We are the Conspirators!

I tracked down Thomas Ligotti's "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race," mainly because I had read that Nic Pizzolatto had used it as a basis for some of the monologues Matthew McConaughey recites in his astonishing and mind-blowing portrayal of the Homicide Detective Cohle on HBO's "True Detective." 

Ligotti is a writer of "horror fiction" in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft, but "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" is a non-fiction book. It is a totally strange beast. You could call it a "Primer on Pessimism," or "How to Lose Friends and Annoy Your Neighbors," it's a handbook of "Extreme Pessimism." Not exactly cocktail-party material.

And when I say extreme pessimism, I mean really, really extreme and really, really pessimistic. As in: non-existence is better than existence, it would be better not to be born, life is suffering, pain and horror; human beings are a abomination, we are a supernatural anomaly, an evolutionary blunder, and human consciousness (the certain knowledge that we will die) is a terrible and horrific thing that we can't really live with, and must do our best to forget. 

Ligotti, with a straight face, argues that human beings should do the brave and noble thing, do a favor for themselves and the Universe, and X themselves out, and stop procreating.  Life is suffering, and to continue life, to continue to perpetrate life, only multiplies the suffering. 

Reading the book is kind of a psychic mud-bath, it's an intellectual blood-letting. It's a poisonous book - "Beware! Tread carefully!"  For some odd reason, I found the book to be strangely uplifting, and thought-provoking. Ligotti's argument, forces you back to the essentials - it compels you to think about the meaning of life, and our place in the Universe. It opens your head!

The book makes you want to argue with it. And that's a good thing. It features a Who's Who of pessimism - Arthur Schopenhaur, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Friedrich Nietzsche, Professor Nothing, Peter Wessel Zapfe, Phillip Mainlander - pessimists, both famous and obscure. The book is well-reasoned, clear, and elegant.

Since I am an optimist by nature, some of this just doesn't fly with me. Maybe I can chalk it up to my "sunny nature," maybe it's the chemical make-up of my particular body and mind, but after reading this book, I'd say I'm primarily optimistic, with major pessimistic tendencies, and that's probably not a bad way to try to navigate this long, strange journey.

There is much wisdom in the book, but I happen to love consciousness, and even if I am fated to die, and even if my consciousness is fated to vanish, the having, no matter how brief, seems worth it. And I do think we can live with the knowledge of our mortality, even if we have to fill our lives with illusions and distractions just to keep the game going.

Schopenhaur tells us that only pain is real, but I have experienced joy, happiness, enlightenment, epiphany, pleasure, and even though it's true that those states do seem illusory and ephemeral, the glimpse, the glimmer, the briefest of brief experiences of lightness of being seems to me to be enough to stake a life upon.