[HN Gopher] What does Werner Herzog's nihilist penguin teach us?
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What does Werner Herzog's nihilist penguin teach us?
Author : Marceltan
Score : 25 points
Date : 2026-01-28 20:43 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwlies.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwlies.com)
| observationist wrote:
| That's how new species happen. Over time, the penguins who get
| sufficiently tired of all the other penguins' shit march off to
| the edge of the map, and when they finally get lucky, enough of
| the smart, independent minded penguins survive to produce a new
| generation. The new adventure flock eventually garners enough
| members to march back to the feeding grounds and seize the
| territory from the loser normy penguins.
|
| Thus the arc of the universe bends towards badass penguins.
| tptacek wrote:
| The whole point of the sequence is that there's no chance that
| these "badass penguins" are going to make new species. There's
| no food where they're monomaniacally heading. They're going to
| die.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This _particular_ one wasn 't going anywhere useful.
|
| That's presumably why the comment said "when [collective
| they] finally get lucky", not "when [individual they]
| _inevitably_ get lucky ".
|
| A certain percentage of your species having genes encouraging
| risky/stupid behavior is likely somewhat useful.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| A lone penguin wandering off is never going to create a
| new, badass species. There would need to be an entire group
| of penguins breaking off to establish a new population and
| eventually a new species. And they don't necessarily become
| more badass, just different; whatever alleles the founders
| had will be more consistently expressed in the new
| population, and eventually they may diverge enough to be a
| new species. Regardless, this penguin is marching off to
| die alone.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > A lone penguin wandering off is never going to create a
| new, badass species.
|
| Sure. But two might.
|
| Or the behavior may sometimes benefit the colony a few
| coves over with some new genes every so often.
|
| See also: Homosexuality in various animals, including
| humans. Individually, not great for your genes' survival.
| Collectively, seems to have enough of an advantage to the
| species to not be selected out.
| tialaramex wrote:
| No, this trait is almost certainly not useful.
|
| Mother Nature doesn't give a shit, that's worth
| remembering. For the scenarios where two species in an arms
| race wipe each other out aren't somehow more or less
| desirable than other outcomes, it's just a thing which
| happened. Meh.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Mother Nature doesn't give a shit
|
| Sure. That's not required for natural selection to work.
|
| But any species that reliably returns to its birthplace
| like penguins and salmon and elephants _must_ have some
| tiny proportion of the population that wanders off and
| gets lost occasionally to be able to spread to new areas.
|
| Sometimes it'll be a storm or a big ice crevasse that
| does it, but there's no reason it can't sometimes be
| this.
| beeflet wrote:
| It's convenient that colonies of penguins only live where
| there is food. One wonders how they got there, perhaps god
| set them there to live for eternity.
| tptacek wrote:
| Have you watched the film we're talking about?
| observationist wrote:
| I get what you're saying and all, but when you look back
| across the hundreds of millions of years of evolution, the
| whole reason humans exist is the extreme and sometimes
| arbitrary individual choices and "that never happens"
| situations that are exceptions to niche saturation. You could
| take the glass half empty, cold and pragmatic view and focus
| on the fact that millions, or maybe even tens of millions of
| antisocial/adventurous/moronic penguins have to get
| wanderlust and die frozen and alone before you might even get
| a single successful breeding pair, but who wants to look at
| life like that?
|
| Most badass penguins don't make it. Being the badass penguin
| isn't a sensible life goal. The altar of time demands the
| blood sacrifice of nearly all the badass penguins before
| progress and change is allowed. Occasionally, though, they
| win, and new species are born. The exceptions end up forking
| the timeline, and provide a backdrop of meaning to the
| sacrifice of all those who came (or went?) before.
|
| The thing I love most is the fact that you can project
| anything on to the penguin, from extreme heroism, to
| villainy, to meaninglessness, or even profound cosmic
| purpose. I'd love to know what the evolutionary psychology /
| behavior is that actually causes it, though.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Interesting fantasy but these broken penguins are too
| infrequent to start something new. They usually just wander off
| to die alone in the cold.
|
| New species are usually formed gradually while introducing
| their mutations to the population until they eventually break
| off as a group. But more commonly there's usually a geographic
| barrier that separates an existing group and they gradually
| just drift apart from each other.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > They usually just wander off to die alone in the cold.
|
| Usually! But not always.
|
| Every once in a while, one probably makes it to another
| colony many miles away, and helps prevent inbreeding as a
| result.
|
| Or runs into a similar weirdo somewhere in between.
| lux-lux-lux wrote:
| Penguins live in large colonies and, as a result, generally
| do not have issues with inbreeding.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://www.penguinsinternational.org/turns-out-that-not-
| all...
|
| > The researchers found that the differences between
| species could be determined by the habitat where a
| species was found. For example, Emperor penguins occupy
| the Antarctic continent, breeding mostly on sea ice. Even
| though they have colonies clustered by geographic
| regions, the researchers found that juveniles of Emperor
| Penguins can travel long distances between colonies
| facilitating "gene flow."
| Towaway69 wrote:
| This leaving the group to die can also be observed in other
| species (cats and dogs do this too).
|
| So this penguin knew its time was up and didn't want to mess
| up the colony with its dead body.
|
| We interpret the behaviour through our lenses and
| experiences.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Or they find a new feeding ground? Why does the universe bend
| to "badass penguins"?
|
| The universe really does not care, in a "badass" way. Major
| league not caring.
|
| It's our interpretation that something is "badass" mainly
| because our species has pretty much negatively affected most
| parts of the environment.
|
| It's us that are "badass" and don't "get it" when it comes to
| nature and the environment.
|
| As someone else points out, there is no such thing as a
| nihilist penguin, it's purely us putting a label on behaviour
| that we - once again - don't understand.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| My personal favourite work of his is "Happy People: A Year in the
| Taiga". Most of the people are doing immediate purposeful work
| and are much more present. There is so much resilience (the bear
| destroyed hut), and there is also tragedy in it as well (the
| fire).
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_People:_A_Year_in_the_Ta...
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Yes, I also love how it shows the seasons and the practical
| work involved in the lives of people living in the taiga
| through the year.
|
| Totally different but Little Dieter Needs to Fly is one of my
| favorites
| rdtsc wrote:
| I like that one as well. I just rewatched it again. One of the
| trappers in the movie is Mikhail Tarkovsky and I just learned
| he is actually the nephew nephew Andrei Tarkovsky, the film
| director.
| beeflet wrote:
| I would describe it as a faustian penguin, not a nihilist
| penguin. The other day there was a story here about a coyote that
| swam to alcatraz (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46674433).
|
| When we look at an animal that does such a thing, we characterize
| it as a strange and suicidal act of a disturbed creature hurtling
| it's life force into the abyss. But when man does the same thing,
| it is a heroic and uniquely human act of exploration.
|
| If you go onto an island or some mountain range or some other
| type of isolated pocket of the world, you may be surprised to
| find that life exists there. But there is only one way in which
| this is possible: at some point in time, some living thing had to
| abandon its old world with little regard for its personal
| survival.
|
| When you factor in the probability of survival in the new world,
| and the requirement of finding a sexed pair on the other side you
| realize that this takes many living things, integrated over a
| long period of time.
|
| Life pushes boundaries and explores new environments. It has to
| start from something. Clearly some amount of mania is a requisite
| for success in the long term in order to overcome reason in the
| short term.
| barcodehorse wrote:
| > When we look at an animal that does such a thing, we
| characterize it as a strange and suicidal act of a disturbed
| creature hurtling it's life force into the abyss. But when man
| does the same thing, it is a heroic and uniquely human act of
| exploration.
|
| I'd say that that's mostly because the man in question is
| rational. They strategize, they collect resources, and they do
| whatever they can to make sure they can return. The penguin
| can't do that. It doesn't have a goal in mind, or any way to
| sustain itself while it wanders. It just goes.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Human explorers aren't necessarily terribly rational. A bunch
| of ordinary human pride is involved.
|
| The base on the _actual_ South Pole, far on the interior of
| the continent, isn 't McMurdo where much of that documentary
| was filmed, it is Amundsen-Scott, and it's named for two
| teams of explorers who first reached that pole in the same
| summer, Amundsen (whose team reached it first and returned
| alive) and Scott (whose team was second and all died)
|
| Scott's plan was crap. To a considerable extent that view is
| hindsight, but even at the time Scott must have known
| Amundsen's plan was better. Certainly by the time they
| reached the Pole and found that they'd been beaten to it, he
| will have been sure. By that time he was in extreme danger,
| slowly starving and with a long trek back to any permanent
| shelter - it would have taken excellent luck (which he didn't
| get) to make it home alive, and in any case he'd been beaten
| to the pole.
| dd8601fn wrote:
| > When you factor in the probability of survival in the new
| world, and the requirement of finding a sexed pair on the other
| side you realize that this takes many living things, integrated
| over a long period of time.
|
| Seems to me you've described how lone adventuring animals are
| _not_ the source of dispersion to remote areas.
| netsharc wrote:
| Interesting, I've seen videos about this nihilistic penguin the
| last few days on Instagram... Feels like content regurgitation,
| but I don't know who's creating and who's recycling it at the
| moment.
|
| (On HN there's often a story from one site one day, and a few
| days later the same story reported by a different news site..)
| arjie wrote:
| Internet commentator and political analyst made a reference to
| this a few days ago
| https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/2015810397295583630
|
| I suspect it was something like that.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| The article itself seems to predate this:
|
| > It's a decade since the film officially premiered at the 2007
| Toronto Film Festival, and it remains one of Herzog's finest
| achievements.
|
| So it would seem the article is nearly a decade old.
| mig39 wrote:
| It was big on TikTok a few months ago, which makes sense that
| it's on Instagram now.
| DavidPiper wrote:
| It seems to have come from the US Department of Homeland
| Security - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7WqVx9x89s
| direwolf20 wrote:
| The Trump administration posted it.
| krona wrote:
| Huh? I was expecting at least one or two Nietzsche or Dostoevsky
| quotes but this article completely fails to go beyond what is
| obvious to anyone who has seen those 3 minutes of the
| documentary.
| Notatheist wrote:
| It has been a while since I read Nietzsche but what exactly does
| trekking off into the unknown or even certain death have to do
| with nihilism? Maybe active nihilism but even that would be a
| stretch, not to mention it would make the penguin inspiring
| rather than depressing.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Yeah, this is using nihilism in the colloquial sense that is
| closer to a synonym of "aimless" or maybe "doomed". The penguin
| can't possibly be a nihilist except for in the sense that all
| animals are nihilists
| krona wrote:
| This is Nietzsche's will to power in its most unforgiving form.
|
| The will to power is not mere survival or dominance over
| others; at its apex it is the drive to impose one's own meaning
| on existence, even when that meaning is written in self-
| destruction.
|
| It is like Empedocles and the volcano.
|
| Empedocles does not leap to escape mortality; he leaps to
| overreach it, to force the cosmos to acknowledge his claim,
| even if the price is erasure.
|
| The penguin would rather perish as itself than endure as
| something lesser.
| mellosouls wrote:
| (2017)
|
| History of the meme and resurgence in the last month:
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/penguin-walking-toward-mounta...
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