What do you think?
Rate this book
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
**In Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction outing, an examination of the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life through an insightful, unsparing argument that proves the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination but instead are found in reality.
"There is a signature motif discernible in both works of philosophical pessimism and supernatural horror. It may be stated Behind the scenes of life lurks something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world."**
His fiction is known to be some of the most terrifying in the genre of supernatural horror, but Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction book may be even scarier. Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy. At once a guidebook to pessimistic thought and a relentless critique of humanity's employment of self-deception to cope with the pervasive suffering of their existence, The Conspiracy against the Human Race may just convince readers that there is more than a measure of truth in the despairing yet unexpectedly liberating negativity that is widely considered a hallmark of Ligotti's work.
"There is a signature motif discernible in both works of philosophical pessimism and supernatural horror. It may be stated Behind the scenes of life lurks something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world."**
His fiction is known to be some of the most terrifying in the genre of supernatural horror, but Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction book may be even scarier. Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy. At once a guidebook to pessimistic thought and a relentless critique of humanity's employment of self-deception to cope with the pervasive suffering of their existence, The Conspiracy against the Human Race may just convince readers that there is more than a measure of truth in the despairing yet unexpectedly liberating negativity that is widely considered a hallmark of Ligotti's work.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2011
2296 people are currently reading
42451 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Ligotti
197 books3,076 followersThomas Ligotti is a contemporary American horror author and reclusive literary cult figure. His writings, while unique in style, have been noted as major continuations of several literary genres—most prominently Lovecraftian horror—and have overall been described as works of "philosophical horror", often written as philosophical novels with a "darker" undertone which is similar to gothic fiction. The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction"; another critic declared "It's a skilled writer indeed who can suggest a horror so shocking that one is grateful it was kept offstage."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,160 reviews
July 25, 2019
Are you one of those hardcore True Detective fans held in thrall by Detective Rust Cohle's rants about the bleakness of the universe? Did you wonder where all that weird stuff was coming from? Here. From this book. That's where it was coming from. Sometimes even verbatim.
This is an impressionistic survey by weird fiction writer Thomas Ligotti of the bleakest practitioners of modern philosophy, the guys who make Cioran look like a stand-up comic and Schopenhauer and Camus like irresponsible pollyannas.
If you've ever wondered whether we are nothing but cosmic puppets and human consciousness nothing but illusion, if you have ever suspected we are mere bags of skin crammed full of sequential sensations imagining themselves to be human, if you have ever guessed that the creation of the universe may be nothing but God's desperate attempt to commit suicide by shattering himself into a trillion pieces, or if you have concluded that the perpetuation of humanity is in itself a wrongheaded enterprise, only partially absolved by negative population growth, then this book may be just the thing for you.
I wouldn't call this a philosophical treatise exactly, since Ligotti's intention seems to be to disturb and to alienate rather than to enlighten. It is really more an example of what they used to call "belles lettres" (if this traditionally light-weight category may admit a work so profoundly pessimistic), an attempt by Ligotti to extend the aims and rhetorical techniques of weird fiction into the realm of expository prose. The book is loosely organized, and my favorite chapter is perhaps the most tangential: an analysis of the supernatural in literature which presents--among other things--an extremely illuminating comparison between the very different uses of the supernatural in "Hamlet" and "Macbeth."
So, True Detective fans, enjoy! (If "enjoy" is indeed the right word.) But don't expect Rust to chime in at the end and tell you that "The Light is winning."
September 2, 2024
⛧⛧⛧⛧⛧
"𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐝, 𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐰𝐨𝐤𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐰 𝐡𝐢𝐦𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟. 𝐇𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐧𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐦𝐨𝐬, 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲. 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬, 𝐰𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐮𝐩𝐨𝐧 𝐰𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫, 𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐫 𝐮𝐩𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐫, 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝." - Zapffe.
Those of you who watched "The Matrix" probably remember the scene where Morpheus offers Neo the choice between illusion and reality in the form of red and blue pills. After re-reading 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐲 𝐀𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐑𝐚𝐜𝐞 by Thomas Ligotti, I realized that in a way, Ligotti's vision is a reminiscent of "The Matrix", where the world we inhabit is revealed to be an illusion, a construct designed to keep us in a state of ignorant bliss instead of recognizing a harsh truth.
In this labyrinth, consciously set on fire, we are being taken into a place where truth and illusion are equally hollow. If Ligotti had a pill to offer, I assume it would've been black. One that dissolves in the mind like ink in water, spreading tendrils of darkness that reach into the deepest corners of consciousness, which, according to Liggotti, is a cruel trick of nature that has doomed us to suffer. Our awareness, according to him, is an evolutionary misstep that has cursed us with the ability to reflect on our own futility. To swallow the pill is to awaken from the dream of significance, to peel back the layers of comforting delusions that tell us that our existence means something and that our suffering is not in vain. It is to confront a stark whisper from the void that tugs at the thin veneer of reality, telling us we are 𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 - puppets dancing on strings of DNA, driven by blind impulses, destined to return to the void from which we came from.
I love the way this thought-provoking book draws deeply from the well of philosophical pessimism as well as horror in fiction, channelling the thoughts of Schopenhauer, Zapffe, Nietzsche, and even Lovecraft. Ligotti doesn't just reference these thinkers. He builds upon their ideas, crafting a philosophy that is even more unrelentingly dark. Nietzsche's declaration that "God is dead" is given new meaning here, not as a cry of liberation but as a lament for the void left in its wake. Lovecraft's tales of unspeakable entities lurking at the fringes of reality find a kindred spirit in Ligotti's exploration of consciousness itself as the ultimate horror. Where Lovecraft imagined monstrous beings indifferent to human suffering, Ligotti posits that the very act of being alive is the true monstrosity. Horror fiction is more than mere entertainment. It is a mirror reflecting the deepest fears of our species.
Despite its density, the book's genius lies in the ability to articulate this dread with beauty, even when you don't agree with it. Ligotti's exploration isn't the mere academic exercise of a philosopher tucked away in a study, but the anguished cry of a soul entangled in the very fabric of existence, a soul that has stared too long into the abyss and found it staring back with a knowing grin. Can someone give this guy a puppy to hug?
So, which pill is it going to be?
Sure, there's something compelling about stripping away the layers of illusion, about facing the darkness head-on without flinching. In accepting the void, there's a clarity that allows to live authentically, without the burden of false expectations or imposed meanings. If everything is meaningless, there should be no fear of living freely, right? However, for all its intellectual rigor and emotional power, there's something about Ligotti's philosophy that feels incomplete to me. His insistence on the futility of all things, while logical within its framework, leaves no room for the nuances of the human experience. Yes, life is often brutal and chaotic, but is still filled with moments of beauty, connection, and wonder, fleeting though they may be.
"𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐝, 𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐰𝐨𝐤𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐰 𝐡𝐢𝐦𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟. 𝐇𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐧𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐦𝐨𝐬, 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲. 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬, 𝐰𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐮𝐩𝐨𝐧 𝐰𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫, 𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐫 𝐮𝐩𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐫, 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝." - Zapffe.
Those of you who watched "The Matrix" probably remember the scene where Morpheus offers Neo the choice between illusion and reality in the form of red and blue pills. After re-reading 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐲 𝐀𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐑𝐚𝐜𝐞 by Thomas Ligotti, I realized that in a way, Ligotti's vision is a reminiscent of "The Matrix", where the world we inhabit is revealed to be an illusion, a construct designed to keep us in a state of ignorant bliss instead of recognizing a harsh truth.
In this labyrinth, consciously set on fire, we are being taken into a place where truth and illusion are equally hollow. If Ligotti had a pill to offer, I assume it would've been black. One that dissolves in the mind like ink in water, spreading tendrils of darkness that reach into the deepest corners of consciousness, which, according to Liggotti, is a cruel trick of nature that has doomed us to suffer. Our awareness, according to him, is an evolutionary misstep that has cursed us with the ability to reflect on our own futility. To swallow the pill is to awaken from the dream of significance, to peel back the layers of comforting delusions that tell us that our existence means something and that our suffering is not in vain. It is to confront a stark whisper from the void that tugs at the thin veneer of reality, telling us we are 𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 - puppets dancing on strings of DNA, driven by blind impulses, destined to return to the void from which we came from.
I love the way this thought-provoking book draws deeply from the well of philosophical pessimism as well as horror in fiction, channelling the thoughts of Schopenhauer, Zapffe, Nietzsche, and even Lovecraft. Ligotti doesn't just reference these thinkers. He builds upon their ideas, crafting a philosophy that is even more unrelentingly dark. Nietzsche's declaration that "God is dead" is given new meaning here, not as a cry of liberation but as a lament for the void left in its wake. Lovecraft's tales of unspeakable entities lurking at the fringes of reality find a kindred spirit in Ligotti's exploration of consciousness itself as the ultimate horror. Where Lovecraft imagined monstrous beings indifferent to human suffering, Ligotti posits that the very act of being alive is the true monstrosity. Horror fiction is more than mere entertainment. It is a mirror reflecting the deepest fears of our species.
Despite its density, the book's genius lies in the ability to articulate this dread with beauty, even when you don't agree with it. Ligotti's exploration isn't the mere academic exercise of a philosopher tucked away in a study, but the anguished cry of a soul entangled in the very fabric of existence, a soul that has stared too long into the abyss and found it staring back with a knowing grin. Can someone give this guy a puppy to hug?
So, which pill is it going to be?
Sure, there's something compelling about stripping away the layers of illusion, about facing the darkness head-on without flinching. In accepting the void, there's a clarity that allows to live authentically, without the burden of false expectations or imposed meanings. If everything is meaningless, there should be no fear of living freely, right? However, for all its intellectual rigor and emotional power, there's something about Ligotti's philosophy that feels incomplete to me. His insistence on the futility of all things, while logical within its framework, leaves no room for the nuances of the human experience. Yes, life is often brutal and chaotic, but is still filled with moments of beauty, connection, and wonder, fleeting though they may be.
August 10, 2011
Ligotti is a pessimist—and not some namby-pamby, equivocating, of course it will rain every day of my vacation! kind of doubting dude: Ligotti's pessimism is old school, pure, richly endowed with the ichor of nullity. Ligotti believes, firmly and avowedly, that, as the human race would have been better off never having come into existence in the first place, the most beneficial and sensible outcome for our species, as constituted at this particular point in the space/time continuum, would be to voluntarily abstain, to a single man and woman, from producing anymore offspring; and thus extinguish our brutal ontological dilemma with a self-enforced and -executed extinction. What, exactly, comprises this dilemma, to such a degree that a willingly undertaken mass-snuffout seems a sensible solution? It is consciousness, that horrible awareness bestowed upon our otherwise animal and natural fleshly bodies that divides us from ourselves, irreparably separates us from the physical world from which we were sprung. Whether this horrible gift was endowed by a supernatural agency or evolutionary development, it long ago metastasized, inflating itself to absurd proportions that cannot be reconciled to the bestial beings in which it is forced to reside. The result is endless torment and suffering, as this consciousness can contemplate both itself and the world, and can anticipate such inevitable mental excruciations as pain, terror, loss, forgetfulness and—the end point ineluctably awaiting on the horizon—death. Alone in nature do we have the capacity to reflect upon the past and contemplate the future—and, thus, we are aware of the futility and ephemerality of our hopes and desires, in both what has and what will crumble to dust.
Though we may experience pleasures and fulfillments, can pass along a portion of our inner-selves through our genetically-generated offspring, our individualities cannot be reconciled to the temporality of our allotted time and the fact that death awaits us, if not in the next second, then at some point in the days ahead; and this, along with a thousand other cuts, are what perpetuate the torment that comprises the centre of our conscious existence. We have established individual, societal, and mental edifices and constructions—illusionary all—in an effort to conceal these bald truths and allow us to proceed with the business of getting on getting on; but it is all a thinly-veiled chimera. We isolate this unpleasant reality where it can be ignored; we anchor ourselves within structures such as religion, families, and ideologies; we distract ourselves through our work, our hobbies, our immersion in mediums such as television and the internet; and we sublimate the truth we have dealt with by these previous methods within that which we create ourselves. It would take but the slightest of perspective alterations for the true and unadulterated horror of our reality to burst forth in all its macabre might: we are puppets, drawn away from the verity of our contingent nature by the charade of freedom that we have so powerfully enacted; fleshly vessels possessed of nothing at all like the self that we so stubbornly continue to believe comprises our wonderfully unique and individualized persons; and then madness—perhaps the truest state in which we can be rendered—would perforce overwhelm all of our controls. We are insane, string-operated, death-bound creatures threaded daily through the needle of suffering—and there is no respite in store for us in any direction, from any quarter. Thus, we would be better off with non-existence: painless, non-conscious, nothingness.
So sayeth the pessimist. Ligotti freely admits that, throughout history, this has been a position held by a tiny minority of the population, surrounded by a wealth of optimists who believe that it is better to be alive than to be dead, that every day, in some way, we are getting better, and that hope springs eternal. These optimists have constructed religions, philosophies, political theories, and cultures to reflect this belief that life is worth living; what's more, they cannot abide that which the pessimist says, sensing the discomfiting viability of their bleak outlooks—and so such dark individuals are exiled from the commonality of popular and accepted thought. To pessimists such as Ligotti, however, these magnificently grim and sober naysayers produced the only type of food for thought that provides the necessary nourishment; and the author takes us upon tours of the output of these profound pessimists who have filled him with the emptiness of their ontological negation. These are names we have all heard of—Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Cioran, Lovecraft—and those dredged from the deepest obscurity—Zapffe, Mainländer, Saltus. Some have qualified their pessimism, such that human extinction forms no part of their solution; the majority advocate our termination, seeing it as the reasonable response to our paradoxical existence. The state of our bifurcation has been attributed to a suicidal deity self-rent into a billion awarenesses in order to dilute and destroy itself; to a nature that ripened consciousness to an absurd degree, in order to endgender beings who would perforce, through alienation, destroy their creational environment; and to a simple evolutionary progression that exceeded itself by the grossest of over-exuberant mutations; in any event, all of these outlooks point towards a singular reality: that we inhabit a universe which, together with every single thing contained therein, can only be regarded as MALIGNANTLY USELESS.
Of course, Ligotti declares from the very start that such pessimism is unprovable—you either believe it to be so, or—as a majority does—you don't. It is unlikely that such arguments will persuade those not innately inclined to such bleak conclusions. What's more, so pervasively has the desirability of living been engendered within us by our consciousness, and the illusionary frameworks it has empowered us to fabricate, that even the most unshakeable of pessimists will often live out their lives until some manner of death extinguishes their flame. Whilst the undesirability of a continued existence for humanity may have made itself perfectly clear in one's mind, it is quite another thing to wield this belief in the manner that logic dictates it be so used; this consciousness is powerful stuff indeed.
This was a great read—Ligotti is a perfect writer for such a topic: his prose style, so sober and deadpan and inexorable, is yet propelled by an undercurrent of the darkest and driest of humor. Laughing out loud while reading a work of such implacable and relentless negativity is an amazing state of affairs; the highest of compliments should be paid to an author who can so skillfully render such a result from razor-blade ruminations. What's more, his analysis of the uncanny and our fleeting awareness of its presence in the quotidian, and the way in which it has been explored in literature and film, philosophy and thought, was very good, as was his exploration of the supernatural and how it functions as a form of the sublimation that he—and thinkers like Zapffe—hold to be one of the principal measures of our ability to hold off the starkly overwhelming reality of our existential predicament, doing so in works ranging from Shakespeare to Lovecraft, from Radcliffe to James. Other than the occasional tendency to melodramatic and overblown phrasing, a nod to his origins as a penner of horror fiction, Ligotti delivers such material with keen insights and an assured touch. I enjoyed his takes, and his reproduction of the takes of others, on such subjects very much.
I am what Ligotti would refer to as an optimistic pessimist: I have no hope; I awake each day with a heightened horror, shaken by the quenching afterimages of that wasteland which I espy so clearly with sleep-lidded eyes; I am riven again and anew by the contemplation of all the impossible angles that abound in this scratchy, acrylic absurdity called my existence, the anile and awkward measures I enact in order to endure through to another sunset; and yet, within this internal darkness, I have access to an ineradicable source of light and laughter and belief in this crazy, irrational species with which I share my ridiculous existence on this planet. I have little hope for mankind, abundant hope for man. I dread the interminability of my remaining days upon this earth, with the bleakscape shuttered away I thrill with each dawn at the possibilities inherent within that particular day. Whereas Ligotti looks at our reality and sees no reason to exist, I look from a similar vantage point and cannot see any reason not to. Certainly we operate behind a palimpsest of barriers and shields that we have concocted in order to draw our attention away from a naked and morbid obsession with our unique status within this existence—the conspiracy overseen by our perverted consciousness—but so what?
Such a determined and enduring struggle against a universe ever revealing itself in its infinite wonder, and reducing our status within it to that of motes of wholly insignificant dust, strikes me as impressive and worthy of admiration, not a mad folly to be discontinued with malice as we take stock of exactly how utterly alone and determined we are. It is the refusal to bow to what seems inevitable that has always comprised the most valuable part of what constitutes that which we label the spirit of humanity. It is our knowledge of suffering that has allowed us to produce works of art, in such a wide variety of mediums, that have so profoundly and deeply and inspiringly touched and moved one another; allowed us to cross the seemingly infinite and eternal spaces that separate us and given us enough of the touches of the other to fortify us for another day. It is that flip-side of hatred, the passionate attachment to another doomed being that we call love, which exposes us to so much that enriches and enhances our brief passage through a world irreconcilable with a mind that cannot endure this core conflict between materiality and awareness. I am inherently inclined to accept a considerable proportion of Ligotti's diagnosis—and I am also inherently inclined to reject the majority of his proposed cure. With that said, this is a book whose contents I appreciate taking inside, with all of the enlightening, engaging, discomfiting, and enjoyable directness that comprised it; and I must say, that to reap such positive benefits from a work of unequivocal negation makes for a surprising but pleasant experience.
Though we may experience pleasures and fulfillments, can pass along a portion of our inner-selves through our genetically-generated offspring, our individualities cannot be reconciled to the temporality of our allotted time and the fact that death awaits us, if not in the next second, then at some point in the days ahead; and this, along with a thousand other cuts, are what perpetuate the torment that comprises the centre of our conscious existence. We have established individual, societal, and mental edifices and constructions—illusionary all—in an effort to conceal these bald truths and allow us to proceed with the business of getting on getting on; but it is all a thinly-veiled chimera. We isolate this unpleasant reality where it can be ignored; we anchor ourselves within structures such as religion, families, and ideologies; we distract ourselves through our work, our hobbies, our immersion in mediums such as television and the internet; and we sublimate the truth we have dealt with by these previous methods within that which we create ourselves. It would take but the slightest of perspective alterations for the true and unadulterated horror of our reality to burst forth in all its macabre might: we are puppets, drawn away from the verity of our contingent nature by the charade of freedom that we have so powerfully enacted; fleshly vessels possessed of nothing at all like the self that we so stubbornly continue to believe comprises our wonderfully unique and individualized persons; and then madness—perhaps the truest state in which we can be rendered—would perforce overwhelm all of our controls. We are insane, string-operated, death-bound creatures threaded daily through the needle of suffering—and there is no respite in store for us in any direction, from any quarter. Thus, we would be better off with non-existence: painless, non-conscious, nothingness.
So sayeth the pessimist. Ligotti freely admits that, throughout history, this has been a position held by a tiny minority of the population, surrounded by a wealth of optimists who believe that it is better to be alive than to be dead, that every day, in some way, we are getting better, and that hope springs eternal. These optimists have constructed religions, philosophies, political theories, and cultures to reflect this belief that life is worth living; what's more, they cannot abide that which the pessimist says, sensing the discomfiting viability of their bleak outlooks—and so such dark individuals are exiled from the commonality of popular and accepted thought. To pessimists such as Ligotti, however, these magnificently grim and sober naysayers produced the only type of food for thought that provides the necessary nourishment; and the author takes us upon tours of the output of these profound pessimists who have filled him with the emptiness of their ontological negation. These are names we have all heard of—Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Cioran, Lovecraft—and those dredged from the deepest obscurity—Zapffe, Mainländer, Saltus. Some have qualified their pessimism, such that human extinction forms no part of their solution; the majority advocate our termination, seeing it as the reasonable response to our paradoxical existence. The state of our bifurcation has been attributed to a suicidal deity self-rent into a billion awarenesses in order to dilute and destroy itself; to a nature that ripened consciousness to an absurd degree, in order to endgender beings who would perforce, through alienation, destroy their creational environment; and to a simple evolutionary progression that exceeded itself by the grossest of over-exuberant mutations; in any event, all of these outlooks point towards a singular reality: that we inhabit a universe which, together with every single thing contained therein, can only be regarded as MALIGNANTLY USELESS.
Of course, Ligotti declares from the very start that such pessimism is unprovable—you either believe it to be so, or—as a majority does—you don't. It is unlikely that such arguments will persuade those not innately inclined to such bleak conclusions. What's more, so pervasively has the desirability of living been engendered within us by our consciousness, and the illusionary frameworks it has empowered us to fabricate, that even the most unshakeable of pessimists will often live out their lives until some manner of death extinguishes their flame. Whilst the undesirability of a continued existence for humanity may have made itself perfectly clear in one's mind, it is quite another thing to wield this belief in the manner that logic dictates it be so used; this consciousness is powerful stuff indeed.
This was a great read—Ligotti is a perfect writer for such a topic: his prose style, so sober and deadpan and inexorable, is yet propelled by an undercurrent of the darkest and driest of humor. Laughing out loud while reading a work of such implacable and relentless negativity is an amazing state of affairs; the highest of compliments should be paid to an author who can so skillfully render such a result from razor-blade ruminations. What's more, his analysis of the uncanny and our fleeting awareness of its presence in the quotidian, and the way in which it has been explored in literature and film, philosophy and thought, was very good, as was his exploration of the supernatural and how it functions as a form of the sublimation that he—and thinkers like Zapffe—hold to be one of the principal measures of our ability to hold off the starkly overwhelming reality of our existential predicament, doing so in works ranging from Shakespeare to Lovecraft, from Radcliffe to James. Other than the occasional tendency to melodramatic and overblown phrasing, a nod to his origins as a penner of horror fiction, Ligotti delivers such material with keen insights and an assured touch. I enjoyed his takes, and his reproduction of the takes of others, on such subjects very much.
I am what Ligotti would refer to as an optimistic pessimist: I have no hope; I awake each day with a heightened horror, shaken by the quenching afterimages of that wasteland which I espy so clearly with sleep-lidded eyes; I am riven again and anew by the contemplation of all the impossible angles that abound in this scratchy, acrylic absurdity called my existence, the anile and awkward measures I enact in order to endure through to another sunset; and yet, within this internal darkness, I have access to an ineradicable source of light and laughter and belief in this crazy, irrational species with which I share my ridiculous existence on this planet. I have little hope for mankind, abundant hope for man. I dread the interminability of my remaining days upon this earth, with the bleakscape shuttered away I thrill with each dawn at the possibilities inherent within that particular day. Whereas Ligotti looks at our reality and sees no reason to exist, I look from a similar vantage point and cannot see any reason not to. Certainly we operate behind a palimpsest of barriers and shields that we have concocted in order to draw our attention away from a naked and morbid obsession with our unique status within this existence—the conspiracy overseen by our perverted consciousness—but so what?
Such a determined and enduring struggle against a universe ever revealing itself in its infinite wonder, and reducing our status within it to that of motes of wholly insignificant dust, strikes me as impressive and worthy of admiration, not a mad folly to be discontinued with malice as we take stock of exactly how utterly alone and determined we are. It is the refusal to bow to what seems inevitable that has always comprised the most valuable part of what constitutes that which we label the spirit of humanity. It is our knowledge of suffering that has allowed us to produce works of art, in such a wide variety of mediums, that have so profoundly and deeply and inspiringly touched and moved one another; allowed us to cross the seemingly infinite and eternal spaces that separate us and given us enough of the touches of the other to fortify us for another day. It is that flip-side of hatred, the passionate attachment to another doomed being that we call love, which exposes us to so much that enriches and enhances our brief passage through a world irreconcilable with a mind that cannot endure this core conflict between materiality and awareness. I am inherently inclined to accept a considerable proportion of Ligotti's diagnosis—and I am also inherently inclined to reject the majority of his proposed cure. With that said, this is a book whose contents I appreciate taking inside, with all of the enlightening, engaging, discomfiting, and enjoyable directness that comprised it; and I must say, that to reap such positive benefits from a work of unequivocal negation makes for a surprising but pleasant experience.
October 22, 2023
Neither Positive Nor Equivocal: The Malignant Uselessness of Being
Fear is an instinctual response to threat common to all animals. Horror, the self-generation of fear without threat, is unique to human beings. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is an extended meditation on this remarkable fact. And its conclusions are even more remarkable: that the faculty we call consciousness, and consider as the apotheosis of evolutionary genetics, is profoundly destructive, not because we possess it but because we attempt to temper it through delusion. (While at least half of Ligotti’s book is written tongue-in-cheek, it isn’t obvious which half that is. Therefore, in my remarks here I have chosen to ignore his irony entirely).
Ligotti is perfectly clear: “Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.” The conspiracy is one of humanity against itself. We limit our consciousness in order to survive in a world of unbearable suffering, both ours and other creatures. Consciousness exposes each of us to a “too clear vision of what we do not wish to see” and therefore must be hampered and downplayed lest it threaten our own survival through the horror it reveals.
That we are a threat to ourselves is factually incontrovertible. That we pose this threat because we are potentially aware of the overwhelming reality of existence, is the surprising but plausible significance in the Genesis tale of eating from the tree of knowledge. Through that metaphorical act, we became “a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead.” We must deny what we are in order to be what we are.
Ligotti’s book is therefore a useful counterpoint to the likes of Yuval Harari’s rather more optimistic Sapiens (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Harari credits the genetic mutation that promoted representational language, essentially gossip, as the climactic breakthrough of our species. Presuming the close evolutionary connection between representational language and consciousness, Ligotti turns this triumph into a disaster. For him, “we live in a habitat of unrealities,” called stories. We are an evolutionary mistake which we have been trying as a species to overcome by minimising its influence both personally and socially through story-telling - literature as neurotic malady rather than therapy.
Ligotti‘s argument is neither tendentious or brash. He knows that the condition he is describing prevents acceptance of his entire line of thought. We want desperately to repress our knowledge of reality. But despite his originality in expression and his self-confessed minority view, his ideas have a long and intellectually sound pedigree. Ligotti has demythologised and established on a purely rational footing the ancient philosophical tendency of Gnosticism. His claim is not that Gnosticism is a superior view of the world, merely that it is respectable. And that its current lack of intellectual respectability is a consequence of the potentially disruptive power of the Gnostic position.
Gnosticism has always been the recurrent heresy of the intellectual in the Western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is a heresy because it denies the essential goodness of creation upon which each of these traditions insist. But it denies this with good reasons that are supplied by the traditions themselves, primarily the acknowledged existence of evil in the world, both natural and that of human corruption. Where can such evil originate? And why is it not eliminated by the all-powerful force which created the world in which it exists?
The Gnostic answer to these awkward questions is that in fact the force which created our world is itself evil. There may be some higher divinity but our souls have been separated from this entity and enslaved in material bodies created by a Demi-God for precisely this purpose. Our real duty as human beings is to escape this materiality in order to be re-united with, re-integrated into, that higher divinity. Of course another way of stating this is that our real fate is to lose our own consciousness by being absorbed in the cosmic consciousness of the divine.
Gnostic influence has always been strong in the Western religions. The battle of the angels led by Lucifer and Michael, Satan taunting God in the book of Job, the competition in Egypt between Aaron and the Pharaoh’s magicians are examples of the assimilation of Gnostic ideas in biblical traditions common to all three Religions of the Book. From time to time Gnosticism has posed a real threat to established doctrinal order - from the Manicheans of Jewish and Christian antiquity, to the Bogomils and Cathars of the Middle Ages, to the Calvinists and Jansenists of the 16th and 17th centuries, to the Shakers of the industrial era, and to the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Camus among others in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Gnostic influence, its fabricated stories, has been persistent and insistent in its expression.
Ligotti‘s innovation is to establish Gnosticism as more than religious poetry or esoteric philosophy. Like Harari, he speculates not about the divine origin or metaphysics but the genetic evolution of the human species. By radicalising it, he turns Gnosticism on its head. Consciousness is not a quality of the divine that points to our origin and to our real home in some spiritual haven. It is the work of the satanic Demi-God within creation itself not above it, which dooms us to an overwhelming awareness of our inevitable fate and the pain to be endured along the way. There is nowhere to run, no safe haven. This bleak fate is in our genes not our souls. And we are aware of this in our saner, that is to say, more pessimistic, moments.
Neither Ligotti nor Harari can provide a good evolutionary reason for the emergence of language and consciousness. In fact even Harari considers that the development of his Cognitive Revolution was likely to have been initially unhelpful to the species. Indeed like all evolutionary changes, it must have been a mere blunder, a shot in the genetic dark. But what Harari thinks of as a fortunate accident in the long term, Ligotti sees as an eventual evolutionary dead end in the even longer term.
Neither view, of course, can be proven. This is Ligotti’s point. What he is really demonstrating is that the presumption, both culturally and scientifically, of anthropic evolutionary dominance is itself mythical. It is a conceit that is employed in various ways to justify exploitation of things and other people. It is also intellectually a means to justify power, the need for coercion, even evil, all in the name of the good. This is the ethical importance of Ligotti’s case, a case that is “neither positive nor equivocal” about how bad things really are.
Postscript: Ligotti was inspired largely by this man: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Postscript 8May19: And in terms of how bad things really are: Nature crisis: Humans 'threaten 1m species with extinction' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-en...
Fear is an instinctual response to threat common to all animals. Horror, the self-generation of fear without threat, is unique to human beings. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is an extended meditation on this remarkable fact. And its conclusions are even more remarkable: that the faculty we call consciousness, and consider as the apotheosis of evolutionary genetics, is profoundly destructive, not because we possess it but because we attempt to temper it through delusion. (While at least half of Ligotti’s book is written tongue-in-cheek, it isn’t obvious which half that is. Therefore, in my remarks here I have chosen to ignore his irony entirely).
Ligotti is perfectly clear: “Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.” The conspiracy is one of humanity against itself. We limit our consciousness in order to survive in a world of unbearable suffering, both ours and other creatures. Consciousness exposes each of us to a “too clear vision of what we do not wish to see” and therefore must be hampered and downplayed lest it threaten our own survival through the horror it reveals.
That we are a threat to ourselves is factually incontrovertible. That we pose this threat because we are potentially aware of the overwhelming reality of existence, is the surprising but plausible significance in the Genesis tale of eating from the tree of knowledge. Through that metaphorical act, we became “a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead.” We must deny what we are in order to be what we are.
Ligotti’s book is therefore a useful counterpoint to the likes of Yuval Harari’s rather more optimistic Sapiens (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Harari credits the genetic mutation that promoted representational language, essentially gossip, as the climactic breakthrough of our species. Presuming the close evolutionary connection between representational language and consciousness, Ligotti turns this triumph into a disaster. For him, “we live in a habitat of unrealities,” called stories. We are an evolutionary mistake which we have been trying as a species to overcome by minimising its influence both personally and socially through story-telling - literature as neurotic malady rather than therapy.
Ligotti‘s argument is neither tendentious or brash. He knows that the condition he is describing prevents acceptance of his entire line of thought. We want desperately to repress our knowledge of reality. But despite his originality in expression and his self-confessed minority view, his ideas have a long and intellectually sound pedigree. Ligotti has demythologised and established on a purely rational footing the ancient philosophical tendency of Gnosticism. His claim is not that Gnosticism is a superior view of the world, merely that it is respectable. And that its current lack of intellectual respectability is a consequence of the potentially disruptive power of the Gnostic position.
Gnosticism has always been the recurrent heresy of the intellectual in the Western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is a heresy because it denies the essential goodness of creation upon which each of these traditions insist. But it denies this with good reasons that are supplied by the traditions themselves, primarily the acknowledged existence of evil in the world, both natural and that of human corruption. Where can such evil originate? And why is it not eliminated by the all-powerful force which created the world in which it exists?
The Gnostic answer to these awkward questions is that in fact the force which created our world is itself evil. There may be some higher divinity but our souls have been separated from this entity and enslaved in material bodies created by a Demi-God for precisely this purpose. Our real duty as human beings is to escape this materiality in order to be re-united with, re-integrated into, that higher divinity. Of course another way of stating this is that our real fate is to lose our own consciousness by being absorbed in the cosmic consciousness of the divine.
Gnostic influence has always been strong in the Western religions. The battle of the angels led by Lucifer and Michael, Satan taunting God in the book of Job, the competition in Egypt between Aaron and the Pharaoh’s magicians are examples of the assimilation of Gnostic ideas in biblical traditions common to all three Religions of the Book. From time to time Gnosticism has posed a real threat to established doctrinal order - from the Manicheans of Jewish and Christian antiquity, to the Bogomils and Cathars of the Middle Ages, to the Calvinists and Jansenists of the 16th and 17th centuries, to the Shakers of the industrial era, and to the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Camus among others in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Gnostic influence, its fabricated stories, has been persistent and insistent in its expression.
Ligotti‘s innovation is to establish Gnosticism as more than religious poetry or esoteric philosophy. Like Harari, he speculates not about the divine origin or metaphysics but the genetic evolution of the human species. By radicalising it, he turns Gnosticism on its head. Consciousness is not a quality of the divine that points to our origin and to our real home in some spiritual haven. It is the work of the satanic Demi-God within creation itself not above it, which dooms us to an overwhelming awareness of our inevitable fate and the pain to be endured along the way. There is nowhere to run, no safe haven. This bleak fate is in our genes not our souls. And we are aware of this in our saner, that is to say, more pessimistic, moments.
Neither Ligotti nor Harari can provide a good evolutionary reason for the emergence of language and consciousness. In fact even Harari considers that the development of his Cognitive Revolution was likely to have been initially unhelpful to the species. Indeed like all evolutionary changes, it must have been a mere blunder, a shot in the genetic dark. But what Harari thinks of as a fortunate accident in the long term, Ligotti sees as an eventual evolutionary dead end in the even longer term.
Neither view, of course, can be proven. This is Ligotti’s point. What he is really demonstrating is that the presumption, both culturally and scientifically, of anthropic evolutionary dominance is itself mythical. It is a conceit that is employed in various ways to justify exploitation of things and other people. It is also intellectually a means to justify power, the need for coercion, even evil, all in the name of the good. This is the ethical importance of Ligotti’s case, a case that is “neither positive nor equivocal” about how bad things really are.
Postscript: Ligotti was inspired largely by this man: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Postscript 8May19: And in terms of how bad things really are: Nature crisis: Humans 'threaten 1m species with extinction' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-en...
December 31, 2014
Lighten up, Francis.
I was very tempted to leave it at that, but I do have more to say.
I should be the perfect audience for this book. I love Lovecraft's work, my worldview could best be summed up as "life is mostly pain, punctuated by moments of joy," and I'm congenitally pessimistic as was my father before me. At least, by the standard definition, but that's not far enough for Ligotti, who restricts the ranks of the true pessimist to those who believe that life is fundamentally not worth living.
His main argument for this is that consciousness is a kind of cosmic mistake--MALIGNANTLY USELESS, in his repeated words--because it makes us aware that we will inevitably suffer and die, causing us to come up with any number of delusions to escape this knowledge. The young's sense that they will live forever. The very young's non-understanding of death. Religion. That kind of thing. As well, consciousness seems to demand meaning to life, but life itself merely is and has no greater purpose, thus requiring us to place a layer of false meaning over life to find a reason to go on. Because life thus requires delusion to live, and because of the suffering all of us will inevitably experience at the end of life, Ligotti concludes that "being alive is not alright."
Furthermore, our humanity is inextricably bound up in our biology. The urge to procreate, to satisfy hunger, thirst, tiredness and sexual desire, and the fact that our reason is contaminated with constant hormonal buffetings all combine to mean that the "us" we imagine as being in control of our lives is merely an illusion. We cannot choose our choices, because that implies some kind of Cartesian homunculous with all the problems that leads to, but as another example of the failure of consciousness to deal with reality, we feel like we have free will, so any kind of deterministic argument gets short shrift with most people.
Due to all this, he determines that having children is a fundamentally...hmm. Not evil, because "good" and "evil" are just more delusions placed on the uncaring universe by a humanity who is unable to survive without imbuing worthless things with unnecessary meaning, but perhaps it could be phrased as being fundamentally MALIGNANTLY USELESS. Ligotti makes the point that very few of us would be willing to be born in the past because of conditions there, but none of us take the viewpoint of the future and spare our child from being born now rather than, say, in a hundred years when suffering might be less. Since all people will suffer and die, creating a new human life is dooming them to suffering and death, which is hardly the compassionate act that raising a child is usually considered to be. It might even be thought of as incredibly selfish--creating new life just because of one's own desires when the child will inevitably suffer and die.
And if you think all this repetition in my review is bad, you should read the book.
Okay, sure. Those are reasonable arguments, but I have problems with the central point here because Ligotti is just as prey to the innate failings of the human mind as anyone else. He repeatedly makes the point that the suffering at the end of one's life is one of the major reasons why being alive is not alright, but that's just the Peak End Rule, where he's judging the entirety of someone's life by what happens at the end rather than a reasoned examination of the totality of their existence. And indeed, the fundamental flaws of human consciousness might make that nearly impossible, but Ligotti doesn't even make a pretense of trying. He just assumes a priori that the suffering at the end of life outweighs anything good that could possibly happen.
He reasonably points out that we can't say that nonexistence is worse than existence since we don't have any nonexistent people to ask, but then assumes that nonexistence is better than existence when suffering is involved. But if joy were involved, would a nonexistent person say that existence is better? That's just as reasonable a question to ask, and just as unanswerable, but unlike Ligotti I'm not going to base a part of my argument on it.
And finally, and most fundamental of my complaints, is that he assumes some kind of perfected human template that we deviate from in his arguments. Consciousness damaging and deluded and MALIGNANTLY USELESS...compared to what? When talking about transhumanism, he correctly points out that it's mostly ridiculous pipe dreaming because transhumanists talk about overcoming the limits of the human form and mind when all of their ideas are defined by those same limits and nothing they create can escape them, but when talking about how terrible consciousness is he's implicitly comparing us to some kind of purely rational and truthful Übermensch who is able to face reality without flinching and isn't just a human puppet strung up by their own biology. There's a part of the book where he implies that people in the grip of extreme depression approach this perfect being, since they understand that life is MALIGNANTLY USELESS and there's no point to anything, but aren't they just as driven by hormones as everyone else? Casting hormones as some kind of separate factor influencing our behavior is just another homunculus argument, since it implies a part of us that would make perfectly rational decisions without those emotions, instead of the truth that decision without emotion is simply impossible.
If you think that a perfectly rational human is the end goal, that is pretty depressing news, but it's not something The Conspiracy Against the Human Race touches on.
Perhaps that's my main problem with it. It's a somewhat-rambling treatise on philosophy, horror fiction, and neuroscience, but I think that focusing on the neuroscience would have been a much better way to make the point. Talk about depressive realism, for example, which is an actual psychological term but is never mentioned at all in the book. Mention all the various cognitive fallacies that humans fall prey to--in this regard, Thinking Fast and Slow is a far better explanation of why consciousness is MALIGNANTLY USELESS than this book is. How about mentioning that the biggest determinant of whether a prisoner will be paroled is how long it's been since the judge's last meal, thus showing that "justice" is a lie we tell ourselves to feel good about making others suffer? What about examining how we retreat into delusion when confronted with evidence against our deeply-held beliefs, showing the futility of so-called "rationality"? What about how hindsight bias means that victim-blaming and the attendant cruelty in the case of crime is an innate part of human psychology?
All of that would have been a lot more convincing than endless talking about how life is not alright. As it is, the book is mostly a non-fiction philosopher's version of Blindsight. But Blindsight is more entertaining and Thinking, Fast and Slow is more convincing, leaving The Conspiracy Against the Human Race stuck in the MALIGNANTLY USELESS middle. I had high hopes for it, but left with the taste of ashes in my mouth. Perhaps that's a triumph, in a way. All is vanity, and especially this book.
I was very tempted to leave it at that, but I do have more to say.
I should be the perfect audience for this book. I love Lovecraft's work, my worldview could best be summed up as "life is mostly pain, punctuated by moments of joy," and I'm congenitally pessimistic as was my father before me. At least, by the standard definition, but that's not far enough for Ligotti, who restricts the ranks of the true pessimist to those who believe that life is fundamentally not worth living.
His main argument for this is that consciousness is a kind of cosmic mistake--MALIGNANTLY USELESS, in his repeated words--because it makes us aware that we will inevitably suffer and die, causing us to come up with any number of delusions to escape this knowledge. The young's sense that they will live forever. The very young's non-understanding of death. Religion. That kind of thing. As well, consciousness seems to demand meaning to life, but life itself merely is and has no greater purpose, thus requiring us to place a layer of false meaning over life to find a reason to go on. Because life thus requires delusion to live, and because of the suffering all of us will inevitably experience at the end of life, Ligotti concludes that "being alive is not alright."
Furthermore, our humanity is inextricably bound up in our biology. The urge to procreate, to satisfy hunger, thirst, tiredness and sexual desire, and the fact that our reason is contaminated with constant hormonal buffetings all combine to mean that the "us" we imagine as being in control of our lives is merely an illusion. We cannot choose our choices, because that implies some kind of Cartesian homunculous with all the problems that leads to, but as another example of the failure of consciousness to deal with reality, we feel like we have free will, so any kind of deterministic argument gets short shrift with most people.
Due to all this, he determines that having children is a fundamentally...hmm. Not evil, because "good" and "evil" are just more delusions placed on the uncaring universe by a humanity who is unable to survive without imbuing worthless things with unnecessary meaning, but perhaps it could be phrased as being fundamentally MALIGNANTLY USELESS. Ligotti makes the point that very few of us would be willing to be born in the past because of conditions there, but none of us take the viewpoint of the future and spare our child from being born now rather than, say, in a hundred years when suffering might be less. Since all people will suffer and die, creating a new human life is dooming them to suffering and death, which is hardly the compassionate act that raising a child is usually considered to be. It might even be thought of as incredibly selfish--creating new life just because of one's own desires when the child will inevitably suffer and die.
And if you think all this repetition in my review is bad, you should read the book.
Okay, sure. Those are reasonable arguments, but I have problems with the central point here because Ligotti is just as prey to the innate failings of the human mind as anyone else. He repeatedly makes the point that the suffering at the end of one's life is one of the major reasons why being alive is not alright, but that's just the Peak End Rule, where he's judging the entirety of someone's life by what happens at the end rather than a reasoned examination of the totality of their existence. And indeed, the fundamental flaws of human consciousness might make that nearly impossible, but Ligotti doesn't even make a pretense of trying. He just assumes a priori that the suffering at the end of life outweighs anything good that could possibly happen.
He reasonably points out that we can't say that nonexistence is worse than existence since we don't have any nonexistent people to ask, but then assumes that nonexistence is better than existence when suffering is involved. But if joy were involved, would a nonexistent person say that existence is better? That's just as reasonable a question to ask, and just as unanswerable, but unlike Ligotti I'm not going to base a part of my argument on it.
And finally, and most fundamental of my complaints, is that he assumes some kind of perfected human template that we deviate from in his arguments. Consciousness damaging and deluded and MALIGNANTLY USELESS...compared to what? When talking about transhumanism, he correctly points out that it's mostly ridiculous pipe dreaming because transhumanists talk about overcoming the limits of the human form and mind when all of their ideas are defined by those same limits and nothing they create can escape them, but when talking about how terrible consciousness is he's implicitly comparing us to some kind of purely rational and truthful Übermensch who is able to face reality without flinching and isn't just a human puppet strung up by their own biology. There's a part of the book where he implies that people in the grip of extreme depression approach this perfect being, since they understand that life is MALIGNANTLY USELESS and there's no point to anything, but aren't they just as driven by hormones as everyone else? Casting hormones as some kind of separate factor influencing our behavior is just another homunculus argument, since it implies a part of us that would make perfectly rational decisions without those emotions, instead of the truth that decision without emotion is simply impossible.
If you think that a perfectly rational human is the end goal, that is pretty depressing news, but it's not something The Conspiracy Against the Human Race touches on.
Perhaps that's my main problem with it. It's a somewhat-rambling treatise on philosophy, horror fiction, and neuroscience, but I think that focusing on the neuroscience would have been a much better way to make the point. Talk about depressive realism, for example, which is an actual psychological term but is never mentioned at all in the book. Mention all the various cognitive fallacies that humans fall prey to--in this regard, Thinking Fast and Slow is a far better explanation of why consciousness is MALIGNANTLY USELESS than this book is. How about mentioning that the biggest determinant of whether a prisoner will be paroled is how long it's been since the judge's last meal, thus showing that "justice" is a lie we tell ourselves to feel good about making others suffer? What about examining how we retreat into delusion when confronted with evidence against our deeply-held beliefs, showing the futility of so-called "rationality"? What about how hindsight bias means that victim-blaming and the attendant cruelty in the case of crime is an innate part of human psychology?
All of that would have been a lot more convincing than endless talking about how life is not alright. As it is, the book is mostly a non-fiction philosopher's version of Blindsight. But Blindsight is more entertaining and Thinking, Fast and Slow is more convincing, leaving The Conspiracy Against the Human Race stuck in the MALIGNANTLY USELESS middle. I had high hopes for it, but left with the taste of ashes in my mouth. Perhaps that's a triumph, in a way. All is vanity, and especially this book.
July 17, 2010
Darkest book I've ever read; and perhaps the most convincing. Highly recommended for all readers, except those with sanity or self-delusions left to lose.
February 19, 2014
The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.
Remember when you were 16 and you thought too much about life and its implications that you wound up in a "dark valley", got so depressed and borderline-suicidal that you decided to leave the "valley" and never look back? Thomas Ligotti has built himself a nice house in that valley.
To summarize the thesis of this non-fiction book/treatise: being alive is not alright, optimists are deceiving themselves and others, the future will not be better, the creation of consciousness was a huge mistake, life is useless and painful to boot, and humanity would do itself a favor by collectively deciding to not have children anymore: to stop perpetuate this madness.
To quote:
Consciousness makes it seem as if (1) there is something to do; (2) there is somewhere to go; (3) there is something to be; (4) there is someone to know. This is what makes consciousness the parent of all horrors, the thing that makes us try to do something, go somewhere, be something, and know someone, such as ourselves, so that we can escape our MALIGNANTLY USELESS being and think that being alive is all right rather than that which should not be.(yes, MALIGNANTLY USELESS is always capitalized)
or
Beef, pork, sometimes goat—they go into us and come out of us. This is part of the regimen of nonsense that nature forced upon us. But it is not all the nonsense we must endure as we go to and fro on the earth and walk up and down upon it. The nature nonsense, the God nonsense. How much nonsense can we take in our lives? And is there any way we can escape it? No, there is not. We are doomed to all kinds of nonsense: the pain nonsense, the nightmare nonsense, the sweat and slave nonsense, and many other shapes and sizes of insufferable nonsense. It is brought to us on a plate, and we must eat it up or face the death nonsense.
He quotes extensively from Zapffe, Schopenhauer, Mainländer, Lovecraft (awesome) and others to make his case - sometimes, the book feels more like an expansion of Zapffe's ideas... Neither Zapffe nor Mainländer were known to me before; I guess both are reasonably unknown, since the majority of Zapffe's work remains untranslated.
But: there is a dark strange form of humor at work here; reading the book I couldn't help but think that getting drunk with Ligotti must be great fun.
You do see that he's got a background as a horror writer:
We are aberrations—beings born undead, neither one thing nor another, or two things at once … uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of creation, horrors that poison the world by sowing our madness everywhere we go, glutting daylight and darkness with incorporeal obscenities.
Recommended for: Remember the Nietzsche quote, "when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you"? This book is for people who love getting into staring contests with the abyss.
Not recommended for: Psychologically labile people. Teddy Daniels from Shutter Island. Me at age 16.
Read
April 20, 2019Exasperating.
DNF so far. I'll back, though.
DNF so far. I'll back, though.
November 25, 2022
Imagine a fireside chat with a notorious horror writer in which he patiently and rather exhaustively explains the purposelessness of human existence to you. That is what reading this feels like. As I read I saw Ligotti sitting nearby in a highback chair, his chin resting on his interlaced fingers, staring into the dying embers of a fire as he speaks his own pessimistic truth in a steady monotone, freely digressing and belaboring the point as he progresses along some rambling trail of his own arcane construction. For this book feels personal, as if it could be at least in part Ligotti's inquiry into his long-running experience of chronic depression and its attendant anhedonia, something which he has never shied away from discussing in interviews and which has informed his fiction as well. In at least one interview he has said the book is:
by no means a philosophical work, let alone a magnum opus. It’s a synthesis of ideas I’ve formed over my life and of other people’s ideas that rhyme with mine.In some ways I found the book easier to read than his fiction, as the style is somewhat conversational, which offsets the bleakness. That said, I read it over the course of several months and only read small sections at a time. I do think it would have greatly benefited from additional editing and proofreading, at least in this first edition from Hippocampus Press. One would expect a long-time editor like Ligotti to have gone through the proofs with an eagle eye, but perhaps he wasn't given the chance or was simply too anhedonic to care...
September 6, 2019
Le stelline di valutazione parlano chiaro, ma ciò nonostante ci tengo a dirvi la mia su questa monografia nichilista e disfattista fino all’osso. Avevo già testato la bravura di Thomas Ligotti -come novellista - nella lettura della raccolta di racconti “Nottuario”, ma con “La cospirazione contro la razza umana” entra di diritto tra i miei autori preferiti di sempre.
Un trattato filosofico-letterario sulla condizione umana venuto alla luce per caso, da un’intervista rilasciata tramite e-mail riveduta e corretta più volte fino ad arrivare al corpus odierno che è giunto in Italia grazie alla casa editrice "Il Saggiatore".
Si passa dalle teorie di filosofi del calibro di Schopenhauer, Zapffe e Mainländer ad accenni alla dottrina buddhista, alle riflessioni del Ligotti stesso, per toccare anche autori che hanno fatto grande il panorama della letteratura internazionale, in particolare quella del soprannaturale e dell’orrore, quali Howard Phillips Lovecraft e Algernon Blackwood.
Uno dei capisaldi di questo saggio è l’allegoria della cosiddetta “marionetta umana” (concetto-chiave presente anche in Nottuario) ideata da Ligotti e da lui sfruttata per rappresentare l’uomo. Tale figura metaforica è riassumibile così: l’essere umano è, per l’appunto, un fantoccio lasciato in balia del caos, perfettamente conscio di questa sua limitazione e annientato nella sua identità di persona.
Seppur gli argomenti trattati non siano dei più lieti, non vi nego che mi sono proprio gustata la lettura di questo saggio; appare chiaro che la commistione di filosofia, neuroscienze, psicologia e narrativa dell’orrore dà origine a un mix vincente, molte delle affermazioni presenti sono in linea con il mio pensiero e hanno dato vita a non pochi momenti di riflessione.
È un libro complesso, per certi versi, perfino radicale; il genere letterario horror si coniuga bene con questa visione disincantata della realtà, espediente, questo, in grado di suscitare una sensazione di vero e proprio straniamento nel lettore.
Super consigliato!
Un trattato filosofico-letterario sulla condizione umana venuto alla luce per caso, da un’intervista rilasciata tramite e-mail riveduta e corretta più volte fino ad arrivare al corpus odierno che è giunto in Italia grazie alla casa editrice "Il Saggiatore".
Si passa dalle teorie di filosofi del calibro di Schopenhauer, Zapffe e Mainländer ad accenni alla dottrina buddhista, alle riflessioni del Ligotti stesso, per toccare anche autori che hanno fatto grande il panorama della letteratura internazionale, in particolare quella del soprannaturale e dell’orrore, quali Howard Phillips Lovecraft e Algernon Blackwood.
Uno dei capisaldi di questo saggio è l’allegoria della cosiddetta “marionetta umana” (concetto-chiave presente anche in Nottuario) ideata da Ligotti e da lui sfruttata per rappresentare l’uomo. Tale figura metaforica è riassumibile così: l’essere umano è, per l’appunto, un fantoccio lasciato in balia del caos, perfettamente conscio di questa sua limitazione e annientato nella sua identità di persona.
Seppur gli argomenti trattati non siano dei più lieti, non vi nego che mi sono proprio gustata la lettura di questo saggio; appare chiaro che la commistione di filosofia, neuroscienze, psicologia e narrativa dell’orrore dà origine a un mix vincente, molte delle affermazioni presenti sono in linea con il mio pensiero e hanno dato vita a non pochi momenti di riflessione.
È un libro complesso, per certi versi, perfino radicale; il genere letterario horror si coniuga bene con questa visione disincantata della realtà, espediente, questo, in grado di suscitare una sensazione di vero e proprio straniamento nel lettore.
Super consigliato!
March 24, 2015
A disappointment but perhaps not an unexpected one. Thomas Ligotti happens to be one of the greatest exponents of uncanny fiction, equal to his earlier masters Poe and Lovecraft - but in small doses.
We have already reviewed some of his short stories which are magnificently disturbing and thought-provoking but have also noted that he has difficulty in developing them to novella length.
His art is that of the short story. This foray into non-fiction is little more than an opinionated, often repetitive, often very dull, literary rant, bad philosophy and weak literary criticism.
But perhaps it serves a purpose because it takes existential pessimism to such absolute extremes that, if even the argument is not accepted, it manages to demolish all lesser forms of the death instinct on the way.
The nearest analogy I can find is a book that appeared on the shelves briefly some years ago - a pseudo-existentialist rant by a child murderer, Ian Brady, one of the two notorious Moors Murders.
According to the Daily Mail of January 21st, Mr. Brady (77) wished he had taken his own life many years ago (poor bunny!) and the same negativity about life infects this philosophical pot boiler.
The quality of thinking is exemplified by the amount of time taken up by literary figures and by an obscure Norwegian post-Schopenhauerian merchant of gloom, one Peter Wessel Zapffe.
The writing is uninspiring and the 'narrative' incoherent - others have liked it less even than I have done. There is too much repetition of both themes and language ('vehicular misadventure'!).
At times, it appears to swerve away from the major theme to be a disjointed essay on supernatural fiction and on his favourite short story theme of the uncanny puppet.
Nietzsche, the ignorant excuse for the crimes of Brady and the Nazis but actually a force for Life and defiance of the death instinct, gets a few dismissive paragraphs. The major existentialists ... nothing!
Zapffe was the depressive exponent of something called antinatalism which assigned a negative valuation to the very fact of being born. The implication is that the human race should eventually genocide itself through non-procreation.
This is a mentality that can be found amongst a certain class of life-negative conservative thinkers whose political heirs are the deep green planet lovers who think of us humans are mere scum on their Gaia.
But Ligotti goes further than this - future specicide, implicit in his callous and unemotional view of the world, is presented as a rational claim that should have the security state checking out anyone found marking the margins of a copy in green ink.
Let us be frank. The human condition is one of considerable variation and it is no surpise that, within that variation, there should be highly articulate and literary extreme self-hating pessimists.
This is their book - and that of adolescents going through a temporary Goth phase, those sinking into black and irreversible clinical depression and those facing a death they cannot come to terms with.
If this book gives them 'comfort' (and does not result in some dim-witted nut trying to bring forward human extinction by a few millennia), then it is simply (ironically) part of life's rich pattern.
And the book has its uses even to us who think its thesis to be absurd and silly - just another literary confection by someone trying to fight above their intellectual weight.
The sheer extremity of the analysis - which contains a legitimate position on the meaninglessness of existence which even us optimists can share - usefully smashes to pieces lesser pessimisms.
The knife job done on Buddhism - the most life negative of religions - is decisive: no sane person could be a Buddhist after this and confirmation that Pope John Paul II could get at least one thing right.
Similarly, Ligotti is prepared to face off the nature of evolved human consciousness and be 'logical' about it. He pins down that point where choices between Life and Death are made.
On the one hand, we have apparently suffered horribly because we can think yet (it would seem) thinking suggests that we can end that suffering with suicide in the short and specicide in the long term.
It has to be said that his arguments for euthanasia stand up in this context. For those who really are this clinically depressed, then perhaps a voluntary removal is fair to them and the gene pool.
On the other, his is still merely a stance based on chance and biochemistry. He has no right to impute negative value to meaninglessness if someone can accept lack of meaning and live well.
For him and Zapffe, self awareness, the Self itself and consciousness are horrors that make life unbearable. He accuses the rest of us who do not share this view of evasion and delusion.
This is part of that fashionable philosophical negativity that insists on ego death as a good, that there is no Self really and that we have no self determination - a fashionable petit-bourgeois stance.
This is the province of a certain type of over-thinking continental philosopher, new age users of 'mind-expanding' (ho, hum!) drugs and people who crave non-duality as substitute for reality.
To be fair, he gives short shrift to such fools which makes his position at least one of some integrity but the same seed of denial of our evolved nature is there but as Reason murdered by Reason.
But, as he admits, he cannot prove his point any more than we optimists can prove ours. The stance of being depressed about meaninglessness is merely that - a stance, a temperamental sentiment.
He has his unjustified normative stand against the alleged evasions of the masses yet seems not to consider it possible that a person can accept the fact of meaninglessness and still choose Life.
The problem strikes me as this. Given the condition of things on which we both agree, there is no reason to choose radical pessimism if a positive optimism is equally valid with the same shared facts.
The only difference between us is that my life and that of optimists is happy while it can be happy and he and his pessimists is carried out in a blue funk until extinction. You choose, matey!
My world takes life as it is - with all its chance and necessity - and makes the best of it, far nearer to his praised animal state than he can manage. But he seems to want a final Ragnarok, the destruction of creation itself.
Here, tolerance is in danger of collapsing as much as it does with Ian Brady. If he is serious, then he is my enemy or at least his followers may be, so perhaps, all things being equal, Ligotti delenda est
I would not go so far as this because his efforts are for armchair depressives whose greatest act is to reach for the whisky bottle yet this book should be on the reading list of our security services.
Why? Because, as we have seen in the case of Breivik (another gloomy Norwegian), the death instinct is a material factor in the near-infinite variation to be found within the species and it can act.
To understand where this death instinct might go in the hands of less literary hands, this book should be studied much as one would study the work of Ian Brady for the underpinnings of child murder.
After all, a cursory reading of some of the very Deep Green lunacy on the internet or the radical reaches of occult fascism indicate levels of pessimism that make Schopenhauer look like Pollyanna.
This is not ever to say that Mr. Ligotti means in any way to do bad things in the world - he is probably far too pessimistic to do anything actively. He is a litterateur. Such types do nothing.
But that there are radical pessimists who present themselves in these terms, far beyond all previous forms of radical pessimism, unleavened by Buddhist evasions or literary tropes, should be watched.
The book has its purpose as part of the radical liberal literature of extremity. It will continue to be read not by philosophers but by those interested in the psychology of weird fiction.
It is a necessary excrescence on the decadent corpse of late liberal capitalist culture, that point where everything must be said and freedom insisted upon to permit all to be said.
I am tempted to upset liberal sensibilities by burning this book.
April 13, 2024
I'm not sure why I chose a non-fiction for my first Thomas Ligotti book, but it was incredible. Sometimes I felt like I was back in Philosophy class, but I love philosophy so that was okay.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is dark, intellectual and pessimistic. We get to read about Ligotti's ideas on life, consciousness and horror. His writing is smooth and grand. His prose are beautiful and ideas easy to read despite the heavy subject matter at times.
I've already bought my next Ligotti book (and first fiction) - My Work is Not Yet Done.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is dark, intellectual and pessimistic. We get to read about Ligotti's ideas on life, consciousness and horror. His writing is smooth and grand. His prose are beautiful and ideas easy to read despite the heavy subject matter at times.
I've already bought my next Ligotti book (and first fiction) - My Work is Not Yet Done.
Read
August 31, 2016If you're anything like me, Ligotti's tone in this peculiar nihilistic screed will creep into daily life. Your girlfriend's listening to celebrity gossip Youtube videos in bed? MALIGNANTLY USELESS. Having to wait for three trains before you can finally cram onto the subway? MALIGNANTLY USELESS. The difference in your pool skills between your second and your fourth beer? MALIGNANTLY USELESS.
Is Ligotti a profoundly elegant writer? Yes. Does he successfully defend philosophical pessimism? Yes. Does he make it compelling? No. And I'm the sort of person who usually has to strain for reasons to get out bed in the morning. If he can't win me over, there aren't many others. But that isn't to say I didn't enjoy reading it. I enjoyed the hell out of it, and got a lot of good book recs out of it. In fact, I consider it BENIGNLY USEFUL.
Probably missed the point, didn't I?
Is Ligotti a profoundly elegant writer? Yes. Does he successfully defend philosophical pessimism? Yes. Does he make it compelling? No. And I'm the sort of person who usually has to strain for reasons to get out bed in the morning. If he can't win me over, there aren't many others. But that isn't to say I didn't enjoy reading it. I enjoyed the hell out of it, and got a lot of good book recs out of it. In fact, I consider it BENIGNLY USEFUL.
Probably missed the point, didn't I?
March 12, 2014
I read this because Nic Pizzolatto mentioned it in one of his interviews about books that influenced his writing for TRUE DETECTIVE.
To be accurate, I should write that I "read" it. I found Ligotti's book to be unreadable: haranguing, desperate, and bloated. Once I realized that I couldn't stand to read the book cover-to-cover, I tried to read each section separately. Each time I started another section, I was simultaneously bored and irritated by the style, the cynicism, and the constant insistence that the sadness, disgust, horror, and existential dread the author described was universal and inarguable. So my "date I finished this book" is actually "date I stopped trying to read this book."
I am clearly not the audience.
To be accurate, I should write that I "read" it. I found Ligotti's book to be unreadable: haranguing, desperate, and bloated. Once I realized that I couldn't stand to read the book cover-to-cover, I tried to read each section separately. Each time I started another section, I was simultaneously bored and irritated by the style, the cynicism, and the constant insistence that the sadness, disgust, horror, and existential dread the author described was universal and inarguable. So my "date I finished this book" is actually "date I stopped trying to read this book."
I am clearly not the audience.
August 24, 2010
Thomas Ligotti is currently the best writer of English prose. Cormac McCarthy was better till the detestable Border Trilogy, and maybe The Road is up there with his best. Until McCarthy tops The Road, however, the honor goes to Thomas Ligotti. It doesn't matter at all you've never heard of him: I believe he prefers it that way.
I do not agree with the ... what? ... the anti-metaphysics of this, Ligotti's first nonfiction book. The fact I don't agree does not diminish the dark grandeur of this book on tittle or jot. When I say "grandeur" and "best writer of English prose" don't think that The Conspiracy Against the Human Race comes off as high-brow. This is no absurd sophisticate such as you find in the pages of New Yorker magazine and who bloat today's university libraries with verbal constipation. This is a plain man whose erudition is as unobtrusive as it is deep. His argumentation is without flaw, given his initial premises, the givens and axioms of his world. He happens to have the audacity to believe that "everything is not all right" as he dryly put its it, and sets out to prove it. That is no innocuous phrase: it's pure poison. Unless you have a lot of heavy-duty lived experience under your belt that says he's wrong--felt experience lived within some traditional faith, or some other kind of non-ordinary yet still very real experience--you'll wind up dismissing The Conspiracy Against the Human Race only you'll do so without a leg to stand on: you'll do this, else you'll join him in the ranks of Nihilists (Ligotti uses the term Pessimists) out of simple honesty. Ligotti himself would regard you (as he would me) as wishful thinkers. I can only counter that hypothetical argument of his by saying nobody knows anything but what they've experienced, even if it's all in their heads--whether it was read in a book or an original product of precise ratiocination or something perceived as an external phenomenon, like a rock, but perhaps not something explicable by a devotee of Science and Reason. In the end, for all it's wonders The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is the product of one who happens to be a True Believer in those things: because that's all he knows. He doesn't think Science and Reason will ever "save" anybody in any way: this book uses Reason to convince you of the lack of Reason in all things, including your life and the lives of those you love.
It needs to be said that that isn't the eponymous Conspiracy Against the Human Race. The Conspiracy is consciousness itself: by our natures we are unnatural, we are puppets who have come to life, manikins who possess consciousness, who think we're more than puppets or manikins, but we are emphatically not more. We are the Conspirators against ourselves, Ligotti argues (read his book, try to prove him wrong with argumentation) because we are the meaningless bearers of meaningless consciousness, meaning-making machines in a universe that is entirely nonsensical and without meaning. I can't do the man or his thought justice.
The sheer experience of reading Ligotti borders on the non-ordinary. It is a harrowing kind of initiation: will you survive? It's like he's some post-human creature who manages to live (not comfortably but still alive) in a world without any hint of any kind of hope or comfort. That's he's an ordinary man with an ordinary job (admittedly one that requires a lot of technical expertise and education) makes his accomplishment all the more amazing.
If you're up to the task, read this book. It's not hard to read. It still may kill you (or kill your illusions and delusions and comfort) if you dare to hear the man who wrote it and to understand his thoughts.
I do not agree with the ... what? ... the anti-metaphysics of this, Ligotti's first nonfiction book. The fact I don't agree does not diminish the dark grandeur of this book on tittle or jot. When I say "grandeur" and "best writer of English prose" don't think that The Conspiracy Against the Human Race comes off as high-brow. This is no absurd sophisticate such as you find in the pages of New Yorker magazine and who bloat today's university libraries with verbal constipation. This is a plain man whose erudition is as unobtrusive as it is deep. His argumentation is without flaw, given his initial premises, the givens and axioms of his world. He happens to have the audacity to believe that "everything is not all right" as he dryly put its it, and sets out to prove it. That is no innocuous phrase: it's pure poison. Unless you have a lot of heavy-duty lived experience under your belt that says he's wrong--felt experience lived within some traditional faith, or some other kind of non-ordinary yet still very real experience--you'll wind up dismissing The Conspiracy Against the Human Race only you'll do so without a leg to stand on: you'll do this, else you'll join him in the ranks of Nihilists (Ligotti uses the term Pessimists) out of simple honesty. Ligotti himself would regard you (as he would me) as wishful thinkers. I can only counter that hypothetical argument of his by saying nobody knows anything but what they've experienced, even if it's all in their heads--whether it was read in a book or an original product of precise ratiocination or something perceived as an external phenomenon, like a rock, but perhaps not something explicable by a devotee of Science and Reason. In the end, for all it's wonders The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is the product of one who happens to be a True Believer in those things: because that's all he knows. He doesn't think Science and Reason will ever "save" anybody in any way: this book uses Reason to convince you of the lack of Reason in all things, including your life and the lives of those you love.
It needs to be said that that isn't the eponymous Conspiracy Against the Human Race. The Conspiracy is consciousness itself: by our natures we are unnatural, we are puppets who have come to life, manikins who possess consciousness, who think we're more than puppets or manikins, but we are emphatically not more. We are the Conspirators against ourselves, Ligotti argues (read his book, try to prove him wrong with argumentation) because we are the meaningless bearers of meaningless consciousness, meaning-making machines in a universe that is entirely nonsensical and without meaning. I can't do the man or his thought justice.
The sheer experience of reading Ligotti borders on the non-ordinary. It is a harrowing kind of initiation: will you survive? It's like he's some post-human creature who manages to live (not comfortably but still alive) in a world without any hint of any kind of hope or comfort. That's he's an ordinary man with an ordinary job (admittedly one that requires a lot of technical expertise and education) makes his accomplishment all the more amazing.
If you're up to the task, read this book. It's not hard to read. It still may kill you (or kill your illusions and delusions and comfort) if you dare to hear the man who wrote it and to understand his thoughts.
April 6, 2021
I found myself basically siding with Ligotti's against the cult of affirmationism, with one exception. I don't think the carnival has been going on quite long enough. I mean, have we really seen everything? Who among us really has the guts to say that they aren't at least remotely excited by the prospect of plumbing the ever more irredeemable depths of depravity that the future holds for our race? This book is not out to convert you, but it will leave profound lacerations on your consciousness.
We human beings enjoy the tragic double fate of being both the victims and the perpetrators of possibly the most damning conspiracy ever concocted, namely, the affirmationist consensus that "it is alright to be alive".
The tragedy of our predicament is that even when we can, by dint of strenous existential effort, come to entertain a clear and distinct idea of our own situation as SOMETHING THAT SHOULD NOT BE, an evolutionary mishap, we cannot confront it. Our bio-psycho-cognitive-cultural apparatus (the Human Security System) is innately programmed to rationalize, repress, and sublimate it away. So the meat machines keep on breathing, shitting and fucking and making more of their kind to feed to the organ grinder, each generation inheriting the cardinal sin of its progenitors (the curse of consciousness). It's better to have never been.
So pernicious is the stranglehold of the Human Security System that even the sharpest minds like Nietzsche who saw through the whole charade could not help but lapse but into affirmationism in the last instance, inscribing sublimity or transcendence into the very futility of persisting in the endless cycle (eternal recurrence). Iconoclasts they were, they could not bring themselves to smash the last and the most cherished idol. Against Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Ligotti elevates the somber figure of the Last Messiah who makes the following solemn pronouncement--even the idol of SELF, life or self-consciousness, must see its twilight. Voluntary self-extinction is ultimate privilege of our species. But this messiah's fame will be cut short; society is naturally biased towards natalism and does not appreciate pessimists.
We human beings enjoy the tragic double fate of being both the victims and the perpetrators of possibly the most damning conspiracy ever concocted, namely, the affirmationist consensus that "it is alright to be alive".
The tragedy of our predicament is that even when we can, by dint of strenous existential effort, come to entertain a clear and distinct idea of our own situation as SOMETHING THAT SHOULD NOT BE, an evolutionary mishap, we cannot confront it. Our bio-psycho-cognitive-cultural apparatus (the Human Security System) is innately programmed to rationalize, repress, and sublimate it away. So the meat machines keep on breathing, shitting and fucking and making more of their kind to feed to the organ grinder, each generation inheriting the cardinal sin of its progenitors (the curse of consciousness). It's better to have never been.
So pernicious is the stranglehold of the Human Security System that even the sharpest minds like Nietzsche who saw through the whole charade could not help but lapse but into affirmationism in the last instance, inscribing sublimity or transcendence into the very futility of persisting in the endless cycle (eternal recurrence). Iconoclasts they were, they could not bring themselves to smash the last and the most cherished idol. Against Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Ligotti elevates the somber figure of the Last Messiah who makes the following solemn pronouncement--even the idol of SELF, life or self-consciousness, must see its twilight. Voluntary self-extinction is ultimate privilege of our species. But this messiah's fame will be cut short; society is naturally biased towards natalism and does not appreciate pessimists.
August 3, 2024
This philosophical piece is written with gusto and humor. At times, it is caustic. But Ligotti's style is atmospheric, and his strangely haunting language affects in a very singular way.
To read his fiction, or nonfiction, is to visit a different world, an uncanny place that can feel uncomfortable.
The main idea is that life is more bad than good. While much of the book is an expansion of Schopenhauer (beyond merely promoting pessimism, both see optimism as not only foolish but nefarious), Ligotti touches on lesser-known pessimists: Mainlander, Zapffe, Michelstaedter, and others.
He goes farther than Ecclesiastes, farther than The Last Messiah, even farther than Mainlander's 'will to die.' At the heart of this book is Ligotti's malignant force (similar to Schopenhauer's Will). The force that causes all action, that makes things live and die.
And this force, far from being some benevolent deity or karmic justice, is not even indifferent, as many have said before. This force is pernicious.
There is a paradoxical warmth and consolation in a book so unapologetically nihilistic. What freedom when you realize everything is malignantly useless!
To read his fiction, or nonfiction, is to visit a different world, an uncanny place that can feel uncomfortable.
The main idea is that life is more bad than good. While much of the book is an expansion of Schopenhauer (beyond merely promoting pessimism, both see optimism as not only foolish but nefarious), Ligotti touches on lesser-known pessimists: Mainlander, Zapffe, Michelstaedter, and others.
He goes farther than Ecclesiastes, farther than The Last Messiah, even farther than Mainlander's 'will to die.' At the heart of this book is Ligotti's malignant force (similar to Schopenhauer's Will). The force that causes all action, that makes things live and die.
And this force, far from being some benevolent deity or karmic justice, is not even indifferent, as many have said before. This force is pernicious.
There is a paradoxical warmth and consolation in a book so unapologetically nihilistic. What freedom when you realize everything is malignantly useless!
September 5, 2016
La cospirazione contro la razza umana è un'opera terribile che avviene ogni giorno. Ligotti apre di fronte al lettore un sipario svelando le incertezze e l'instabilità della vita umana, la storia di come l'uomo, dai primordi, ha soppresso la propria coscienza, ha riposto in una stanza asettica il vero sé stesso, nascondendosi insieme ai suoi simili, in mezzo ai suoi simili, grazie a processi che lo hanno aiutato a sopportare questo incredibile fardello che è la vita.
Perché è la vita la cospirazione, insieme al perturbamento che essa causa.
Ligotti, con una dialettica sublime, con voce sardonica, parla di letteratura, di come solo alcuni siano riusciti a svelare il nostro costante disagio verso qualcosa, verso quel perturbante, quell'atmosfera che pochi sono riusciti a mostrare. Quel qualcosa insomma che allarma la nostra coscienza, che tenta di svegliarla. Ed è il soprannaturale è la forma che l'uomo ha dato al perturbante, generando orrori interiori ed esteriori.
E come sopravvivere? Le risposte ci sono, Ligotti (che per me si trova in mezzo a quelli che lui stesso onora di aver saputo dare vita a quell'atmosfera indicibile) ne snocciola alcune citando filosofi e demolendo religioni. Ma all'uomo, vittima di sé stesso, vittima di una cospirazione senza radici e per questo imbattibile, sicuramente non piaceranno.
Perché è la vita la cospirazione, insieme al perturbamento che essa causa.
Ligotti, con una dialettica sublime, con voce sardonica, parla di letteratura, di come solo alcuni siano riusciti a svelare il nostro costante disagio verso qualcosa, verso quel perturbante, quell'atmosfera che pochi sono riusciti a mostrare. Quel qualcosa insomma che allarma la nostra coscienza, che tenta di svegliarla. Ed è il soprannaturale è la forma che l'uomo ha dato al perturbante, generando orrori interiori ed esteriori.
E come sopravvivere? Le risposte ci sono, Ligotti (che per me si trova in mezzo a quelli che lui stesso onora di aver saputo dare vita a quell'atmosfera indicibile) ne snocciola alcune citando filosofi e demolendo religioni. Ma all'uomo, vittima di sé stesso, vittima di una cospirazione senza radici e per questo imbattibile, sicuramente non piaceranno.
March 17, 2014
Nudged up to five stars just for how damn readable it was....We are not ad idem on everything, not least because where he sees horror, I see the hilariously absurd, but he provides an excellent overview of the more extreme pessimistic position, and has introduced me to some very interesting thinkers of whose work I was unaware...
Well worth a gander...
Well worth a gander...
November 20, 2021
Brilliant. Genius? Who can say?
As for a review, the most respectful thing to do is to try to let the bruising from the punches to the face fade away and then complete a second reading.
Literally stunning for me at times.
Let's keep our heads up, keep turning pages, and I'll you see all out there on the field!
(waves)
As for a review, the most respectful thing to do is to try to let the bruising from the punches to the face fade away and then complete a second reading.
Literally stunning for me at times.
Let's keep our heads up, keep turning pages, and I'll you see all out there on the field!
(waves)
July 3, 2014
Highly pretentious and unreadable. The author has clearly done his research but here it's a bad thing. Reading this book, you get the impression that most of the time the author doesn't understand what he's saying. How can the reader be expected to understand this rubbish either? He seems determined to use every word in the dictionary without knowing what those words mean himself. Besides, there is no logic to the chapters or his argument. There doesn't seem to be an argument when you boil it down. The author is repeating what he's read (there is nothing new) and much of what he's repeating is his own misinterpretation. Either the book is a clever work of fiction or a completely self-indulgent failure.
ps Ray Brassier's intro is also nonsense and sums up this silly book and its silly writing.
ps Ray Brassier's intro is also nonsense and sums up this silly book and its silly writing.
October 6, 2022
Almost finished the audiobook and realized I hadn't gotten enough into the book to really remember what I've read. Perhaps the audiobook wasn't for me or just the book overall
January 6, 2022
4,5
"Porque el horror devora la luz y la digiere convirtiéndola en oscuridad."
"Para calmar nuestra ansiedad ante la muerte nos hemos Inventado un mundo que nos permite engañarnos con la creencia de que perviviremos -aunque sólo sea simbólicamente- más allá del colapso de nuestros cuerpos."
Un ensayo con diferentes temáticas que convergen, en parte, ante el horror de la conciencia y de la necesidad de nuestra prevalencia, en la que el concepto de marioneta va tomando sentido y significado dentro de estas páginas.
Tiene aspectos más que interesantes. Me ha gustado como este ensayo nos muestra un rincón de la mentalidad, inspiraciones del autor, aunque sea indirectamente, y como esto va dando al lector una mirada renovada del sentido de sus obras, de lo que expresa, de cómo es esa mirada del mundo y esos cuestionamientos constantes ante las acciones cotidianas establecidas en la sociedad.
Un ensayo que sigue un paralelismo, en el que Ligotti se basa en filósofos, como Schopenhauer y Zapffe, para entregar un fundamento pesimista de la existencia en contraposición de la mirada optimista que existe en la realidad y sociedad.
Temas como la supervivencia ante todo, la necesidad de prevalecer como especie, el ego, el sentido de la existencia, el autoengaño, la felicidad, la voluntad, etc. son solo algunos que se abordarán y que irán ajustando cada uno de los hilos que nos mueven como especie.
"Porque el horror devora la luz y la digiere convirtiéndola en oscuridad."
"Para calmar nuestra ansiedad ante la muerte nos hemos Inventado un mundo que nos permite engañarnos con la creencia de que perviviremos -aunque sólo sea simbólicamente- más allá del colapso de nuestros cuerpos."
Un ensayo con diferentes temáticas que convergen, en parte, ante el horror de la conciencia y de la necesidad de nuestra prevalencia, en la que el concepto de marioneta va tomando sentido y significado dentro de estas páginas.
Tiene aspectos más que interesantes. Me ha gustado como este ensayo nos muestra un rincón de la mentalidad, inspiraciones del autor, aunque sea indirectamente, y como esto va dando al lector una mirada renovada del sentido de sus obras, de lo que expresa, de cómo es esa mirada del mundo y esos cuestionamientos constantes ante las acciones cotidianas establecidas en la sociedad.
Un ensayo que sigue un paralelismo, en el que Ligotti se basa en filósofos, como Schopenhauer y Zapffe, para entregar un fundamento pesimista de la existencia en contraposición de la mirada optimista que existe en la realidad y sociedad.
Temas como la supervivencia ante todo, la necesidad de prevalecer como especie, el ego, el sentido de la existencia, el autoengaño, la felicidad, la voluntad, etc. son solo algunos que se abordarán y que irán ajustando cada uno de los hilos que nos mueven como especie.
February 26, 2025
To be, or not to be. Or to have never been. A fraction of all people believe non-existence is the preferable state. I believe existence is better, but this book weighs heavy on any thoughts of positivity. Thomas Ligotti leads the reader down the tangled path of the pain and futility of conscious existence. If you hold the position existence is better than non-existence, you better be prepared to think about why, and have your position flayed, exposed, and dissected. It's slightly uncomfortable, but an enlightening glimpse into more flaws evolved into our human brains. And, researchers better be able to comprehensively address this fundamental concept if, for example, a superconciousness wakes you up in the middle of the night to ask, "Wouldn't it be better for humanity to not exist?"
March 28, 2015
Years of meditating and reading books on philosophy, psychology, years of lucid dreams and night terrors, do not make a person unique. But it is singularly unique to find what feels like your own thoughts reflected back at you when you didn't pen them. As I read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, I had a strange feeling, as if Deja vu and vertigo had somehow been blended together. Had I read this before, if I hadn't written it?
Yet that disturbing familiarity regards an utterly useless process. Reading or writing about philosophy has long had a negative connotation in the United States, thanks to a long anti-intellectual culture in some corners. But here the useless, and indeed the negative, have an absolutely finality that have nothing to do with anti-intellectualism. This is ontological uselessness, the nightmare of being.
Ligotti's core thesis — the self as we know it is a contrivance of evolution, self consciousness an accident. To be deceived into thinking we are a self, that's the situation we find ourselves in, without hope of reprieve or reprisal. Of course, he isn't the first pessimist to set pen to paper, but he is the first to do so starkly, with such uncompromising clarity, without back pedaling or that ultimate cop out, the happy ending, "it was all a dream."
There is a certain intentional irony here, as indeed our waking lives are a type of dream, and the self we grant some sense of ultimate reality is nothing other than a character in that dream. But to the extent anything is real, that dream character's suffering is legitimate.
Our choice as he sees it is simple — self deception, or insanity. He shows us the basis of horror, rooted not in the supernatural beyond, but much closer to home. It stares back at us in the mirror. The supernatural in a sense gives us a glimpse of our own uncanny ghoulishness, without requiring identification with the absolute truth of the matter. We can close the book, and shake off that chill, for after all, it was just a story.
But this is not merely a thought experiment. It isn't satirical hyperbole, like A Modest Proposal. There is no hope or happy ending to soften the blow. Because the game of life is all fixed anyway, it couldn't matter less if you deceive yourself and write this book off as pessimistic belly aching. Whatever it takes to get you through another day, and prop up the illusion that you are a self in the first place.
Although some may argue about what constitutes "serious philosophy" — as Ligotti himself says, he eschews the circuitous argumentation that generally grants a work that unapproachable aura of seriousness — I would argue that this book belongs within any introductory study of nihilism and even post-modernism. To do so I'd like to demonstrate what I mean. Those purely interested in The Conspiracy Against The Human Race may as well stop here, but I believe this claim demands a little context and backtracking. You'll forgive me if I need to broaden the scope to come back to task.
Post modernism and nihilism both are subjects of derision. So many people wave off, dismiss it, or make fun of it, because what? Reason "can't" merely delineate the contours of our prison cell? Our psychology "can't" be the determining factor in our philosophical theories? The world as we know it "can't" just be the product of our narratives about it?
Suffice it to say, I'm not convinced. And neither is Ligotti. According to him, these dismissals are rooted in an underlying fear of pessimism. Even further, that fear may cover up the very existential terror that these theories hope to lay bare, even if it will quickly become clear to any ‘student’ that the effort itself is probably entirely counter-productive.
Another barrier is a sort of pop-cultural understanding of nihilism that throws most people off the scent. For this I need to turn to Vattimo, in a passage of The End of Modernity where he more or less paraphrases Nietzsche, "The project of nihilism is to unmask all systems of reason as systems of persuasion, and to show that logic — the very basis of metaphysical thought -- is in fact a kind of rhetoric. All thought that pretends to discover truth is but an expression of the will to power ... of those making the truth-claims over those being addressed by them; in particular, the disinterested, scientific, rational search for the objective, neutral truth of a proposition is an illusion produced by metaphysical thought for its own benefit."
I would actually specify here that it is the narrative doing this, and it is in the process of making narrative ("sense ") from " pure" data / research that this comes about. It's not that there is no objective world or neutral facts, it's that humans are incapable of direct interaction. Everything is mediated. And mediation is where myth/narrative is king. Lyotard defined postmodernism as “skepticism toward all meta-narratives,” and this bookends all these points on the subject, by saying, in essence, that it recognizes we only understand the world through narratives, and it demands we be skeptical of them all.
(My own little mea culpa: this is what I've dedicated like 10 years of work/research to, so I guess you could say I've got some skin in the game.)
The critique of logic that is perhaps most damning comes from Wittgenstein's commentary and later disavowal of his own Tractatus, and how it kind of turned the tables on logical positivism. There is a terrific accounting of that in "Wittgenstein's Vienna," possibly one of my favorite works of philosophical history.
More prosaically, it was the project of Enlightenment Reason that postulates "progress", which underlies all our technology (see Heidegger's essays on tech, such as “The Questions Concerning Technology,” which are even more damning in hindsight of where we are now), technology is the proverbial case in point of pure logic, at least in itself as a matter of engineering. If not so much how we interact with it, which remains more or less sociological and psychological, logic playing much less of a role in that engagement.
So, we might say nihilism is inherently skeptical of Enlightenment Reason as a project, of progress as a given — and in this regards there's some overlap with many stated postmodern "projects" (objectives). All are critical of logic as an end in itself, especially as a cultural project, and in this regard Conspiracy fits in quite well. There’s much to be found on this subject in Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, though he'll also wander off topic and rant about jazz music. But he has some good points, despite all that.
These projects are not themselves outside of time, which is maybe one of the ironies of post-modernism as a term. This is the subject of many lengthy works, but in short, nihilism and postmodernism both got much of their manna from the second world war, though the first had really already set that in motion-- the massive projects that had promised an idealized Utopian future brought instead war, death, genocide, and then after, the process of man being turned into machine. So the apparent obsession with critique and even, as some have claimed, pessimism within nihilistic and post-modernist philosophies comes as much from the lives of those that created it as any other philosophy. Again, we come to know and interact with the world only through the meditation of our narratives, and much recent neurological research backs this up. Ligotti deals with this directly, without getting sidetracked in “philosophical quibbling,” and indeed this work stands shoulder to shoulder with other works of this nature. But it seeks to one up them all — because they, and indeed this work as well, are ultimately nothing more than sublimation. Conspiracy will show us the truth, but only by dint of demonstrating that it doesn’t actually matter.
My own issue with much postmodern theory, especially the most pessimistic like Ligotti, is it's much easier to tear down an idea than build a new one. Years of working with this sort of material have left me essentially skeptical of everything, including my own memories. The cost of absolute honesty is ultimately paralysis. Only by having faith in the things we can't know, even in blatant fictions, can we take any action. This too he predicts. But he insists we must distance ourselves with denials or false narratives. There seems little room for Kierkegaardian leaps of faith. Getting out of bed is an act of faith. And, given all the things that might happen, possibly a stupid one. But I still take it.
And that's the only place where we might take some issue with Ligotti’s certainty, one may even call it faith, in futility. And that human, all too human trait is curiosity.
I grant nearly every single premise in Conspiracy, but at the end of day sheer curiosity at what lies behind the next rock keeps us going. This fits into his schema well enough as a form of sublimation, or perhaps mere distraction from the existential truth that we are puppets dancing at the call of some invisible master. Picture Sisyphus happy? Perhaps not. But we can imagine him wandering off to the horizon, just to see what happens next. The only certainty — death — does not undermine the great wealth of uncertainties life gives us along the way.
Reviewed by http://www.ModernMythology.net
Yet that disturbing familiarity regards an utterly useless process. Reading or writing about philosophy has long had a negative connotation in the United States, thanks to a long anti-intellectual culture in some corners. But here the useless, and indeed the negative, have an absolutely finality that have nothing to do with anti-intellectualism. This is ontological uselessness, the nightmare of being.
Ligotti's core thesis — the self as we know it is a contrivance of evolution, self consciousness an accident. To be deceived into thinking we are a self, that's the situation we find ourselves in, without hope of reprieve or reprisal. Of course, he isn't the first pessimist to set pen to paper, but he is the first to do so starkly, with such uncompromising clarity, without back pedaling or that ultimate cop out, the happy ending, "it was all a dream."
There is a certain intentional irony here, as indeed our waking lives are a type of dream, and the self we grant some sense of ultimate reality is nothing other than a character in that dream. But to the extent anything is real, that dream character's suffering is legitimate.
Our choice as he sees it is simple — self deception, or insanity. He shows us the basis of horror, rooted not in the supernatural beyond, but much closer to home. It stares back at us in the mirror. The supernatural in a sense gives us a glimpse of our own uncanny ghoulishness, without requiring identification with the absolute truth of the matter. We can close the book, and shake off that chill, for after all, it was just a story.
But this is not merely a thought experiment. It isn't satirical hyperbole, like A Modest Proposal. There is no hope or happy ending to soften the blow. Because the game of life is all fixed anyway, it couldn't matter less if you deceive yourself and write this book off as pessimistic belly aching. Whatever it takes to get you through another day, and prop up the illusion that you are a self in the first place.
Although some may argue about what constitutes "serious philosophy" — as Ligotti himself says, he eschews the circuitous argumentation that generally grants a work that unapproachable aura of seriousness — I would argue that this book belongs within any introductory study of nihilism and even post-modernism. To do so I'd like to demonstrate what I mean. Those purely interested in The Conspiracy Against The Human Race may as well stop here, but I believe this claim demands a little context and backtracking. You'll forgive me if I need to broaden the scope to come back to task.
Post modernism and nihilism both are subjects of derision. So many people wave off, dismiss it, or make fun of it, because what? Reason "can't" merely delineate the contours of our prison cell? Our psychology "can't" be the determining factor in our philosophical theories? The world as we know it "can't" just be the product of our narratives about it?
Suffice it to say, I'm not convinced. And neither is Ligotti. According to him, these dismissals are rooted in an underlying fear of pessimism. Even further, that fear may cover up the very existential terror that these theories hope to lay bare, even if it will quickly become clear to any ‘student’ that the effort itself is probably entirely counter-productive.
Another barrier is a sort of pop-cultural understanding of nihilism that throws most people off the scent. For this I need to turn to Vattimo, in a passage of The End of Modernity where he more or less paraphrases Nietzsche, "The project of nihilism is to unmask all systems of reason as systems of persuasion, and to show that logic — the very basis of metaphysical thought -- is in fact a kind of rhetoric. All thought that pretends to discover truth is but an expression of the will to power ... of those making the truth-claims over those being addressed by them; in particular, the disinterested, scientific, rational search for the objective, neutral truth of a proposition is an illusion produced by metaphysical thought for its own benefit."
I would actually specify here that it is the narrative doing this, and it is in the process of making narrative ("sense ") from " pure" data / research that this comes about. It's not that there is no objective world or neutral facts, it's that humans are incapable of direct interaction. Everything is mediated. And mediation is where myth/narrative is king. Lyotard defined postmodernism as “skepticism toward all meta-narratives,” and this bookends all these points on the subject, by saying, in essence, that it recognizes we only understand the world through narratives, and it demands we be skeptical of them all.
(My own little mea culpa: this is what I've dedicated like 10 years of work/research to, so I guess you could say I've got some skin in the game.)
The critique of logic that is perhaps most damning comes from Wittgenstein's commentary and later disavowal of his own Tractatus, and how it kind of turned the tables on logical positivism. There is a terrific accounting of that in "Wittgenstein's Vienna," possibly one of my favorite works of philosophical history.
More prosaically, it was the project of Enlightenment Reason that postulates "progress", which underlies all our technology (see Heidegger's essays on tech, such as “The Questions Concerning Technology,” which are even more damning in hindsight of where we are now), technology is the proverbial case in point of pure logic, at least in itself as a matter of engineering. If not so much how we interact with it, which remains more or less sociological and psychological, logic playing much less of a role in that engagement.
So, we might say nihilism is inherently skeptical of Enlightenment Reason as a project, of progress as a given — and in this regards there's some overlap with many stated postmodern "projects" (objectives). All are critical of logic as an end in itself, especially as a cultural project, and in this regard Conspiracy fits in quite well. There’s much to be found on this subject in Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, though he'll also wander off topic and rant about jazz music. But he has some good points, despite all that.
These projects are not themselves outside of time, which is maybe one of the ironies of post-modernism as a term. This is the subject of many lengthy works, but in short, nihilism and postmodernism both got much of their manna from the second world war, though the first had really already set that in motion-- the massive projects that had promised an idealized Utopian future brought instead war, death, genocide, and then after, the process of man being turned into machine. So the apparent obsession with critique and even, as some have claimed, pessimism within nihilistic and post-modernist philosophies comes as much from the lives of those that created it as any other philosophy. Again, we come to know and interact with the world only through the meditation of our narratives, and much recent neurological research backs this up. Ligotti deals with this directly, without getting sidetracked in “philosophical quibbling,” and indeed this work stands shoulder to shoulder with other works of this nature. But it seeks to one up them all — because they, and indeed this work as well, are ultimately nothing more than sublimation. Conspiracy will show us the truth, but only by dint of demonstrating that it doesn’t actually matter.
My own issue with much postmodern theory, especially the most pessimistic like Ligotti, is it's much easier to tear down an idea than build a new one. Years of working with this sort of material have left me essentially skeptical of everything, including my own memories. The cost of absolute honesty is ultimately paralysis. Only by having faith in the things we can't know, even in blatant fictions, can we take any action. This too he predicts. But he insists we must distance ourselves with denials or false narratives. There seems little room for Kierkegaardian leaps of faith. Getting out of bed is an act of faith. And, given all the things that might happen, possibly a stupid one. But I still take it.
And that's the only place where we might take some issue with Ligotti’s certainty, one may even call it faith, in futility. And that human, all too human trait is curiosity.
I grant nearly every single premise in Conspiracy, but at the end of day sheer curiosity at what lies behind the next rock keeps us going. This fits into his schema well enough as a form of sublimation, or perhaps mere distraction from the existential truth that we are puppets dancing at the call of some invisible master. Picture Sisyphus happy? Perhaps not. But we can imagine him wandering off to the horizon, just to see what happens next. The only certainty — death — does not undermine the great wealth of uncertainties life gives us along the way.
Reviewed by http://www.ModernMythology.net
August 23, 2020
Wow, I enjoyed this way more a second time!
Even though I haven't touched it since this time last year (or since I threw it in this short film I made!) somehow Ligotti's writing flowed much more easily for me this time.
I mean last year was just not a good year for me. Still recovering from grief (it takes a loooooooong time), my brain was running a loop of precisely the type of ideas that fill this book. It wasn't the time to read something that told me, "You're actually one of the few non-crazy ones. Life before feeling this way was an illusion which, now shattered, shall never return. Thinking this way is your new life now." And that was an unbearable interpretation of how I felt. Though I remember looking up an article on Tolstoy's "Confession"—and though I have still not read it, I was somewhat reassured to discover that even he—perhaps especially he—succumbed to the exact same pessimism I had, while objectively living a lovely life. Because it's painful enough to have that narrative running through your mind, but coupled with the ungratefulness of it, it's just too much. (I won't read my previous review, available below, but I suspect I was talking to myself at this time also.)
But I don't think my interpretation was accurate. Ligotti seems to have found a weird type of peace in his resignation about the state of the universe—but there was nothing peaceful about how I felt. I found this Maya Angelou quote that turned out to be quite prophetic, and that you may also find useful: "[I]t's going to be better...If it's bad, it might get worse, but I know that it's going to be better. And you have to know that. There's a country song out now, which I wish I'd written, that says, 'Every storm runs out of rain.' I'd make a sign of that if I were you. Put that on your writing pad. No matter how dull and seemingly unpromising life is right now, it's going to change. It's going to be better. But you have to keep working." Even the most miserable states of affairs exhaust themselves.
And I will read Tolstoy's Confession soon, but I think it needs to be understood in context. Okay so the guy lost faith in everything and flipped his absolute shit. So the lesson is, "Could (nay, does!) happen to everybody." I've definitely suffered long enough to have written a whole negative thesis on existence during—though luckily for everyone, I didn't! But there's no reason to believe that that attitude is the truth of the matter and whatever else you feel is the lie. Why would that be true? (I mean, as Ligotti points out, "Why wouldn't that be true?" But as he admits on several occasions, neither of us will ever be proven or disproven.)
Ligotti's intentions are pretty clear with this book. He doesn't expect to convert anyone, he knows his attitude is going to sound weird and not even sell very well. But perhaps these ideas are worth presenting anyway. I totally agree.
It is humbling—and has since been of immense value to me—to consider that, no one does or ever will know the answers to life's ultimate question: if it's even worth it in the first place. Don't you also find that oddly reassuring? Maybe madness is sanity and vice versa. Maybe ingratitude is reasonable instead of scold-worthy. Maybe, through the argument for determinism, you are far less responsible for your failures (and, sure, your successes)—than you once thought. As someone who has this weird golden boy thing going on, a need to please and perform 100%, to take on all responsibilities etc, it's hugely alleviating to consider this. And what does it matter what you achieve or don't? We'll all get forgotten. If I (whatever it means for me to have a self :P) truly cared about being remembered, why would I spend so much time indoors away from people anyway? The people I used to care about preserving me in memory—eg, people I've never met who read my books—are even less important to me than loved ones, whom I seem to avoid most of the time! Am I really sure I care that much about my/everyone's ultimate fate?
And, as I've pointed out regarding similar texts (Better Never to Have Been by David Benatar), behaviourally speaking, being an optimist or pessimist doesn't change anything, really. Even a pessimist would argue that, if life contains too much suffering and I agree not to have kids anyway, then I can be happy, right? Even the pessimists win! I guess I should also contribute somehow to their cause—well if Ligotti thinks writing this book is a good enough demonstration of his dedication to it, then I can simply say, “Read this book! I recommend it!” and that should keep the pessimists off my back.
All three of them—a fact which is neither damning nor accrediting :P
FIRST REVIEW:
Ugh, this was such a slog, as it is reading any tedious ideology. Something about almost being told the truth always has that stultifying, soporific feel to it.
I obviously won't be able to contend with all of this book's points simply in a review, so I will just give my main thoughts having recently tossed it aside. (They're for my own records—I have no interest in debating this bullshit with anyone.)
That consciousness is a mistake and life is not worth living strikes me as a profoundly ungrateful take. If there's no more evidence that this is true than that it isn't (which, as far as I understand it, the book confesses), then I dismiss it on grounds of ingratitude alone. Shit take. What on earth is the rationale/logic/etc of choosing to believe life isn't worth living?
The idea that pessimists aren't active, and keep to themselves, and don't engage in discourse as a result of their beliefs, sounds like the excuse of a wee lonely guy who likes to entertain the belief that there surely are more who agree with him than it appears—they just, uh, don't write. Because of pessimism. Even the title smacks of extremist paranoia. None of this is a truth that people fail to learn; it just isn't conventional wisdom. (We're going through a crackpot renaissance at the moment because politics is being decided by YouTube comments or whatever, but that can't go on.)
Who could look at evolution, at humans, and be like, "Why you so proud? All kinds of stuff has evolved." Like, yeah, over epic spans of time nature has continuously optimised itself and everything is better than ever. That's awesome. It didn't just "happen"—it was effort and survival and all that, and we're actively engaged in that today.
I've also always maintained that it's an insanely dangerous take that "depression = facts." Depression may be the absence of emotion. I don't understand why it's "clarity" on that basis. Is a person truer as a corpse because they lack life? Like, what?
Humanity is largely proceeding in a suffering-minimising direction, and for centuries people have found reasons to live and even enjoyed life in worse circumstances, and (no I can't prove but) I sincerely doubt that the only source of this joy is self-delusion. Surely there's no better time to bring in the next generation! (I won't be doing it personally, but I'm all for it.)
As for love: I love love. There's absolutely no need for the following two fallacies to be true in order for people to enjoy relationships:
1) You are my soulmate.
2) I couldn't live without you.
1) You spend enough time with someone, they become an inextricable part of your life, self and history, such that you can't just ditch them as if you're rolling out of an Avis rental car at the end of a package holiday and sending it off a cliff. You have built something with this person, and this someone may become—what I, for all intents and purposes understand to be—your soulmate. Very few people believe there is someone for everyone, and there probably are multiple someones for some people who are committed to supposed soulmates (more people saying, "Great! Add them to the mix too!")—but it feels like this person is your person, and that's why people speak of it that way. For all intents and purposes, it's definitely a thing.
2) You don't have to need someone to want them in your life forever. Life just needs to be demonstrably worse without them. And if you love someone, life probably is worse without them. (If you stop loving each other you can leave, but that doesn't make it a waste.)
It's like the rite of passage of every fifteen-year-old boy to pick at these ideas because, I don't know, he saw them in a fifteen-year-old girl's blog post, and he goes about talking about how they're not true because it feels good, and he tells himself most people believe in these ideas literally because the more people to whom he can feel superior, the better it feels. Look to Alain de Botton's Essays in Love for a better deconstruction of this notion—and the much kinder take of, "Best not to point this stuff out to those enjoying themselves."
It's true that there has been a lot of harm done by people believing in things that cannot be proven or located. But just because it can't be proven or located, doesn't mean it isn't there, nor that believing in it is inherently harmful.
I don't know who it was who discovered that life is inherently meaningless and that all meaning is simply applied onto life—Sartre with existence precedes essence? A whole bunch of folk agree. As do I! This is the unusual source of all meaning, but it's meaning nonetheless.
This guy David Benatar, who wrote Better Never to Have Been, he said he didn't want people to focus on his life because he wanted them to contend with his ideas. But all humans have some personal basis for the way they choose to see the world. Personally, I like to collect reasons that I could descend into nihilism if I felt like it, and then not do that. For example, having lost both my parents, seemingly before their time in both instances, I probably have more reason—than some imagined control subject, say—to think, "Finding someone you love, having kids with them, only for it to amount to that—what's the point in that, then? And why make someone to then put them through a trauma like that?" (I'm okay btw—there's pizza in the fridge and so on, but ooft, grief double whammy, do not recommend it!) Through no desire of my own to do so, I've had to ruminate on thoughts like that for a really long time. But! I now get up each morning thrilled at the idea that the facts of my life, coupled with the positive attitude I have chosen to take about them regardless, maximally pisses off those who are trying to use such basic adversity as "simply existing" as an excuse to denounce existence!! :) (I don't need it to be true that my parents are somewhere now—they did a great job of being here. And they poured an insane amount of time and energy to me, so I have mad respect for that and desire to do it justice. No, I don't think they got to stick around long enough to enjoy the fruits of their labour, and I'm not sure I would have been satisfied with either of their lives as a sum total—but they definitely both were of the opinion that yes, it was all worth it. And that's their call, because it was their lives.)
Jordan Peterson—whose book helped curb a number of my bad habits and set myself up better as an adult, by the way—is on some mission to find an overarching truth, which is quite bleak and involves a lot of suffering. It almost seems like, "Who could willingly adopt a narrative that dark? It must simply be the truth!" Men, mostly, is the answer. Men could adopt a narrative that dark even though it's not exactly true. They want to believe that life is tough and they are big and strong for conquering it. It's a compelling narrative, paradoxical though that seems.
Why do you assume it's a nightmare lurking behind the scenes? Like, why would love be just biochemistry but feelings of doom wouldn't? Why is doom the clarity and love isn't? Why do you have to make yourself forget the feeling of depression, to consciously lock it out in order to survive, but you forget the feeling of new love even if you'd rather not? Is the latter an accident and the former a necessary self-delusion? ALSO! If you come out of a bout of depression, and you survived it, evidently you don't need to lock out those thoughts or be afraid of them—because you survived with them. And you could do it again (hopefully you don't have to of course, but still.)
As for fear of death: another young man pastime. I find it helpful to think that there's more going on than just you. You participate in life and make connections and you'll inevitably live on. And you yourself are made of those who came before, in so many ways, and who will perish before you (if you're lucky...) And during this process you'll see some cool stuff and eat lovely dinners. What is it you're gasping to do beyond eighty anyway? Go to New Zealand? Ach. There's trees and stuff there like there is anywhere else. Live long enough and you'll get the point, I say. If you choose to be grateful to be here at all, you can draw focus away from your fear of it ending and make the best of the time you do get—and since you can choose to do that, I don't see why you wouldn't.
To give this book its due: I'm glad these thoughts are laid out somewhere, as they will surely comfort those who think the world mad for not acknowledging that this argument could be made. I agree up to an extent that this argument could be made—I just don't choose to make it.
Just because you can't prove it, doesn't necessarily mean it isn't true. And if a series of thoughts hurts the most to consider, that just means it hurts the most to consider. It means absolutely nothing in terms of its veracity.
Most extreme pretty cover/bad book combo I've come across as well!
(I hope Ligotti has a wee wife who pads into his writing room sometimes, and he says, "You know that it's impossible that we are soulmates? That love is simply a delusion, a fallacy masking the true horror of existence?" And she puts a wee blanket over his shoulders, kisses him on the head and says "That's very profound, honey, now don't catch a chill.")
Even though I haven't touched it since this time last year (or since I threw it in this short film I made!) somehow Ligotti's writing flowed much more easily for me this time.
I mean last year was just not a good year for me. Still recovering from grief (it takes a loooooooong time), my brain was running a loop of precisely the type of ideas that fill this book. It wasn't the time to read something that told me, "You're actually one of the few non-crazy ones. Life before feeling this way was an illusion which, now shattered, shall never return. Thinking this way is your new life now." And that was an unbearable interpretation of how I felt. Though I remember looking up an article on Tolstoy's "Confession"—and though I have still not read it, I was somewhat reassured to discover that even he—perhaps especially he—succumbed to the exact same pessimism I had, while objectively living a lovely life. Because it's painful enough to have that narrative running through your mind, but coupled with the ungratefulness of it, it's just too much. (I won't read my previous review, available below, but I suspect I was talking to myself at this time also.)
But I don't think my interpretation was accurate. Ligotti seems to have found a weird type of peace in his resignation about the state of the universe—but there was nothing peaceful about how I felt. I found this Maya Angelou quote that turned out to be quite prophetic, and that you may also find useful: "[I]t's going to be better...If it's bad, it might get worse, but I know that it's going to be better. And you have to know that. There's a country song out now, which I wish I'd written, that says, 'Every storm runs out of rain.' I'd make a sign of that if I were you. Put that on your writing pad. No matter how dull and seemingly unpromising life is right now, it's going to change. It's going to be better. But you have to keep working." Even the most miserable states of affairs exhaust themselves.
And I will read Tolstoy's Confession soon, but I think it needs to be understood in context. Okay so the guy lost faith in everything and flipped his absolute shit. So the lesson is, "Could (nay, does!) happen to everybody." I've definitely suffered long enough to have written a whole negative thesis on existence during—though luckily for everyone, I didn't! But there's no reason to believe that that attitude is the truth of the matter and whatever else you feel is the lie. Why would that be true? (I mean, as Ligotti points out, "Why wouldn't that be true?" But as he admits on several occasions, neither of us will ever be proven or disproven.)
Ligotti's intentions are pretty clear with this book. He doesn't expect to convert anyone, he knows his attitude is going to sound weird and not even sell very well. But perhaps these ideas are worth presenting anyway. I totally agree.
It is humbling—and has since been of immense value to me—to consider that, no one does or ever will know the answers to life's ultimate question: if it's even worth it in the first place. Don't you also find that oddly reassuring? Maybe madness is sanity and vice versa. Maybe ingratitude is reasonable instead of scold-worthy. Maybe, through the argument for determinism, you are far less responsible for your failures (and, sure, your successes)—than you once thought. As someone who has this weird golden boy thing going on, a need to please and perform 100%, to take on all responsibilities etc, it's hugely alleviating to consider this. And what does it matter what you achieve or don't? We'll all get forgotten. If I (whatever it means for me to have a self :P) truly cared about being remembered, why would I spend so much time indoors away from people anyway? The people I used to care about preserving me in memory—eg, people I've never met who read my books—are even less important to me than loved ones, whom I seem to avoid most of the time! Am I really sure I care that much about my/everyone's ultimate fate?
And, as I've pointed out regarding similar texts (Better Never to Have Been by David Benatar), behaviourally speaking, being an optimist or pessimist doesn't change anything, really. Even a pessimist would argue that, if life contains too much suffering and I agree not to have kids anyway, then I can be happy, right? Even the pessimists win! I guess I should also contribute somehow to their cause—well if Ligotti thinks writing this book is a good enough demonstration of his dedication to it, then I can simply say, “Read this book! I recommend it!” and that should keep the pessimists off my back.
All three of them—a fact which is neither damning nor accrediting :P
FIRST REVIEW:
Ugh, this was such a slog, as it is reading any tedious ideology. Something about almost being told the truth always has that stultifying, soporific feel to it.
I obviously won't be able to contend with all of this book's points simply in a review, so I will just give my main thoughts having recently tossed it aside. (They're for my own records—I have no interest in debating this bullshit with anyone.)
That consciousness is a mistake and life is not worth living strikes me as a profoundly ungrateful take. If there's no more evidence that this is true than that it isn't (which, as far as I understand it, the book confesses), then I dismiss it on grounds of ingratitude alone. Shit take. What on earth is the rationale/logic/etc of choosing to believe life isn't worth living?
The idea that pessimists aren't active, and keep to themselves, and don't engage in discourse as a result of their beliefs, sounds like the excuse of a wee lonely guy who likes to entertain the belief that there surely are more who agree with him than it appears—they just, uh, don't write. Because of pessimism. Even the title smacks of extremist paranoia. None of this is a truth that people fail to learn; it just isn't conventional wisdom. (We're going through a crackpot renaissance at the moment because politics is being decided by YouTube comments or whatever, but that can't go on.)
Who could look at evolution, at humans, and be like, "Why you so proud? All kinds of stuff has evolved." Like, yeah, over epic spans of time nature has continuously optimised itself and everything is better than ever. That's awesome. It didn't just "happen"—it was effort and survival and all that, and we're actively engaged in that today.
I've also always maintained that it's an insanely dangerous take that "depression = facts." Depression may be the absence of emotion. I don't understand why it's "clarity" on that basis. Is a person truer as a corpse because they lack life? Like, what?
Humanity is largely proceeding in a suffering-minimising direction, and for centuries people have found reasons to live and even enjoyed life in worse circumstances, and (no I can't prove but) I sincerely doubt that the only source of this joy is self-delusion. Surely there's no better time to bring in the next generation! (I won't be doing it personally, but I'm all for it.)
As for love: I love love. There's absolutely no need for the following two fallacies to be true in order for people to enjoy relationships:
1) You are my soulmate.
2) I couldn't live without you.
1) You spend enough time with someone, they become an inextricable part of your life, self and history, such that you can't just ditch them as if you're rolling out of an Avis rental car at the end of a package holiday and sending it off a cliff. You have built something with this person, and this someone may become—what I, for all intents and purposes understand to be—your soulmate. Very few people believe there is someone for everyone, and there probably are multiple someones for some people who are committed to supposed soulmates (more people saying, "Great! Add them to the mix too!")—but it feels like this person is your person, and that's why people speak of it that way. For all intents and purposes, it's definitely a thing.
2) You don't have to need someone to want them in your life forever. Life just needs to be demonstrably worse without them. And if you love someone, life probably is worse without them. (If you stop loving each other you can leave, but that doesn't make it a waste.)
It's like the rite of passage of every fifteen-year-old boy to pick at these ideas because, I don't know, he saw them in a fifteen-year-old girl's blog post, and he goes about talking about how they're not true because it feels good, and he tells himself most people believe in these ideas literally because the more people to whom he can feel superior, the better it feels. Look to Alain de Botton's Essays in Love for a better deconstruction of this notion—and the much kinder take of, "Best not to point this stuff out to those enjoying themselves."
It's true that there has been a lot of harm done by people believing in things that cannot be proven or located. But just because it can't be proven or located, doesn't mean it isn't there, nor that believing in it is inherently harmful.
I don't know who it was who discovered that life is inherently meaningless and that all meaning is simply applied onto life—Sartre with existence precedes essence? A whole bunch of folk agree. As do I! This is the unusual source of all meaning, but it's meaning nonetheless.
This guy David Benatar, who wrote Better Never to Have Been, he said he didn't want people to focus on his life because he wanted them to contend with his ideas. But all humans have some personal basis for the way they choose to see the world. Personally, I like to collect reasons that I could descend into nihilism if I felt like it, and then not do that. For example, having lost both my parents, seemingly before their time in both instances, I probably have more reason—than some imagined control subject, say—to think, "Finding someone you love, having kids with them, only for it to amount to that—what's the point in that, then? And why make someone to then put them through a trauma like that?" (I'm okay btw—there's pizza in the fridge and so on, but ooft, grief double whammy, do not recommend it!) Through no desire of my own to do so, I've had to ruminate on thoughts like that for a really long time. But! I now get up each morning thrilled at the idea that the facts of my life, coupled with the positive attitude I have chosen to take about them regardless, maximally pisses off those who are trying to use such basic adversity as "simply existing" as an excuse to denounce existence!! :) (I don't need it to be true that my parents are somewhere now—they did a great job of being here. And they poured an insane amount of time and energy to me, so I have mad respect for that and desire to do it justice. No, I don't think they got to stick around long enough to enjoy the fruits of their labour, and I'm not sure I would have been satisfied with either of their lives as a sum total—but they definitely both were of the opinion that yes, it was all worth it. And that's their call, because it was their lives.)
Jordan Peterson—whose book helped curb a number of my bad habits and set myself up better as an adult, by the way—is on some mission to find an overarching truth, which is quite bleak and involves a lot of suffering. It almost seems like, "Who could willingly adopt a narrative that dark? It must simply be the truth!" Men, mostly, is the answer. Men could adopt a narrative that dark even though it's not exactly true. They want to believe that life is tough and they are big and strong for conquering it. It's a compelling narrative, paradoxical though that seems.
Why do you assume it's a nightmare lurking behind the scenes? Like, why would love be just biochemistry but feelings of doom wouldn't? Why is doom the clarity and love isn't? Why do you have to make yourself forget the feeling of depression, to consciously lock it out in order to survive, but you forget the feeling of new love even if you'd rather not? Is the latter an accident and the former a necessary self-delusion? ALSO! If you come out of a bout of depression, and you survived it, evidently you don't need to lock out those thoughts or be afraid of them—because you survived with them. And you could do it again (hopefully you don't have to of course, but still.)
As for fear of death: another young man pastime. I find it helpful to think that there's more going on than just you. You participate in life and make connections and you'll inevitably live on. And you yourself are made of those who came before, in so many ways, and who will perish before you (if you're lucky...) And during this process you'll see some cool stuff and eat lovely dinners. What is it you're gasping to do beyond eighty anyway? Go to New Zealand? Ach. There's trees and stuff there like there is anywhere else. Live long enough and you'll get the point, I say. If you choose to be grateful to be here at all, you can draw focus away from your fear of it ending and make the best of the time you do get—and since you can choose to do that, I don't see why you wouldn't.
To give this book its due: I'm glad these thoughts are laid out somewhere, as they will surely comfort those who think the world mad for not acknowledging that this argument could be made. I agree up to an extent that this argument could be made—I just don't choose to make it.
Just because you can't prove it, doesn't necessarily mean it isn't true. And if a series of thoughts hurts the most to consider, that just means it hurts the most to consider. It means absolutely nothing in terms of its veracity.
Most extreme pretty cover/bad book combo I've come across as well!
(I hope Ligotti has a wee wife who pads into his writing room sometimes, and he says, "You know that it's impossible that we are soulmates? That love is simply a delusion, a fallacy masking the true horror of existence?" And she puts a wee blanket over his shoulders, kisses him on the head and says "That's very profound, honey, now don't catch a chill.")
September 5, 2023
This is an outstanding book full of thought-provoking philosophies from some of the world's brightest minds. I highly recommend it to any of my followers. Chances are, if you are in any way similar to me, you will wish to add this to your shelf.
It's burdensome for many to accept that human life and existence has no inherent meaning whatsoever. But even if billions of people plug their ears and try to pretend otherwise, either through religion or spiritual perspective, the truth remains the truth. Our species will continue to do mental gymnastics to run from this truth, but one day we will all be gone, and a cold, uncaring universe will carry on as if we were never here at all. This is a difficult thing for creatures with our level of consciousness to grapple with.
We are not the main characters. Our suffering and our happiness mean nothing on a cosmic scale.
Granted, I take a rather optimistic view of this fact. Since there is no inherent meaning to our species, put in place by some divine being, it means that 'meaning' itself is a blank canvass. We can paint it any colour we wish. There is a beauty in that. It's not something to be upset over. It's liberating. Your meaning of life will be different than mine. That would not be the case if we were subjects to a divine being. We would be told how to live and what to think. I prefer the reality, however morose it may appear on the surface.
It's burdensome for many to accept that human life and existence has no inherent meaning whatsoever. But even if billions of people plug their ears and try to pretend otherwise, either through religion or spiritual perspective, the truth remains the truth. Our species will continue to do mental gymnastics to run from this truth, but one day we will all be gone, and a cold, uncaring universe will carry on as if we were never here at all. This is a difficult thing for creatures with our level of consciousness to grapple with.
We are not the main characters. Our suffering and our happiness mean nothing on a cosmic scale.
Granted, I take a rather optimistic view of this fact. Since there is no inherent meaning to our species, put in place by some divine being, it means that 'meaning' itself is a blank canvass. We can paint it any colour we wish. There is a beauty in that. It's not something to be upset over. It's liberating. Your meaning of life will be different than mine. That would not be the case if we were subjects to a divine being. We would be told how to live and what to think. I prefer the reality, however morose it may appear on the surface.
November 11, 2023
A non-fiction piece which ostensibly focuses on the work of Peter Zapffe, a Norwegian philosopher who belived that consciousness was an evolutionary blunder which took the human species away from being part of the natural. As such, Zapffe belived that we, as a species, should explore the possibility that non-existence is preferable to existence; that the whole human race should consider antinatalism, allow itself to leave, to end the cycle of birth and death, that we should simply opt out of existence.
The book is superbly written and very enjoyable to read. Ligotti looks at the ideas of various philosophers and writers (mostly those who write of the supernatural) and does so with a deft touch that makes the reading experience very entertaining. He identifies thinkers who, via philosophy, psychology, or fiction, have addressed the issue of being alive and whether or not it is, for want of a better term, worth it. Despite his even-handedness, it seems clear from the outset that he does not.
While I enjoyed the book, there was nothing in it that I wasn't already familiar with and, should you want a greater, more in-depth analysis of the subject matter, I would recommend the writers and thinkers he refences more so that this book. Zapffe in particular. In essence this is a simplified version of complex ideas which, understandably given Ligotti's horror fiction background, he makes a little more accessible via their relationship with horror and the supernatural. Existence and consciousness are, after all, a horror story.
As a means of producing an easy to digest and easy to understand exploration of these ideas I would highly recommend the book. Very interesting stuff. But ultimately nothing too deep or heavy.
The book is superbly written and very enjoyable to read. Ligotti looks at the ideas of various philosophers and writers (mostly those who write of the supernatural) and does so with a deft touch that makes the reading experience very entertaining. He identifies thinkers who, via philosophy, psychology, or fiction, have addressed the issue of being alive and whether or not it is, for want of a better term, worth it. Despite his even-handedness, it seems clear from the outset that he does not.
While I enjoyed the book, there was nothing in it that I wasn't already familiar with and, should you want a greater, more in-depth analysis of the subject matter, I would recommend the writers and thinkers he refences more so that this book. Zapffe in particular. In essence this is a simplified version of complex ideas which, understandably given Ligotti's horror fiction background, he makes a little more accessible via their relationship with horror and the supernatural. Existence and consciousness are, after all, a horror story.
As a means of producing an easy to digest and easy to understand exploration of these ideas I would highly recommend the book. Very interesting stuff. But ultimately nothing too deep or heavy.
January 28, 2024
You, yes YOU, don’t run away, did you know that you are nothing but diseased meat, going through the motions of an animal existence, forced by ancient, biological drives to eat, sleep, fight,fuck and shit?! Only the paradox of our consciousness which clings to us like a disease also makes us aware of our own impending death and the malignant uselessness of our lives.
We know this to be true on a basic level but in order to avoid a plague of insanity and suicide, we distract ourselves with horse shit like religion which we’re willing to commit mass murder to protect because even the idea that there is another religion threatens the verisimilitude of our own.
Besides, even if god did exist, and he created us in his image, he was a man alone in a room,plagued by the horror of his existence until he blew himself to smithereens (the worst way to be blown) and everyone and everything in the universe are the leftover pieces of his form, each of us, a tiny bit of our creator and still just as meaningless and unspecial as he was.
Animals don’t have this problem, they aren’t aware of death so just take life as it comes, no animal pessimists, nihilists or cosmisists to write philosophical texts about consciousness being the parent of all horrors and then committing suicide.
All this stuff is interesting as an intellectual exercise but it doesn’t do to dwell on it for the sake of your own sanity, our consciousness may be the parent of our horror but it’s also the parent of art and innovation so don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, enjoy the small things and don’t take shit so seriously.
We know this to be true on a basic level but in order to avoid a plague of insanity and suicide, we distract ourselves with horse shit like religion which we’re willing to commit mass murder to protect because even the idea that there is another religion threatens the verisimilitude of our own.
Besides, even if god did exist, and he created us in his image, he was a man alone in a room,plagued by the horror of his existence until he blew himself to smithereens (the worst way to be blown) and everyone and everything in the universe are the leftover pieces of his form, each of us, a tiny bit of our creator and still just as meaningless and unspecial as he was.
Animals don’t have this problem, they aren’t aware of death so just take life as it comes, no animal pessimists, nihilists or cosmisists to write philosophical texts about consciousness being the parent of all horrors and then committing suicide.
All this stuff is interesting as an intellectual exercise but it doesn’t do to dwell on it for the sake of your own sanity, our consciousness may be the parent of our horror but it’s also the parent of art and innovation so don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, enjoy the small things and don’t take shit so seriously.
November 24, 2025
Went in expecting whatever one expects from Thomas Ligotti writing a non-fiction treatise elaborating and contextualizing the (anti-)philosophies that fuel his fiction, and largely got that but also came out having extrapolated a surprisingly huge number of realizations as to why disabled people often have second-class status in society and how the very fact of our existence ontologically threatens the lies human society tells itself to stay sane. Ligotti only intermittently explores the experience of the ill (though his oft-evoked Depressive serves well enough as an all-encompassing cipher) and their place in this ostensible existential horrorshow, but either way the ideas he expresses and the thinkers he cites left me with a lot to chew on not only in regards to the disabled's social status but also helped me understand further why such a person, me for instance, has gravitated toward the macabre in literature and art for pretty much all my life.
"A sibling term of supernatural horror is the "uncanny". Both terms are pertinent in reference to nonhuman forms that disport human qualities. Both may also refer to seemingly animate forms that are not what they seem, as with the undead - monstrosities of paradox, things that are neither one thing nor another, or, more uncannily, and more horrifically supernaturally, things that are discovered to be two things at once. . . Such is the motif of supernatural horror: Something terrible in its being comes forward and makes its claim as a shareholder in our reality, or what we think is our reality and ours alone." (Ligotti)
The aspect of being unsettled is one that anyone who has been diagnosed with a chronic or terminal illness will be familiar with on some level. One day you are of apiece with society and the able-bodied because you ostensibly fit into the folds of socially agreed-upon standards of health and "normal living", then the next you are diagnosed with an absurd condition that unravels everything you thought you knew and are left adrift among a world that is now alien and, apparently, confrontational to your existence - a reality that you only have to affirm by your interactions with the average person, who now either reacts to the particulars of your existence with pity at best and active skepticism or loathing at worst. You may have been aware in some dim way of life's difficulties before, but never had your supposing of inherent equanimity between the body and the self (and between the self and society) been thrown so starkly into question, to the point where this polarization that you never before had to think about (at least not at such length) is now suddenly the central predicament of your life. As Johanna Hedva says in their excellent essay collection "How to Tell When We Will Die", the experience of a chronic diagnosis is marked by the feeling of "the everything-ness of ourselves pierced by the everything-ness of our environment", and this is a sensation that might be the ultimate in uncanniness - the forcible recognition that you are now somehow different from others and the rest of the world while inhabiting a similar appearance on the surface, yet one whose specific traumas are not relatable or often even comprehensible to the overwhelming majority of those around you.
One of the highlights of the book is Ligotti's citation of psychologist Ernst Jentsch, who uses the example of epilepsy to illustrate how the uncanny is embodied in the disabled. Jentsch argues that the general public's "experience of ordinary life is the relative psychical harmony in which their mental functions generally stand in relation to each other, even if moderate deviations from this equilibrium make their appearance occasionally in almost all of us: this behavior. . . constitutes man's individuality and provides the foundation for our judgment of it". With disability, such as epilepsy, the perceived harmony between our mental functions is more boldly blown apart and revealed to be built on flimsy foundations (bodies that are susceptible to disease and decay), which then effects our entire conceptualization of a sense of Self, which we (sub)consciously relate to the state of our bodies (however erroneous that relation may be in reality). We believe ourselves to be permanent, solid beings in a unified society and it is the chaos of a chronically ill body that more plainly and aggressively confronts us with the fact that these ideas are only comforting illusions. ". . . This relative psychical harmony happens markedly to be disturbed in the spectator and if the situation does not seem trivial or comic, the consequence of an unimportant incident, or if it is not quite familiar (like an alcohol intoxication, for example), then the dark knowledge dawns on the unschooled observer that mechanical processes are taking place in that which he was previously used to regarding as a unified psyche" (Jentsch)
In other words, this book made me realize that the fear of disability could be the basis from which all supernatural horror in fiction springs, even if only implicitly. At one point Ligotti illustrates the fundamental uncanniness of the undead beings that populate horror fiction, such as vampires and zombies, which are "uncanny in themselves because they once were human but have undergone a terrible rebirth and become mechanisms with a single function - to survive for survival's sake." To me as someone whose life was profoundly changed on all levels by my disability, my experience was nothing if not a terrible rebirth who revealed a primary purpose, which was to survive for the sake of survival. Of course, this is not all I nor any disabled person is - actually bother asking any of us, and we will all affirm we have rich inner lives - but from the perspective of the able-bodied, who in an ableist society are the prime subjects while we are only objects to receive their gawking, this is foremost how we are perceived - as aberrations, as walking things-that-should-not-be who reveal that life and humanity's place within it is not as strictly logical or tidy as our stridently materialistic society likes to think at the expense of all other modes of being. An ostensibly supernatural intrusion on a "natural" framework, basically.
But on what basis is our "rebirths" as sickly beings an unnatural process, any different from what befalls all other matter in the universe? I think the crux of the problem is that abled society isolates and otherizes disabled people because we are a visible mirror of the fact that in life decay and transformation (which are of apiece) are inevitable and unavoidable, and if there's anything our species does poorly with, it's reckoning with the fact we aren't and never could be permanent selves, as I said above. In western society, one is expected to be a completely self-sufficient Owner of Themselves with unconditional freedom to employ their individual wills unfettered, and this is the basis for which the average westerner perceives personhood - and at this point I probably don't need to explain why disability makes uneasy this civilization-pervading worldview. The disabled's nature as elastic and contradictory beings who are often at odds with our own body - the one thing most humans will unanimously understand as "their own"- threatens the idea that we "own" anything, as we observe that there are those among us who can't even own permanent, fixed bodies/selves. This creates another uncanny sensation in the onlooker, because in the physically belabored they see what could and very well will happen to their own body eventually, because it's not like we're really any different from anyone or anything else, which is knowledge the abled person subconsciously realizes but suppresses out of fear. If the abled were to be honest with themselves, they would accept that our existence as sick people means their all-or-nothing libertarian view of personhood is flawed and open to challenge as any other view, but to actually interrogate this on a societal level would necessitate allocating resources and education toward accommodating people living within different modes of reality from the status quo and that would take so much effort for a society mired in the illusion of unconditional self-sufficiency that it would cause complete upheaval. Can't have that, of course, so the disabled's conditions (literally and existentially) are then perceived as Our Own Fault, and our experiences with reality are at best isolated, caricaturized, and essentialized as being unreal or impossible (just ask any CFS patient, hyperacusis sufferer, or bedbound disabled person who needs online interaction to have any social presence at all), and at worst, we are actively tortured and eugenicized because that is what the fear of the Other ultimately necessitates in the ignorant and fearful.
Apologies for getting about as bitter in that last paragraph as Ligotti does in every single one in this book, but I see it as a necessary anger in a world in which the ill are treated as either vermin by the right or collateral damage by the left, and as invisible by everyone in between. What about Ligotti and his antinatalism itself then?? I am a spiritual optimist as much as I am a material pessimist, so I guess my reaction to Ligotti's thesis here is yet another way in which I inhabit that half-life state familiar to the sick. I largely agree with his premises on the futility of absolutely everything but I do not see it as intrinsically negative and horrific, and I also principally agree that life is mostly suffering, but he doesn't really seem interested in interrogating the times when it isn't other than a very all-or-nothing dismissal of any positive interpretation of chaos. I understand this is supposed to be a single-minded tract to serve a primary purpose, but that mindset just isn't really for me. Ligotti also makes wayyyyy too many confident assertions that animal consciousness is somehow fundamentally different enough from humans that they're in a different class entirely, which is obviously not intrinsically wrong but he falls back on this idea as a crutch (to support the idea that humanity's self-awareness uniquely torments us) to the point where it sometimes feel like he doesn't register animals as conscious or emotional at all, which is obviously just untrue from any scientific or philosophical perspective worth its salt. Again, I understand the point is to underscore his greater goal with this book so he probably didn't see it as necessary to have an entire section clarifying this position, but such charged philosophical inquiries as "how non-human animals experience suffering" deserve more consideration than to be used as throwaway tools to back up a thesis and nothing more.
Still, as someone who has also long been accustomed to the bleak attitudes Ligotti illustrates here, it was nice to see someone just so plainly and bluntly lay the ideas out without having to worry about listening to a torrent of platitudes and toxic positivity in response to our justified complaints. As in his stories, he's also insanely readable - the "late-night chat with a neurotic professor" voice he uses can sometimes be so stylized that it obstructs his arguments, but it's just overall a lot of fun, and as always his tone is suffused with icy humor that really appeals to me and prevents even his darkest passages from feeling too emotionally rending. Kinda says a lot about me that I'm the type who finds this and his writing in general more cozy than distressing lol. Also naturally serves as an excellent primer piece for both philosophical pessimism and supernatural horror writers, with plenty of interesting names and citations to be mined from here, and this work as a whole gives further context to Ligotti's entire project fiction-wise, and on that basis is worth a read for any fans of his or just people interested in his writing.
"A sibling term of supernatural horror is the "uncanny". Both terms are pertinent in reference to nonhuman forms that disport human qualities. Both may also refer to seemingly animate forms that are not what they seem, as with the undead - monstrosities of paradox, things that are neither one thing nor another, or, more uncannily, and more horrifically supernaturally, things that are discovered to be two things at once. . . Such is the motif of supernatural horror: Something terrible in its being comes forward and makes its claim as a shareholder in our reality, or what we think is our reality and ours alone." (Ligotti)
The aspect of being unsettled is one that anyone who has been diagnosed with a chronic or terminal illness will be familiar with on some level. One day you are of apiece with society and the able-bodied because you ostensibly fit into the folds of socially agreed-upon standards of health and "normal living", then the next you are diagnosed with an absurd condition that unravels everything you thought you knew and are left adrift among a world that is now alien and, apparently, confrontational to your existence - a reality that you only have to affirm by your interactions with the average person, who now either reacts to the particulars of your existence with pity at best and active skepticism or loathing at worst. You may have been aware in some dim way of life's difficulties before, but never had your supposing of inherent equanimity between the body and the self (and between the self and society) been thrown so starkly into question, to the point where this polarization that you never before had to think about (at least not at such length) is now suddenly the central predicament of your life. As Johanna Hedva says in their excellent essay collection "How to Tell When We Will Die", the experience of a chronic diagnosis is marked by the feeling of "the everything-ness of ourselves pierced by the everything-ness of our environment", and this is a sensation that might be the ultimate in uncanniness - the forcible recognition that you are now somehow different from others and the rest of the world while inhabiting a similar appearance on the surface, yet one whose specific traumas are not relatable or often even comprehensible to the overwhelming majority of those around you.
One of the highlights of the book is Ligotti's citation of psychologist Ernst Jentsch, who uses the example of epilepsy to illustrate how the uncanny is embodied in the disabled. Jentsch argues that the general public's "experience of ordinary life is the relative psychical harmony in which their mental functions generally stand in relation to each other, even if moderate deviations from this equilibrium make their appearance occasionally in almost all of us: this behavior. . . constitutes man's individuality and provides the foundation for our judgment of it". With disability, such as epilepsy, the perceived harmony between our mental functions is more boldly blown apart and revealed to be built on flimsy foundations (bodies that are susceptible to disease and decay), which then effects our entire conceptualization of a sense of Self, which we (sub)consciously relate to the state of our bodies (however erroneous that relation may be in reality). We believe ourselves to be permanent, solid beings in a unified society and it is the chaos of a chronically ill body that more plainly and aggressively confronts us with the fact that these ideas are only comforting illusions. ". . . This relative psychical harmony happens markedly to be disturbed in the spectator and if the situation does not seem trivial or comic, the consequence of an unimportant incident, or if it is not quite familiar (like an alcohol intoxication, for example), then the dark knowledge dawns on the unschooled observer that mechanical processes are taking place in that which he was previously used to regarding as a unified psyche" (Jentsch)
In other words, this book made me realize that the fear of disability could be the basis from which all supernatural horror in fiction springs, even if only implicitly. At one point Ligotti illustrates the fundamental uncanniness of the undead beings that populate horror fiction, such as vampires and zombies, which are "uncanny in themselves because they once were human but have undergone a terrible rebirth and become mechanisms with a single function - to survive for survival's sake." To me as someone whose life was profoundly changed on all levels by my disability, my experience was nothing if not a terrible rebirth who revealed a primary purpose, which was to survive for the sake of survival. Of course, this is not all I nor any disabled person is - actually bother asking any of us, and we will all affirm we have rich inner lives - but from the perspective of the able-bodied, who in an ableist society are the prime subjects while we are only objects to receive their gawking, this is foremost how we are perceived - as aberrations, as walking things-that-should-not-be who reveal that life and humanity's place within it is not as strictly logical or tidy as our stridently materialistic society likes to think at the expense of all other modes of being. An ostensibly supernatural intrusion on a "natural" framework, basically.
But on what basis is our "rebirths" as sickly beings an unnatural process, any different from what befalls all other matter in the universe? I think the crux of the problem is that abled society isolates and otherizes disabled people because we are a visible mirror of the fact that in life decay and transformation (which are of apiece) are inevitable and unavoidable, and if there's anything our species does poorly with, it's reckoning with the fact we aren't and never could be permanent selves, as I said above. In western society, one is expected to be a completely self-sufficient Owner of Themselves with unconditional freedom to employ their individual wills unfettered, and this is the basis for which the average westerner perceives personhood - and at this point I probably don't need to explain why disability makes uneasy this civilization-pervading worldview. The disabled's nature as elastic and contradictory beings who are often at odds with our own body - the one thing most humans will unanimously understand as "their own"- threatens the idea that we "own" anything, as we observe that there are those among us who can't even own permanent, fixed bodies/selves. This creates another uncanny sensation in the onlooker, because in the physically belabored they see what could and very well will happen to their own body eventually, because it's not like we're really any different from anyone or anything else, which is knowledge the abled person subconsciously realizes but suppresses out of fear. If the abled were to be honest with themselves, they would accept that our existence as sick people means their all-or-nothing libertarian view of personhood is flawed and open to challenge as any other view, but to actually interrogate this on a societal level would necessitate allocating resources and education toward accommodating people living within different modes of reality from the status quo and that would take so much effort for a society mired in the illusion of unconditional self-sufficiency that it would cause complete upheaval. Can't have that, of course, so the disabled's conditions (literally and existentially) are then perceived as Our Own Fault, and our experiences with reality are at best isolated, caricaturized, and essentialized as being unreal or impossible (just ask any CFS patient, hyperacusis sufferer, or bedbound disabled person who needs online interaction to have any social presence at all), and at worst, we are actively tortured and eugenicized because that is what the fear of the Other ultimately necessitates in the ignorant and fearful.
Apologies for getting about as bitter in that last paragraph as Ligotti does in every single one in this book, but I see it as a necessary anger in a world in which the ill are treated as either vermin by the right or collateral damage by the left, and as invisible by everyone in between. What about Ligotti and his antinatalism itself then?? I am a spiritual optimist as much as I am a material pessimist, so I guess my reaction to Ligotti's thesis here is yet another way in which I inhabit that half-life state familiar to the sick. I largely agree with his premises on the futility of absolutely everything but I do not see it as intrinsically negative and horrific, and I also principally agree that life is mostly suffering, but he doesn't really seem interested in interrogating the times when it isn't other than a very all-or-nothing dismissal of any positive interpretation of chaos. I understand this is supposed to be a single-minded tract to serve a primary purpose, but that mindset just isn't really for me. Ligotti also makes wayyyyy too many confident assertions that animal consciousness is somehow fundamentally different enough from humans that they're in a different class entirely, which is obviously not intrinsically wrong but he falls back on this idea as a crutch (to support the idea that humanity's self-awareness uniquely torments us) to the point where it sometimes feel like he doesn't register animals as conscious or emotional at all, which is obviously just untrue from any scientific or philosophical perspective worth its salt. Again, I understand the point is to underscore his greater goal with this book so he probably didn't see it as necessary to have an entire section clarifying this position, but such charged philosophical inquiries as "how non-human animals experience suffering" deserve more consideration than to be used as throwaway tools to back up a thesis and nothing more.
Still, as someone who has also long been accustomed to the bleak attitudes Ligotti illustrates here, it was nice to see someone just so plainly and bluntly lay the ideas out without having to worry about listening to a torrent of platitudes and toxic positivity in response to our justified complaints. As in his stories, he's also insanely readable - the "late-night chat with a neurotic professor" voice he uses can sometimes be so stylized that it obstructs his arguments, but it's just overall a lot of fun, and as always his tone is suffused with icy humor that really appeals to me and prevents even his darkest passages from feeling too emotionally rending. Kinda says a lot about me that I'm the type who finds this and his writing in general more cozy than distressing lol. Also naturally serves as an excellent primer piece for both philosophical pessimism and supernatural horror writers, with plenty of interesting names and citations to be mined from here, and this work as a whole gives further context to Ligotti's entire project fiction-wise, and on that basis is worth a read for any fans of his or just people interested in his writing.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,160 reviews