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about to derail what he himself regards as illusions, which may be rough on bad-mannered or ill-designed automata but serve the social machine acceptably well. The determinist is also aware that if our illusions fall apart on paper, they are intractable in our lives. They have such a lock upon us that even the desire to escape from them is nearly impossible. To hate our illusions or hold them dear only attaches us to them all the more. We cannot stand up to them without our world falling apart, for those who care. While determinists stick to their logic, they are satisfied to let their philosophical opponents run the puppet show. What choice do they have? Yet how much slack do you give to what you believe is a lie, even a lie that holds steady the social order and braces up everything you have become accustomed to—your most cherished image of yourself, your country, your loved ones, and the value you place on your work, your hobbies, your possessions, your “way of life”? How much slack do you give to what you believe to be a lie before you say you have had it with lies, before you forsake everything to live with what you really think and feel about the way things are?
    How much slack? Answer: all the slack in the world.
    3. Although the translation of “The Last Messiah” in the March-April 2004 number of the British journal Philosophy Now is annotated as the first appearance of this essay in English, it was previously included in an anthology of English translations of the works of Norwegian writers entitled Wisdom in the Open Air: The Norwegian Roots of Deep Ecology (1993), eds. Peter Reed and David Rothenberg (translation of “The Last Messiah” by Sigmund Kvaløy with Peter Reed). Zapffe’s writings have not been translated into English except stingily and posthumously. This is not a queer happenstance for writers whose humor is unfriendly to the status quo. Until they have been long under the ground, if then, their works are kept on life support by an underground readership. Those among the resurrected include H. P. Lovecraft, whose horror fiction and varied nonfiction writings waited decades before they were made fairly accessible even to readers in his native country, where writers of a negative persuasion—whether homegrown or foreign—are relegated to the lower echelons of the cult figure until they are trusted to appear on the shelves of better bookstores or from the presses of major publishers.
    4. While philosophers and other thinkers have often deliberated upon the fabricated nature of our lives (example: P. L. Berger and T. Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality, 1966), mass audiences are not often regaled with the practical import of this idea. But sometimes they are, if only momentarily and deceptively. In the 1976 film Network, a news anchorman, Howard Beale, breaks the following story to his viewers: “Today is Wednesday, September the 24th, and this is my last broadcast. Yesterday I announced on this program that I was going to commit public suicide, admittedly an act of madness.
    Well, I'll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bullshit. Am I still on the air? I really don't know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit. Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can't think up any reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit. We don't know why we're going through all this pointless pain, humiliation, decays, so there better be someone somewhere who does know. That's the God bullshit. And then there's the noble man bullshit; that man is a noble creature that can order his own world; who needs God? Well, if there's anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me: That man is full of bullshit. I don't have anything going for me. I haven't got any kids. And I was married for forty-three years of shrill, shrieking fraud. So I don't have any bullshit