Read Online The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti - Free Book Online Page A

left. I just ran out of it, you see.” Later in the film, 35

    Howard Beale excavates a new load of bullshit during the course of a rant in which he reinstates his previous denial that “man is a noble creature.” He does this by enjoining his viewers to seize upon the following words: “You've got to say, ‘I'm a HUMAN
    BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!’” This leads into the signature quote from Network (“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore”), which refers to life in modern Western society, a jump backwards from the wider existential perspective that characterized the anchorman’s “bullshit” monologue. This newfound bullshit, fresh from the bottomless pit of fabrications, is then devoured by a large viewership that doltishly responds to Beale’s slogan and sends his ratings skyward, turning him into just another celebrity with a pathetic catch-phrase. Similarly, the film degenerates from a critique of life itself into a send-up of television, careerism, corporatism, and other narrow topics. The second instance in cinema where fabrication (bullshit) is admitted as the cornerstone of our lives occurs at the end of Hero (1992), when the character referred to in the title, Bernard LePlant, passes on some words of wisdom to his previously estranged son. "You remember where I said I was going to explain about life, buddy?” he says. “Well, the thing about life is, it gets weird. People are always talking to you about truth, everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or something and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn as you get older is, there ain't no truth. All there is, is bullshit. Pardon my vulgarity here. Layers of it. One layer of bullshit on top of another. And what you do in life, like when you get older, is—
    you pick the layer of bullshit you prefer, and that's your bullshit, so to speak. You got that?" Despite the cynicism of LePlant’s words, the object of his fatherly lesson is to create a bond between him and his son. (Hollywood movies are heavily dependent on plotlines in which a broken family comes together again.) This bond is reliant on the exposure of life as bullshit and is itself bullshit—bullshit to the second power—which makes LePlant’s case without his being aware of his own bullshit, which is how bullshit works. But this is not the message the moviegoer is meant to take away from the mass-audience philosophizing of Hero. That would be to break a tacit social contract, which may be stated: “Leave me to my bullshit, and I will leave you to yours.” Like every other social contract, it is “more honoured in the breach than in the observance,” as one writer quipped, touching off a scholarly debate as to whether the meaning of this statement is (1) that rules of decency and civility are routinely broken or (2) it is morally incumbent upon us to break certain rules rather than observe them. This squabble depends on which word one believes should be emphasized, “honoured” or “breach.”
    Emphasis on the first word turns the statement into praise for those whose actions display higher moral standards than those set by law or social custom; emphasis on the second word gives us a mordant observance that people flout whatever does not further their selfish aims, morality be damned. As often happens, the writer quoted here either expressed himself poorly or has been willfully misunderstood by those who emphasize the word “honoured” to further an optimistic view of human behavior. This gives us leave to choose our own bullshit, much in the way afforded by religious scriptures such as the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Koran, Buddhist texts, and all other works in this or any other genre (codes of law, for example).
    5. The sense that one’s life has meaning and purpose is sometimes declared to be a necessary condition for acquiring or maintaining a state of good feeling. This is horrifying news considering