joke, a universe running down without purpose, is older than Camus, and the cosmic version of nihilism has produced answers that sound surprisingly absurdist.

In “A Free Man’s Worship”, written in 1902 and published in the Independent Review in 1903, Bertrand Russell accepted that all human achievement is headed for extinction “in the vast death of the solar system”, “buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins”. His conclusion was to build anyway, on what he called “the firm foundation of unyielding despair”. Russell’s tone is grander and more mournful than Camus’s; the structure is close, though. Both accept the cosmic verdict and refuse to let it settle how a person should live. Thermodynamics adds a timetable to the nihilist’s premise without settling the question of value, which our post on cosmic nihilism and entropy takes on with more physics.

Where the Hostage Joke Lands a Real Hit

The joke lands a real hit: critics, including sympathetic ones, have asked whether Camus gets from “nothing has meaning” to “revolt, solidarity and lucidity are good” without a valid argument.

The SEP entry on Camus puts the problem sharply. By the end of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus has moved from scepticism about meaning to recommending one way of living as better than others, and the entry asks how he justifies “embracing a normative stance”. Its verdict is that the move involves “a certain sleight of hand, as the philosopher gives way to the artist”. The Rebel has the same gap at a larger scale: the SEP asks how “we are” is supposed to follow from “I revolt”. A nihilist could press the point further. Lucidity, defiance and solidarity are values, and absurdism smuggles them in under the label of honesty, much as a hostage might start calling the captor’s rules “our arrangement”.

Camus’s defenders reply that he did not try to derive values from the cosmos. He argued instead that anyone who goes on living, breathing and arguing has already judged that something is worth it, and the absurdist simply refuses to hide that judgment. On that reading the nihilist is the less consistent party, using a life he values to announce that nothing has value. Whether that answer fully works is still argued over.

For the man with the rock, read Sisyphus: the absurd hero or an asymptomatic case?