The Conspiracy Against the Human Race – A Contrivance of Horror – Thomas Ligotti
The title is maybe unlucky nowadays because it reminds us of conspiracism.
Also see The Last Messiah by Zapffe.
Look at your body – A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings.
The Dhammapada
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Introduction: Of Pessimism and Paradox
In his study The Nature of Evil (1931), Radoslav A. Tsanoff cites a terse reflection set down by the German philosopher Julius Bahnsen in 1847, when he was seventeen years old. “Man is a self-conscious Nothing,” wrote Bahnsen. Whether one considers these words to be juvenile or precocious, they belong to an ancient tradition of scorn for our species and its aspirations. All the same, the reigning sentiments on the human venture normally fall between qualified approval and loud-mouthed braggadocio. As a rule, anyone desirous of an audience, or even a place in society, might profit from the following motto: “If you can’t say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.”
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Freaks of Salvation
Down-Going
An epidemic of depression would quiet those chattering voices in our heads, stopping life dead in its tracks. Providentially, we are endowed with enough manic enthusiasm to keep us plowing onward and making more of ourselves, bragging all the while about what billions of years of evolution have bidden every species to do anyway.
Zapffe, Schopenhauer, and Lovecraft fared well enough without surrendering themselves to life-affirming hysterics. This is a risky thing for anyone to do, but it is even more risky for writers, because anti-vital convictions will demote their work to a lower archive than that of wordsmiths who capitulate to positive thinking, or at least follow the maxim of being equivocal when speaking of our species. Everyone wants to keep the door open on the possibility that our lives are not MALIGNANTLY USELESS [sic]. Even highly educated readers do not want to be told that their lives are an evolutionary contingency—and nothing else—and that meaning is not what people think it means.
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Futurephilia
And what difference would it make to retard our progress to nowhere? Zapffe reviled technological advancements and the discoveries to which they led, since those interested in such things would be cheated of the distraction of finding them out for themselves at whatever pace they chose. Every human activity is a tack for killing time, and it seemed criminal to him that people should have their time already killed for them by explorers, inventors, and innovators of every stripe. Zapffe himself reserved his leisure hours for that most purposive time-killer—mountain climbing.
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The Cult of Grinning Martyrs
Institutionalized
In the workaday world, complainers will not go far. When someone asks how you are doing, you had better be wise enough to reply, “I can’t complain.” If you do complain, even justifiably, people will stop asking how you are doing. Complaining will not help you succeed and influence people. You can complain to your physician or psychiatrist because they are paid to hear you complain. But you cannot complain to your boss or your friends, if you have any. You will soon be dismissed from your job and dropped from the social register. Then you will be left alone with your complaints and no one to listen to them. Perhaps then the message will sink into your head: If you do not feel good enough for long enough, you should act as if you do and even think as if you do. That is the way to get yourself to feel good enough for long enough and stop you from complaining for good, as any self-improvement book can affirm. But should you not improve, someone must assume the blame. And that someone will be you. This is monumentally so if you are a pessimist or a depressive. Should you conclude that life is objectionable or that nothing matters—do not waste our time with your nonsense. We are on our way to the future, and the philosophically disheartening or the emotionally impaired are not going to hinder our progress. If you cannot say something positive, or at least equivocal, keep it to yourself. Pessimists and depressives need not apply for a position in the enterprise of life. You have two choices: Start thinking the way God and your society want you to think or be forsaken by all. The decision is yours, since you are a free agent who can choose to rejoin our fabricated world or stubbornly insist on … what? That we should mollycoddle non-positive thinkers like you or rethink how the whole world transacts its business? That we should start over from scratch? Or that we should go extinct? Try to be realistic. We did the best we could with the tools we had. After all, we are only human, as we like to say. Our world may not be in accord with nature’s way, but it did develop organically according to our consciousness, which delivered us to a lofty prominence over the Creation. The whole thing just took on a life of its own, and nothing is going to stop it anytime soon. There can be no starting over and no going back. No major readjustments are up for a vote. And no melancholic head-case is going to bad-mouth our catastrophe. The universe was created by the Creator, damn it. We live in a country we love and that loves us back. We have families and friends and jobs that make it all worthwhile. We are somebodies, not a bunch of nobodies without names or numbers or retirement plans. None of this is going to be overhauled by a thought criminal who contends that the world is not doubleplusgood and never will be. Our lives may not be unflawed—that would deny us a better future to work toward—but if this charade is good enough for us, then it should be good enough for you. So if you cannot get your mind right, try walking away. You will find no place to go and no one who will have you. You will find only the same old trap the world over. Lighten up or leave us alone. You will never get us to give up our hopes. You will never get us to wake up from our dreams. We are not contradictory beings whose continuance only worsens our plight as mutants who embody the contorted logic of a paradox. Such opinions will not be accredited by institutions of authority or by the middling run of humanity. To lay it on the line, whatever thoughts may enter your chemically imbalanced brain are invalid, inauthentic, or whatever dismissive term we care to hang on you, who are only “one of those people.” So start pretending that you feel good enough for long enough, stop your complaining, and get back in line. If you are not as strong as Samson—that no-good suicide and slaughterer of Philistines—then get loaded to the gills and return to the trap. Keep your medicine cabinet and your liquor cabinet well stocked, just like the rest of us. Come on and join the party. No pessimists or depressives invited. Do you think we are morons? We know all about those complaints of yours. The only difference is that we have sense enough and feel good enough for long enough not to speak of them. Keep your powder dry and your brains blocked. Our shibboleth: “Up the Conspiracy and down with Consciousness.”
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Disillusionment
Speaking in terms of his time, and ours, Zapffe writes in “The Last Messiah” of our rising “spiritual unemployment.”
The absence of naturally (biologically) based spiritual activity shows up, for example, in the pervasive recourse to distraction (entertainment, sport, radio—the “rhythm of the times”). Terms for anchoring are not as favorable—all the inherited, collective systems of anchorings are punctured by criticism, and anxiety, disgust, confusion, despair leaking in through the rifts (“corpses in the cargo”). Communism and psychoanalysis, however incommensurable otherwise, both attempt (as Communism also has a spiritual reflection) by novel means to vary the old escape anew; applying, respectively, violence and guile to make humans biologically fit by ensnaring their critical surplus of cognition. The idea, in either case, is uncannily logical. But again, it cannot yield a final solution. Though a deliberate degeneration to a more viable nadir may certainly save the species in the short run, it will by its nature be unable to find peace in such resignation, or indeed find any peace at all…
If we continue on these considerations to the bitter end, then the conclusion is not in doubt. As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change. As the numbers mount and the spiritual atmosphere thickens, the techniques of protection must assume an increasingly brutal character.
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Autopsy on a Puppet: An Anatomy of the Supernatural
Endgame
The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scandalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravings—the complete gamut of agitations—and finally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or simmer in the phantasmagorias[🡕] that molest our dreaming minds.
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Mutation
As a fact, we cannot give suffering precedence in either our individual or collective lives. We have to get on with things, and those who give precedence to suffering will be left behind.
They fetter us with their sniveling. We have someplace to go and must believe we can get there, wherever that may be. And to conceive that there is a “brotherhood of suffering between everything alive” would disable us from getting anywhere. We are preoccupied with the good life, and step by step are working toward a better life. What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next—as if we were playing a board game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as 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 and the human puppet.
( Ed. This refers back to a previous part where Ligotti highlights two elements often found in horror literature and cinema—zombies and living dolls—as examples of paradoxes that frighten us. The reason they terrify us is that they mirror the horror at the core of our own condition: we are self-aware minds trapped in organic bodies, slaves to determinism and biology. People who are overly self-aware, psychiatric patients, schizoid individuals, psychopaths and sociopaths, pessimistic philosophers, disturb “normal people” just as much as zombies in horror films, because they reveal to the ignorant the terrifying reality of things. But Ligotti takes the metaphor further and uses these two images to also describe the opposite types of people: the concept of the zombie can also indicate someone unconscious of the conspiracy. In fact, later on (in this document too), he describes the strategy of “zombification,” whereby people try to distract themselves from the dreadful truth of the human condition by limiting their capacity for thought as much as possible. Similarly, the concept of the “human puppet” is used both for those who have attained excessive awareness, thus becoming a walking contradiction and condemned to a state of existential terror, and for those who live unconsciously, like happy automatons. )
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Zombification
As adumbrated above, Zapffe arrived at two central determinations regarding humanity’s “biological predicament.” The first was that consciousness had overreached the point of being a sufferable property of our species, and to minimize this problem we must minimize our consciousness. From the many and various ways this may be done, Zapffe chose to hone in on four principal strategies.
- Isolation. So that we may live without going into a free-fall of trepidation, we isolate the dire facts of being alive by relegating them to a remote compartment of our minds. They are the lunatic family members in the attic whose existence we deny in a conspiracy of silence.
- Anchoring. To stabilize our lives in the tempestuous waters of chaos, we conspire to anchor them in metaphysical and institutional “verities”—God, Morality, Natural Law, Country, Family—that inebriate us with a sense of being official, authentic, and safe in our beds.
ed. I would also add that the psychological mechanism of “compartmentalization” is what allows e.g. a scientist to be rational during his job and then religious once at home with the family. - Distraction. To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors, we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous trash. The most operant method for furthering the conspiracy, it is in continuous employ and demands only that people keep their eyes on the ball—or their television sets, their government’s foreign policy, their science projects, their careers, their place in society or the universe, etc.
- Sublimation. That we might annul a paralyzing stage fright at what may happen to even the soundest bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by making an open display of them. In the Zapffean sense, sublimation is the rarest technique utilized for conspiring against the human race. Putting into play both deviousness and skill, this is what thinkers and artistic types do when they recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in which the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a stylized and removed manner as entertainment. In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types confect products that provide an escape from our suffering by a bogus simulation of it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance. Zapffe uses “The Last Messiah” to showcase how a literary-philosophical composition cannot perturb its creator or anyone else with the severity of true-to-life horrors but only provide a pale representation of these horrors, just as a King Lear’s weeping for his dead daughter Cordelia cannot rend its audience with the throes of the real thing.
By watchful practice of the above connivances, we may keep ourselves from scrutinizing too assiduously the startling and dreadful mishaps that may befall us. These must come as a surprise, for if we expected them then the conspiracy could not work its magic. Naturally, conspiracy theories seldom pique the curiosity of “right-minded” individuals and are met with disbelief and denial when they do. Best to immunize your consciousness from any thoughts that are startling and dreadful so that we can all go on conspiring to survive and reproduce as paradoxical beings—puppets that can walk and talk all by themselves. At worst keep your startling and dreadful thoughts to yourself. Hearken well: “None of us wants to hear spoken the exact anxieties we keep locked up inside ourselves. Smother that urge to go spreading news of your pain and nightmares around town. Bury your dead but don’t leave a trace. And be sure to get on with things or we will get on without you.”
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Undoing II
The second of Zapffe’s two central determinations—that our species should belay reproducing itself—immediately brings to mind a cast of characters from theological history known as Gnostics. […]
In another orbit from the theologies of either Gnosticism or Catholicism, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Philipp Mainländer (born Phillip Batz) also envisaged non-coital existence as the surest path to redemption for the sin of being congregants of this world. Our extinction, however, would not be the outcome of an unnatural chastity, but would be a naturally occurring phenomenon once we had evolved far enough to apprehend our existence as so hopelessly pointless and unsatisfactory that we would no longer be subject to generative promptings. Paradoxically, this evolution toward life-sickness would be promoted by a mounting happiness among us. This happiness would be quickened by our following Mainländer’s evangelical guidelines for achieving such things as universal justice and charity. Only by securing every good that could be gotten in life, Mainländer figured, could we know that they were not as good as nonexistence.
[…]
As one who had a special plan for the human race, Mainländer was not a modest thinker. “We are not everyday people,” he once wrote in the royal third-person, “and must pay dearly for dining at the table of the gods.” To top it off, suicide ran in his family.
[…]
Mainländer was confident that the Will-to-die he believed would well up in humanity had been spiritually grafted into us by a god who, in the beginning, masterminded his own quietus. It seems that existence was a horror to god. Unfortunately, god was impervious to the depredations of time. This being so, his only means to get free of himself was by a divine form of suicide.
God’s plan to suicide himself could not work, though, as long as he existed as a unified entity outside of space-time and matter. Seeking to nullify his oneness so that he could be delivered into nothingness, he shattered himself—Big Bang-like—into the time-bound fragments of the universe, that is, all those objects and organisms that have been accumulating here and there for billions of years. In Mainländer’s philosophy, “god knew that he could change from a state of super-reality into non-being only through the development of a real world of multiformity.” Employing this strategy, he excluded himself from being. “God is dead,” wrote Mainländer, “and his death was the life of the world.” Once the great individuation had been initiated, the momentum of its creator’s self-annihilation would continue until everything became exhausted by its own existence, which for human beings meant that the faster they learned that happiness was not as good as they thought it would be, the happier they would be to die out.
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As the average conscious mortal knows, Christianity and Buddhism are all for leaving this world behind, with their leave-taking being for destinations unknown and impossible to conceive. For Mainländer, these destinations did not exist. His forecast was that one day our will to survive in this life or any other will be universally extinguished by a conscious will to die and stay dead, after the example of the Creator. From the standpoint of Mainländer’s philosophy, Zapffe’s Last Messiah would not be an unwelcome sage but a crowning force of the post-divine era. Rather than resist our end, as Mainländer concludes, we will come to see that “the knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom.” Elsewhere the philosopher states, “Life is hell, and the sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell.”
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Pessimism II
In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), [Albert] Camus represents the unattainable goal of the title figure as an apologetic for going on with life rather than ending it. As he insists in his discussion of this gruesome parable, “We must imagine Sisyphus as happy” as he rolls his boulder to the top of mountain from which it always tumbles down again and again and again to his despair. […] In the end, though, his insistence that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy is as impractical as it is feculent. […] Camus may have been able to assume this view of life before his life ended in a vehicular misadventure, but he must have been jesting to pose it as a possibility or a duty for the world.
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Life-Principles
A complex and contradictory figure, […] Lovecraft often seemed to be on the fence when it came to his convictions about the value of existence. In a letter to Edwin Baird, the first editor of Weird Tales, he penned some remarks that express a univocal stand by a pessimist who is estranged from all solace known to ordinary folk. These merit quotation at length.
Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view. Wild and “different” as they may consider their quasi-weird products, it remains a fact that the bizarrerie is on the surface alone; and that basically they reiterate the same old conventional values and motives and perspectives. Good and evil, teleological illusion, sugary sentiment, anthropocentric psychology—the usual superficial stock in trade, and all shot through with the eternal and inescapable commonplace… Who ever wrote a story from the point of view that man is a blemish on the cosmos, who ought to be eradicated? As an example—a young man I know lately told me that he means to write a story about a scientist who wishes to dominate the earth, and who to accomplish his ends trains and overdevelops germs … and leads armies of them in the manner of the Egyptian plagues. I told him that although this theme has promise, it is made utterly commonplace by assigning the scientist a normal motive. There is nothing outré about wanting to conquer the earth; Alexander, Napoleon, and Wilhelm II wanted to do that. Instead, I told my friend, he should conceive a man with a morbid, frantic, shuddering hatred of the life-principle itself, who wishes to extirpate from the planet every trace of biological organism, animal and vegetable alike, including himself. That would be tolerably original. But after all, originality lies with the author. One can’t write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses theme and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror—for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.
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Repression
These mechanisms are related to the psychoanalytic theory of unconscious repression, although they are also perilously accessible to the conscious mind. And when they are accessed, no one can concede them with impunity. Not overweight persons or tobacco users, who must play dumb when they are scarfing down a cupcake or smoking a cigarette. Not soldiers fighting a war, who must not be aware they are risking their lives and limbs for a rationalization—their country, their god, etc. Not anyone who is going to suffer and die (that is, everyone), who will not voluntarily confess to playing the same old games for as long as possible rather than be haunted by thoughts of mortality and the unpleasantness that may precede it. And definitely not artists, who keep their aesthetic distance for fear of being hamstrung by the realities they “bring to life.”
Once the facts that repressional mechanisms hide are accessed, they must be excised from our memory—or new repressional mechanisms must replace the old—so that we may continue to be protected by our cocoon of lies. If this is not done, we will be whimpering misereres morning, noon, and night instead of chanting that day by day, in every way, we are getting better and better. Although we may sometimes admit to the guileful means we use to keep us doing what we do, this is only a higher level of self-deception and paradox, not evidence that we stand on the heights of some meta-reality where we are really real. We say we know what is in store for us in this life, and we do. But we do not know. We cannot if we are to survive and multiply.
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Effectively, then, Smith is allied with Zapffe’s position that the human being
performs …a more or less self-conscious repression [Zapffe’s emphasis] of its damning surplus of consciousness. The process is virtually constant during our waking and active hours, and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living.
Psychiatry even works on the assumption that the “healthy” and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. Depression, “fear of life,” refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter. Often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of anti-biological tendencies. It is not the soul being sick, but its protection failing, or else being rejected because it is experienced—correctly—as a betrayal of ego’s highest potential.
Even though Zapffe regarded psychoanalysis as another form of anchoring, whether or not a repressional mechanism is accessible to our consciousness or is wholly unconscious seems a trivial point. For both Smith and Zapffe, they lead to the same thing: occlusion of the real. Another thing Smith and Zapffe share is that their ideas about humankind are not scientifically verifiable and will not be for some time to come, if ever. And without proof on a platter, anyone whose ideas are unpalatable to scientists, philosophers, and average mortals must expect to be poorly heard.
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Uncanniness II
(on the movies Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter’s The Thing)
[…] Due to these transformations, everyone who has not been taken by the Body Snatchers suffers from two appalling uncertainties. One is that any other person may not be what they seem to be—human. The other is that they themselves will also be transformed once they go to sleep. But unlike becoming a vampire or a zombie, neither being a desirable state of being, our transformation into Body Snatchers, which, despite the pluralization in the film title, seem to be parts of a hive rather than uniquely individuated entities, does not look too bad, objectively speaking. Once absorbed by the alien power, the converted lose all the qualities they had as humans except for one—that of contentment, or happiness if you like. They become quietists in their existence, which in the film appears the last thing that human beings want, preferring the agitations of the life they know. This reaction is understandable. No one wants to be other than they are, or think they are. That is a fate worse than death: the transformation in which you stop being you. And better to die than to live in an assimilated condition, even one that is permanently collected and reassuring rather than vulnerable to the startling and dreadful. Our sense of the uncanny is too ingrained in us as beings that may not be what we think we are, but who will hold on for dear life to survive and reproduce as our own species and not that of some alien power.
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Actors
Of course, there are rare cases when a wrongdoer’s malfeasance is determined to be the result of determining forces. Then free will and moral responsibility are waived, and the defendant is either sent to a psychiatric hospital rather than a prison or gets off scot-free because a certain judge and jury in a certain society temporarily became strong determinists without a sense of moral realism, thereby turning the human image of a defendant into a puppet image. But this is highly irregular. In the normal course of events, both determinists and indeterminists are one in promoting some kind of operative morality. As guardians of our morale, they feel moral realism to be a necessary truth, whether it is objectively real, as it is to indeterminists, or subjectively “real,” as it is to determinists. Without this truth, or “truth,” we could not go on living as we always have and believe that being alive is all right.
It does not seem wildly improbable that determinations have been made in our psyches that make some people determinists and others indeterminists. If we could only know how these determinations work, we would be able to answer the only interesting question in the debate pitting free will against determinism: Why argue for one side or the other? The answer to this question would abort all rivalry in this matter, since it would bring to light the reason why any philosopher would engage in a conflict more vain than most in his discipline. But should we ever get an answer to this question, the repercussions would far override matters of moral realism or “realism.” Really, there would only be one repercussion: to reduce all philosophical proclivities to the psychology of the individuals who exhibit them. In his Metaphilosophy and Free Will (1996), Richard Double speaks of analytic philosophers whose writing is protective of free will.
Although this type of free will writing pays dividends in terms of precision, it has its disadvantages. First, we may lose sight of the philosophical forest for the technical trees. Second, and following from the first, we may collect psychological consolation at the expense of candor. By submerging ourselves in the nuances of theories, we may avert our attention from the big, scary questions. An attention to detail can be an exercise in bad faith when it uses up our time and energies so that we do not bother to question whether what we are trying to do is possible. Meticulous precision can enable us to remain happy and engaged at the expense of averting our eyes from the disturbing big picture.
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Impersonation
Within the hierarchy of fabrications that compose our lives—families, countries, gods—the self incontestably ranks highest. Just below the self is the family, which has proven itself more durable than national or ethnic affiliations, with these in turn outranking god-figures for their staying power. So any progress toward the salvation of humankind will probably begin from the bottom—when our gods have been devalued to the status of refrigerator magnets or lawn ornaments. Following the death rattle of deities, it would appear that nations or ethnic communities are next in line for the boneyard. Only after fealty to countries, gods, and families has been shucked off can we even think about coming to grips with the least endangered of fabrications—the self. However, this hierarchy may change in time as science makes inroads regarding the question of selfhood, which, if the findings are negative, could reverse the progression, with the extinction of the self foretelling that of families, national and ethnic affiliations, and gods. After all, the quintessential sequence by which we free ourselves from our selves and our institutions is still that depicted in the Buddha legend. Born a prince, so the story goes, the nascent Enlightened One, Siddhartha Gautama, embarked on a quest to neutralize his ego by first leaving behind his family, gods, and sociopolitical station—all in one stroke. But Buddha’s way requires a near inhuman dedication, and few of us have that kind of stamina. This being so, a speedy and efficient breakdown of fabrications having a worldwide ambit seems remote without the intercession of science, which could at some future date provide a vaccination against the development of “selves” after models already in use to wipe out certain diseases.
Perhaps the only matter of interest about the self is this: Whatever makes us think that we are what we think we are lies in the fact that we have consciousness, which gives us a sense of being somebody, specifically a human somebody, whatever that may be, since we do not have a definition of “human” on which there is universal agreement. But we do agree that, if only in practice, we are all real-live selves, since we are all self-conscious. And once we have passed through every door that qualifies our selves in some way—be it by name, nationality, occupation, gender, or shoe size—we then stand before the door of consciousness—parent of all horrors. And that is all there is to our existence.
No creature caged in a zoo even knows what it is to exist, nor does it crow about being superior to another kind of thing, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral. As for us humans, we reek of our sense of being special. Those hailed as the most conscious among us—the ones needful of a refined type of brainwashing—have made investigations into what it means to be human. Their divergent ramblings on this subject keep our brains buzzing while our bodies go the way of surviving and reproducing—being alive that is, since we do not especially consider the alternative. That being human might mean something very strange and awful, something quite uncanny, is not given a passing thought. If it were, who knows what would happen to us? We could disappear in a puff of smoke or fall through a mirror that has nothing on the other side. Naturally, such possibilities do not lift our spirits the way we need them to be lifted if we are to continue to live as we have all these years.
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Unpersons
In his novel translated as Moment of Freedom, which was published ten years before his suicide in 1976, the Norwegian author and cultural critic Jens Bjørneboe wrote that “he who hasn’t experienced a full depression alone and over a long period of time—he is a child.” Aside from being indemonstrable in its validity, Bjørneboe’s bilious discharge is also too restrictive in esteeming his personal class of suffering as the sole rite of passage to maturity as a conscious individual. Depression is only one of the psychopathologies that could be selected to make the bombastic claim that those who have not been affected by it in full and over a long period of time belong on a playground or in a playpen. But it is serviceable as an example of a psychological disease with which most people have had some experience in one or more of its varieties.
The statistically prevailing form of this disease is “atypical depression.” Less common and more deadly is “melancholic depression.” But whatever family name a given case of depression goes by, it has the same effect: sabotaging the network of emotions that make it seem as if you and your world mean something in some meaningful way. It is then you discover that your “old self” is not the inviolable thing you thought it was, nor is the rest of your “old reality.” Both are as frail as our bodies and may be perforated as readily, deflating all that we thought meaningful about ourselves and our world.
What meaning our lives may seem to have is the work of a relatively well-constituted emotional system. As consciousness gives us the sense of being persons, our psychophysiology is responsible for making us into personalities who believe the existential game to be worth playing. We may have memories that are unlike those of anyone else, but without the proper emotions to liven those memories they might as well reside in a computer file as disconnected bits of data that never unite into a tailor-made individual for whom things seem to mean something. You can conceptualize that your life has meaning, but if you do not feel that meaning then your conceptualization is meaningless and you are nobody. The only matters of weight in our lives are colored by rainbows or auroras of regulated emotion which give one a sense of that “old self.” But a major depression causes your emotions to evaporate, reducing you to a shell of a person standing alone in a drab landscape. Emotions are the substrate for the illusion of being a somebody among somebodies as well as for the substance we see, or think we see, in the world. Not knowing this ground-level truth of human existence is the equivalent of knowing nothing at all.
Although varying in intensity and nature, our emotions must seem ever-stable in their concatenation, just as a mixed drink must be made with specific ingredients in the same relative amounts so that they may blend into a vodka martini or a piña colada. United, our emotions ostensibly form a master self to which anomalous secondary selves may be compared for quality. Even as they are ever trading places or running together within us, clearly cut or amorphous, the experience of these biological twitterings makes it nearly impossible to doubt that they will stay with us as far as we can see into the future. Ask any couple who cannot imagine being without each other, a vital fiction without which, besides the fact that it often leads to procreation, no society could exist. It would have no reason to do so, because reason is merely the mouthpiece of emotion. Hume, who specialized in detaining his readers with obvious but unspoken realities, wrote in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) that “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” To free reason from this slavery would mean our becoming rationalists without a cause, paralytics crippled by mentation.
In speaking of depression and its defining effect of driving its victim to the point of caring nothing for anything, the American talk-show host Dick Cavett once remarked that “when you’re downed by this affliction, if there were a curative magic wand on the table eight feet away, it would be too much trouble to go over and pick it up.” No better elucidation has ever been proffered vis-à -vis the uselessness of reason in the absence of emotion. In the recumbence of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is nowhere to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know. Without meaning-charged emotions keeping your brain on the straight and narrow, you would lose your balance and fall into an abyss of lucidity. And for a conscious being, lucidity is a cocktail without ingredients, a crystal clear concoction that will leave you hung over with reality. In perfect knowledge there is only perfect nothingness, which is perfectly painful if what you want is meaning in your life.
William S. Burroughs said it rightly in his journals. Using his streetwise voice, he wrote: ”Love? What is it? The most natural painkiller what there is.” You may become curious, though, about what happened to that painkiller should depression take hold and expose your love—whatever its object—as just one of the many intoxicants that muddled your consciousness of the human tragedy. You may also want to take a second look at whatever struck you as a person, place, or thing of “beauty,” a quality that lives only in the neurotransmitters of the beholder. (Aesthetics? What is it? A matter for those not depressed enough to care nothing about anything, that is, those who determine almost everything that is supposed to matter to us. Protest as you like, neither art nor an aesthetic view of life are distractions granted to everyone.) In depression, all that once seemed beautiful, or even startling and dreadful, is nothing to you. The image of a cloud-crossed moon is not in itself a purveyor of anything mysterious or mystical; it is only an ensemble of objects represented to us by our optical apparatus and perhaps processed as a memory.
This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.
Of course, individuals may recover from depression. But in that event they had better keep their consciousness of what they went through at heel. Otherwise they might start thinking that being alive is not as all right as they once thought it was when they were being shuttled about by a relatively well-constituted emotional system. The same applies to bodily systems of any kind, such as the immune system. Because when one of your systems goes haywire, you cannot function as you think you should. You may not even be able to think about anything except how much vomit, nasal mucus, phlegm, and watery stool you are discharging from your body when your immune system cannot withstand an onslaught from a viral or bacterial infection. If that is the way you were all the time, you could not go on as a well-constituted being, which means you could not go on as your old self, whatever that might have been. But chances are you will get better after one or more of your systems has gone haywire, and as a newly well-constituted being you will probably think, “I’m back to being the real me.” However, you might as truthfully think that the real you is the one who was sick, not the one with well-constituted systems working together so cooperatively that you do not even notice them. […]
âś»
Buddhanomics
(On the bullshit that is Buddhism; and about consciousness)
Along with every other religion, Buddhism is a compilation of do-it-yourself projects, and some of them, such as Pure Land Buddhism, are only lightweight versions of the faiths scantily detailed here. This principle has its parallel in every philosophy, ideology, and bag of myths that has ever been presented to the world. Because no two minds are contoured alike, no one system or collocation of systems will ever be sized to fit all. If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else. This gives leave to believers in anything to have an opinion about whatever they like. For Buddhists, though, this is a problem, because clinging to opinions, or whatever else ordinary folk cling to, is an obstruction to becoming a right-minded practitioner of Buddhism. But you can believe that in Buddhist law, or in someone’s opinion of Buddhist law, there are allowance conditions that stipulate when clinging is not really clinging. […]
Leaving aside reincarnation and the mental gymnastics it foists on the believer, the central focus of Buddhism’s three-ring circus remains the state or non-state of enlightenment, which, like Jesus’ ethereal theme park, is an appetizing carrot suspended in the darkness of life’s suffering, if you are one of those who are sensitive enough to life’s suffering. However, to get that carrot you must first kowtow to dogmatic authorities that cannot be told apart from those of Christianity, spiritual ministers who strong-arm you to do some things and not do others under pain of not becoming enlightened.
But here is the real catch: If you want to become enlightened you will never become enlightened, because in Buddhism wanting things is just the thing that keeps you from getting the thing you want. Less circuitously, if you want to end your suffering, you will never end your suffering. This is the “wanting paradox,” or “paradox of desire,” and Buddhists are at the ready with both rational and non-rational propositions as to why this paradox is not a paradox. How to understand these propositions is past understanding, because, per Buddhism, there is nothing to understand and no one to understand it. And as long as you think there is something to understand and someone to understand it, you are doomed. Trying for this understanding is the most trying thing of all. Yet trying not to try for it is just as trying. There is nothing more futile than to consciously look for something to save you. But consciousness makes this fact seem otherwise. 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 [sic] and think that being alive is all right rather than that which should not be.
The Buddhist “wanting paradox” might be regarded as correlative to Zapffe’s Paradox (the paradox of conscious beings attempting to disclaim their consciousness of the flagrantly joyless possibilities of their lives). The difference between Buddhism’s Paradox and Zapffe’s Paradox is that the latter is not amenable to being resolved, explained away, or denied, either rationally or non-rationally. It can only be left unacknowledged so that we can continue to live as we have all these years, or at least as long as we can before the paradox demands acknowledgment to the extent that we cannot live with ourselves as beings whose existence is terribly false and paradoxical, things so uncanny that we can no longer even look at one another or hold our heads steady. Until that day, we will keep living as obstinate selves who affirm that being conscious is an enlightened way to be and that being alive is all right.
âś»
Notes
3.
“You remember where I said I was going to explain about life, buddy?” he says. “Well, the thing about life is, it gets weird. People are always talking to you about truth, everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or something and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn as you get older is, there ain’t no truth. All there is, is bullshit. Pardon my vulgarity here. Layers of it. One layer of bullshit on top of another. And what you do in life, like when you get older, is—you pick the layer of bullshit you prefer, and that’s your bullshit, so to speak. You got that?” Despite the cynicism of LaPlant’s words, the object of his fatherly lesson is to create a bond between him and his son. (Hollywood is heavily invested in plotlines in which a broken family is “healed.”) This bond is reliant on the exposure of life as bullshit and is itself bullshit—since one can have no basis for preferring one layer of bullshit over another without already being full of bullshit—which makes LaPlant’s case that “All there is, is bullshit” without his being aware of it, which is how bullshit works. This is not the message the moviegoer is meant to take away from the mass-audience philosophizing of Hero [(1992)], but there it is anyway.