Read Online The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Thomas Ligotti
Tags: Criticism, Philosophy
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the mind-boggling number of books and therapies for a market of discontented individuals who are short on a sense of meaning and purpose, either in a limited and localized variant (“I received an ‘A’ on my calculus exam”) or one that is macrocosmic in scope (“There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”). Those who are euphoric, or even moderately content, are not parched for 36
meaning and purpose. Relatively speaking, feeling good is its own justification. As long as such states last, why spoil a good thing with self-searching interrogations in re: meaning and purpose? But a high tone of elation could also be a sign of psychopathology, as it is for individuals who have been diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder. Such persons should be treated by mental health professionals, although their therapeutics often mires a patient in the ravings of therapists who are modern-day incarnations of “positive thinking” preachers such as Norman Vincent Peale. No one ever bought a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) who was not unsatisfied with his or her life. This dissatisfaction is precisely the quality that the great pessimists—Buddha, Schopenhauer, Freud—saw as definitive of the human packing plant. Millions of copies Peale’s book and its spawn, including Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (2002), have been sold . . . and they were not purchased by readers who were madly content with their lives. They may have attracted people who wished to potentiate their “subjective well being,” in the terminology of positive psychology researchers. But those who are on that road may nevertheless be considered at least relatively unsatisfied with how they feel and are playing a perilous game in trying to upgrade their emotional tone to a height from which they may have a very unhappy fall.
Ask any major drug user.
6. Zapffe’s solution to nature’s sportive minting of the human race may seem the last checkpoint of despair. In his Philosophy of The Unconscious (1869), the German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann thinks farther ahead: “What would it avail, e.g., if all mankind should die out by sexual continence? The world as such would continue to exist.” This endurance of the organic would allow the restive forces of life to set up “a new man or similar type, and the whole misery would begin over again” (emphasis not added). For Hartmann, the struggle for deliverance is not between humanity and nature, but between the affirmation of all phenomena by their continuance in any form and the negation of same by the evolution of a super-developed form of being that could exterminate every scintilla of existence at the very source of creation. While Hartmann’s vision is rather lunatic, its goal is actually more realistic than Zapffe’s. It is uproariously implausible that humankind will ever leave off breeding. But we can imagine that someday we will be able to suffocate every cell on earth with reasonable certainly using a destructive mechanism not yet devised, since nuclear or biological weapons would probably leave simpler organisms unharmed and spoiling for a new evolution. This planetary doomsday would not depend on the assent of billions (a huddle of holdouts could foil Zapffe’s solution for the disappearance of all humans and quasi-humans) but could occur either accidentally or by the initiative of a few messianic individuals.
7. In his study Suicide (1897), the French sociologist Emile Durkheim contended that "one does not advance when one proceeds toward no goal, or—which is the same thing—
when the goal is infinity. To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness." Who can gainsay that the goal of our race has no visible horizon and therefore, in Durkheim’s view, we are doomed to, as the French thinker rather
meaning and purpose. Relatively speaking, feeling good is its own justification. As long as such states last, why spoil a good thing with self-searching interrogations in re: meaning and purpose? But a high tone of elation could also be a sign of psychopathology, as it is for individuals who have been diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder. Such persons should be treated by mental health professionals, although their therapeutics often mires a patient in the ravings of therapists who are modern-day incarnations of “positive thinking” preachers such as Norman Vincent Peale. No one ever bought a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) who was not unsatisfied with his or her life. This dissatisfaction is precisely the quality that the great pessimists—Buddha, Schopenhauer, Freud—saw as definitive of the human packing plant. Millions of copies Peale’s book and its spawn, including Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (2002), have been sold . . . and they were not purchased by readers who were madly content with their lives. They may have attracted people who wished to potentiate their “subjective well being,” in the terminology of positive psychology researchers. But those who are on that road may nevertheless be considered at least relatively unsatisfied with how they feel and are playing a perilous game in trying to upgrade their emotional tone to a height from which they may have a very unhappy fall.
Ask any major drug user.
6. Zapffe’s solution to nature’s sportive minting of the human race may seem the last checkpoint of despair. In his Philosophy of The Unconscious (1869), the German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann thinks farther ahead: “What would it avail, e.g., if all mankind should die out by sexual continence? The world as such would continue to exist.” This endurance of the organic would allow the restive forces of life to set up “a new man or similar type, and the whole misery would begin over again” (emphasis not added). For Hartmann, the struggle for deliverance is not between humanity and nature, but between the affirmation of all phenomena by their continuance in any form and the negation of same by the evolution of a super-developed form of being that could exterminate every scintilla of existence at the very source of creation. While Hartmann’s vision is rather lunatic, its goal is actually more realistic than Zapffe’s. It is uproariously implausible that humankind will ever leave off breeding. But we can imagine that someday we will be able to suffocate every cell on earth with reasonable certainly using a destructive mechanism not yet devised, since nuclear or biological weapons would probably leave simpler organisms unharmed and spoiling for a new evolution. This planetary doomsday would not depend on the assent of billions (a huddle of holdouts could foil Zapffe’s solution for the disappearance of all humans and quasi-humans) but could occur either accidentally or by the initiative of a few messianic individuals.
7. In his study Suicide (1897), the French sociologist Emile Durkheim contended that "one does not advance when one proceeds toward no goal, or—which is the same thing—
when the goal is infinity. To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness." Who can gainsay that the goal of our race has no visible horizon and therefore, in Durkheim’s view, we are doomed to, as the French thinker rather
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