Aung Sett Kyaw Min's Reviews > The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

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.