True Detective | The Angry River

True Detective Rust Cohle True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto has recently talked about texts that influenced his writing of Rust, describing him as an “anti-natalist nihilism.“ What can we learn about Rust as a person informed by works like Jim Crawford’s Confessions of an Antinatalist, Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet, David Benatar’s Better to Have Never Been? We would know that he is drawn to the extreme fringes of philosophical speculation and that much of the material he is reading is unpalatable to most people. We would also know that he sought out these texts perhaps after being dissatisfied with more mainstream mediations on our place in the universe. He is not at home in the world, expects nothing from it, and has a fundamental mistrust of all discourse of hope. It is also likely that he sees hypocrisy as the norm and is attuned to delusion as the natural state of the human mind. This is perhaps why he is so good at soliciting confessions. Nuances dividing these thinkers aside, I’d sa