The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

The Conspiracy against the Human Race is the first nonfiction work of horror author Thomas Ligotti. If you've been following Ligotti, the views expressed will not come as a surprise. This book has all the markings of a magnum opus. Here, Ligotti takes the ideas that he's been advancing for his whole career and strips them of their fictional trappings, explores their raw realities and their naked implications. This is not a dry read. Though there is no story or characters, this is still a deeply engaging work. The tone is set by the brief fable of humanity's "Loss of Innocence" (so titled in the Notes section), which is one of the many times that Ligotti uses his virtuosity as a fiction author to get across dense abstractions. Reading Ligotti's stories is being immersed in a strange, inimical atmosphere, and Ligotti proves just as capable of getting across moods and feelings (alienation, fright, or whatever it is that he wishes to evoke) with only a few phrases, conjuring powerful images with apparent ease: "Life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would have us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, starring void." (p. 29) In addition to the terror that he can so easily create, Ligotti's prose can also, at times, have a lightness to it. His writings are always elegant, beautiful as they tear into your beliefs. The moments of black comedy (and it is a black so dark that fulign barely begins to describe it) do nothing to damage the import of the ideas all around them, but rather succeed in drawing us closer and enmeshing us further still. But to review a work of philosophy and talk about prose and imagery, and then to leave it at that, is to miss the point entirely. How does one review a work of ideas without either shallow dismissals or equally worthless panegyrics? I'm not sure. I don't think that there's a way to read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and not be affected by its ideas, and, by the same token, I don't think it's possible to do a worthwhile review of the work without, at least partially, allowing objectivity to fall by the wayside and interacting with those ideas. The rest of this article will be a combination of review and response, going through the first two sections of the book and both looking at Ligotti's arguments and my own feelings about his conclusions. If you would prefer to draw your own conclusions about Ligotti's ideas, feel free to bow out until you've tracked down a copy. THE NIGHTMARE OF BEING This section deals with a broad array of pessimistic, nihilistic, and antinatalistic philosophies. I have a minor quibble with Ligotti's terminology (I think it's one step too far to say that, in order to be a pessimist, one must also be an antinatalist), but I'll bow down and use Ligotti's definitions for this article. We are first exposed to Peter Wessel Zapffe's essay The Last Messiah, which is the cornerstone of Ligotti's argument and likely the most discussed work in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Zapffe believed consciousness to be an evolutionary accident and held that, in a universe governed by uncaring natural law, the realization of our predicament (which consciousness would bring about) would cause the end of our race. As a result, the entirety of human endeavor can essentially be summed up as an attempt to minimize consciousness. In order to accomplish those aims, Zapffe provides four means of repression: Isolation, Anchoring, Distraction, and Sublimation. These ideas are not left as abstracts. By the end of the section, almost every one of our accomplishments or emotional outputs is explained in the darkest possible light. The final of the four means of repression, Sublimation, accounts for the entirety of human art, and our enjoyment of that art is nothing but an attempt to distract ourselves from our predicament: "(4) 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 [...] just as King Lear's weeping for his dead daughter Cordellia cannot rend its audience with the throes of the real thing." (p. 31-32) After Zapffe, we explore Arthur Schopenhauer's concept of the Will to Live, a blind and uncaring force that drives us ever onward to procreation and thoughtless expansion, as well as a whole host of other pessimistic philosopher's, a list that includes, by the book's end, Fredrik Nietzsche, Philipp Mainländer, Carlo Michelsteadter, Karl Popper, David Benatar, and others. The synthesis of these ideas is remarkably smooth, and one often finds ideas here represented in the abstract that have been featured prominently in Ligotti's fiction, such as the idea of the puppet universe: "To Michelsteadter, nothing in this world can be anything but a puppet. And a puppet is only a plaything, a thing of parts brought together as a simulacrum of real presence. It is nothing in itself. It is not whole and individual but exists only relative to other playthings, some of them human playthings that support one another's illusion of being real. However, by suppressing thoughts of suffering and death they give themselves away as beings of paradox - prevaricators who must hide from themselves the flagrantly joyless possibilities of their lives if they are to go on living." (p. 32-33) And yet, Ligotti never argues for any of the concepts put forward. The philosophies are exposed and either favored or criticized based on Ligotti's overall ideas, but this section is strictly informational, not persuasive. The reader is, it seems, either assumed to be an antinatalist already, therefore in little need of convincing, or, if they don't happen to already be sufficiently pessimistic, impossible to convince: "People are either pessimists or optimists. They forcefully "lean" one way or the other, and there is no common ground between them. For pessimists, life is something that should not be, which means that what they believe should be is the absence of life, nothing, non-being, the emptiness of the uncreated. Anyone who speaks up for life as something that irrefutably should be - that we would not be better off unborn, extinct, or forever lazing in nonexistence - is an optimist. It is all or nothing; one is in or out, abstractly speaking. Practically speaking, we have been a race of optimists since the nascency of human consciousness and lean like mad toward the favorable pole." (p. 47) Since there are so many ideas proposed, it's inevitable that some are more persuasive than others and that some contradict one another. The ideas of Philipp Mainländer - the Will to Die, to follow Schopenhauer's Will to Live - are fascinating but, ultimately, feel as sentimental, although admittedly negatively so, as any of the major religions. Mainländer theorized that the ultimate goal of everything in the universe is, essentially, entropy, and that life and existence ultimately amounts to nothing but the pursuit of death. He gives us the idea of a suicidal god, who made existence only so that, when existence ended, it could enjoy nothing afterwards. But the idea of a suicidal god, while an interesting one, is no more practical than that of a benevolent god, and both thoughts depend equally on the unsubstantiated existence of a deity, whether it be a negative or positive figure. Antinatalism in general is seen as the disregarding of all conventional notions (to use Ligotti's phrasing, it is to say that life is NOT alright), but Mainländer is more inversion than negation, more akin to theistic Satanism than atheism. Mainländer's inverted spiritualism leads us in its way to the book's title. The Conspiracy against the Human Race is a fittingly evocative phrase, as are all of Ligotti's titles, but I'll admit to being perplexed when I first considered it. Isn't the crux of Ligotti's argument that there's not only no conspiracy but that there's nothing aware enough to even dream of such a conspiracy? Upon the course of reading, however, the meaning becomes clearer. Ligotti uses the word `conspiracy' as something perpetuated by optimists; the conspiracy against the human race is our own collective refusal to deal with reality. The emergence of our consciousness was not something that we could have stopped. The perpetuation of the suffering that can only be brought about by existence, however, is something that we have no one to blame for but ourselves. To go back to the arguments presented in The Nightmare of Being, several rely on either an overuse of absolutes or for the listener to have already adopted the central tenants of the philosophy. David Benatar says that there is a chance that a baby will experience happiness, but a certainty that it will experience suffering. Up to this point, I think that most will agree. He then goes on to say that, since happiness is a possibility and suffering a guarantee, the only moral act is to curtail the suffering and cease reproduction. But this idea only works under the (frankly bizarre) supposition that all suffering and happiness are equal. While there are some lives, I'll admit, that contain absolutely no happiness (death soon after birth, say), the majority will experience some kind of joy in their lives, and a good many of them will say that the pleasure in their lives outweighs the pain. So while more may, numerically, experience pain than pleasure, it is illogical to say that pain overweighs pleasure overall, rendering the conclusion that, in order to benefit the majority we must end birth, unattainable. Which brings us to the key problem that I have with antinatalist arguments. I agree with the nihilism of, say, Lovecraft (though there we'd likely be better off with the term Cosmicism). I see no possibility of a benevolent deity, and I believe that the world is without objective purpose. But does that mean it is without personal purpose, also? A key tenant of antinatalism is that the majority, as per Zapffe's minimization of consciousness, suppress all knowledge of their ultimate position in the universe and go on to live their lives in a happy fiction. That the majority is, to some extent, happy is almost undeniable, and the pessimists make no attempt to refute it; the majority of the population is (at least under the strict optimist/pessimist definition put forth by Ligotti) optimistic. So if most people are, in the end, happy, why is the sum value of existence a negative? It's one thing to argue that the ways in which they make themselves happy are, ultimately, false, but it's far from certain that that invalidates the resulting joy. Regardless of the ultimate meaning of existence (and on that question I am in agreement with the Ligottis and Schopenhauers of the world), if the majority of people are existing in a fashion that they consider better than not existing, if they would answer that Life is Alright, how can it be stated that Life is Not Alright for the entirety of the human race? WHO GOES THERE? The second section of The Conspiracy against the Human Race concerns itself with humanity. Who are we? Why are we the way that we are? Do we control ourselves? Do we understand ourselves? As before, anyone with a familiarity of Ligotti's thoughts as expressed through stories and interviews will likely not be surprised by the conclusions that he draws, but the depth that he goes into and the frank insidiousness of his arguments is almost like a physical blow at times. Like endlessly probing a cut, human thought circles around those areas that make it uncomfortable. But why does the uncanny make us so uncomfortable? In his essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny, Jentsch says: "But if this relative physical 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 processers are taking place in that which he was previously used to regarding as a unified psyche." (p. 88) This discomfort with the realities of our bodies, and our attempts to distance ourselves from those realities, show our acute discomfort with who we really are. This is, Ligotti concludes, one of the key ways in which supernatural horror can make us afraid: by showing us our bodies stripped of the romanticization of consciousness, with the added benefit that - unlike, say, a medical drama - no training can desensitize you to the uncanny of the supernatural. This is one of several passages in The Conspiracy against the Human Race that deals with the casues, so to speak, of supernatural horror. Like the others, the symbolism makes sense, but there's the fact that Ligotti is only ever describing the upper echelons of horror. While it is effective in explaining why movies like The Thing and The Bodysnatchers are so affecting - and while such creatures as Shelly's Frankenstein, Lovecraft's Cthulhu, and Ligotti's own unnamed (at least in the works I've read) beings are powerful symbols - I think that your average zombie picture is far more concerned with decapitations than symbolism, fake blood being held in much higher esteem than any sort of stripped bare analogy. Or perhaps my skepticism just relays my total lack of faith in every aspect of your average horror products, from the writer to the audience. Jentsch and the discussion that followed are interesting, but it's Ligotti's analysis of free will that makes this section so powerful. Consider: you have the ability to act in the manner that best suits your desires. Hence, you have free will. Correct? But wait: how did you come by those desires? Did you chose them? Could you chose them? "Within the structures of commonsense reality and personal ability, we can choose to do anything we like in this world...with one exception. We cannot choose what any of our choices will be. To do that, we would have to be capable of making ourselves into self-made individuals, as opposed to individuals who simply make choices. For instance, we may want to become bodybuilders and choose to do so. But if we do not want to become bodybuilders we cannot make ourselves into someone who does want to be a bodybuilder. For that to happen, there would have to be another self inside us who made us choose to want to become bodybuilders. And inside that self, there would have to be still another self who made that self want to choose to choose to make us want to become bodybuilders. This sequence of choosing, being interminable, would result in the paradox of an infinite number of selves beyond which there is a self making all the choices." (p. 94) Of course, the interesting thing about Determinism is that it's impossible to believe in while still remaining anything even approaching human (or, as Metzinger put it: "Can one really believe in determinism without going insane?" (p. 110)). After all, you feel responsible for your actions, do you not? To imagine that you are not the cause of your actions is to wholly leave behind any societal framework. But that feeling of responsibility isn't something that can be trusted, because we all feel responsible for a whole variety of actions that we are, in no way, responsible for. Ligotti discusses the idea of inviting your friend over to your house to move a couch. On the way there, they are hit by a car. You feel as responsible as if you'd killed them, but that feeling is, by any objective measure, false. So how can you trust your feelings in other matters, if examples of how they can mislead you are so easy to conceive? Taking the discussion of feelings and emotional further still, Ligotti brings up the idea of an emotionless state, a frame of mind that's wholly rational. The pathway to the state is depression, or, at its extreme, anhedonia. In this state of mind, as close to enlightenment as it is, perhaps, possible for us to come, we would realize that our endeavors are wholly fruitless: "In [...] 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. [...] The image of a cloud-crossed moon is dreadful 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 memory. This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling." (p. 116) Of course, it could be argued that esteem for depression (or, later, for the ego-dead) is no different than any other religion's reverence for their holy men, with just the robes and means of enlightenment altered. Ligotti does admit that the sick self is no more "the real you" than your hale self, but I'm curious about the significance he lends rationality. While anhedonia is no doubt an effective tool for showing the ultimate emptiness of our world, I'm unconvinced it's a good tool to defeat consciousness with. After all, if our foe is not life but consciousness, why is the depressive the one who has achieved enlightenment? Rather than believe that the man who has eliminated emotion and lives with only rational thought (a product of our consciousness), wouldn't it make more sense to revere the man wholly given into his emotions, or his baser nature? CONCLUSION The Conspiracy against the Human Race is an incredibly affecting work of poignant imagery, masterful prose, and powerful arguments. I'm aware that my review has consisted of far more dissension than adoration, and that's not something incidental. First, it would have been pointless for me to simply summarize every one of Ligotti's arguments and merely nod my head. More importantly, however, I want to get across that I am not recommending this book because I agree with everything that Ligotti says. I do not, but I don't think that that was Ligotti's intention. This is a work that makes you think; the reader who proceeds with an unconsidered affirmation of every pessimistic sentence and nihilistic turn of phrase has, I think, missed Ligotti's point as thoroughly as the reader who just throws the book in a fire after the first few pages. We end with a man dying. As we experience the last moments of his life, we're put through, once again, the wringer of all of Ligotti's arguments. Reading and finishing this book is apt to leave you shaken, with a black cloud hanging over your head that filters out all light, and with the sensation of everything you know and love having been insulted. I think that means that Ligotti succeeded, don't you?

Well that's partly the message of this book. It's written by a horror writer who is afraid of, and sickened by, being a kind of puppet. Yet he's honest enough to communicate what's pulling his strings when he writes horror. As it happened, I had read most of his short-story collections before this book, but the specific message of pessimism wasn't very precise in them. I certainly got the life-is-REALLY-weird and the universe-is-against-me type of "pessimism" found in horror, but I did not understand just how personal it was for this writer. However, having read this book, it's now much, much clearer the depth of sympathy he has for the outrageous, surreal, and often first-person-narration stories his characters find themselves in. A newcomer to Ligotti might find this book impactful if they have some grounding in older horror literature (e.g., Lovecraft, Poe) or if they were pre-acquainted with pessimistic philosophers (which I wasn't). However, it makes the most sense to read Ligotti stories first to see if you even care about his work (e.g., Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe are excellent collections). I was also lucky enough to read Teatro Grotesco (the collection which just predates this book) just *after* reading this book, and it really did seem that the latter provided a user's manual to that particular collection. Of course if you've read much of Ligotti (implying you like him), this book is on your bucket list. As for what the book is, I would say less rigorous philosophy and more (selective) philosophical review and literary analysis. The book characterizes pessimism as the counter to the optimistic view that "being alive is all right". For the pessimist, what makes our existence intrinsically bad is our consciousness of it, combined with our consciousness of its transience: "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." (p. 28 or thereabouts in the Kindle Edition). Ligotti shows how prevalent this view is in his historical review. If you are a pure pessimist, ones inevitable death *always* trumps arguments that life is something you (or the universe) is always better off having, and please appreciate that this position is different from simply advocating suicide. For Ligotti it's a logical fallacy to assume this, although the position clearly advocates not having any children, as being born is a kind of "violence" one inflicts on a person. But as for suicide, more often than not, once you are alive, it is the horror of dying that keeps you alive (first) and makes you a pessimist (second). The "conspiracy" is the inveterate arguments/tactics (cataloged by Zapffe and reviewed by Ligotti) used to fortify optimism as a kind of anaesthetic. These boil down to anchoring, distraction, sublimation, or different categories of things one might claim makes life worthwhile, plus repression ("isolation"). It is Ligotti's belief that the conspiracy keeps humanity plugging along what is ultimately aimless pursuit of continuation. Ligotti isn't interested in converting optimists but more invested in showing why optimistic arguments impress no pessimist (and to a certain extent the reverse). Finally, Ligotti describes pessimism's role in horror literature, in terms of the conspiracy, which is certainly a neat contrivance and a novel contribution to the philosophy/aesthetic of pessimism. So why five stars? This is mainly my appreciation of artists who attempt to explain themselves with some humor, sarcasm, and imagery. You will learn about pessimism from obscure philosophers (some of whom did indeed killed themselves) and from more famous and unsuspected sources (Buddhism, Nietzche, Tolstoy). You will also learn about provocative things like "ego death" and "heroic 'pessimist' ". You will be unsettled, and part of the charm of the book is that it will invite you to refute it (which in the Kindle edition means highlighting a passage and leaving a note for it). Certainly, I could criticize the book's choice of issues or authors, but as a more comprehensive book, relative to my expectations, the book would definitely not be as effective as a personal reflection. Can I refute him? Well yes, and maybe philosophy majors could rip to shreds some of the arguments for a strong determinism as a characterization of the human condition. However, Ligotti's ultimate point is that none of my refutations will make me *feel* any better about the stuff he writes about.

This was a super interesting book and I’m glad I read it. The writer is erudite and thoughtful and I learned a lot from his references. For example, his account of Buddhism as the most pessimistic religion was interesting and I watched the film “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” based on his discussion. Despite these pluses, I found some of the core premises of the book unsupported/insupportable. For example, the notion that consciousness is inherently bad just seems like a value judgement of the author and isn’t really supported by any convincing reasoning. Similarly, the oft quoted remark that behind the scenes lies “something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world” seems likewise unsupported and has the character of a religious belief in that the author takes the existence of this pernicious element as an article of faith without any proof. Likewise the premise that life is pure suffering and not worth living is similarly unsupported and seems to run contrary to my own experience, for example. Death and suffering are certainly elements of life, but not the only elements and certainly existence is subjectively pleasureable and worthwhile to many humans. So who is the author to pronounce that consciousness is bad for all those who are subjectively enjoying it? Another unsupported premise of the work is that consciousness is “unnatural”. The work assumes that consciousness resulted from evolution, so how can it be any more or less natural than any other evolutionary product. In essence, all of these supported assumptions by the author in analyzing such ambiguous subjects as consciousness, nature and non existence, amount to a sort of religious belief in his brand of extreme pessimism and not a convincing philosophical system. Again, the basic conclusion that there is something “pernicious” behind the scenes that makes a nightmare of our world, is just an unpleasant religious belief. More interesting and convincing to me personally is Samuel Beckett’s form of pessimism, if you want to call it that, as presented in Molloy or Waiting for Godot, which suggests that existence may be absurd and meaningless ultimately, but doesn’t make unjustifiable claims like that consciousness is bad or unnatural. In other words, Beckett doesn’t overstate his case, while Ligotti does. Nonetheless I enjoyed the book and think it’s very valuable in that it engages a subject that most writers are not willing to engage in a sustained way.

Thomas Ligotti’s *The Conspiracy Against the Human Race* is an unsettling and deeply philosophical exploration of pessimism, horror, and the inherent tragedy of existence. Known primarily for his work in supernatural fiction, Ligotti takes a different approach here, crafting a nonfiction meditation on the bleakness of consciousness and the futility of human life. At the heart of Ligotti’s argument is the notion that self-awareness is not a gift but a curse. Drawing from philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer and horror writers like H. P. Lovecraft, he paints a grim portrait of existence as an accidental nightmare, where human beings suffer simply because they were born. He challenges the comforting illusions that sustain society—free will, purpose, and personal agency—asserting instead that life is a meaningless, agonizing burden that we endure without consent. The book is heavy with existential dread, but it’s also brilliant in how it interweaves horror literature with philosophical inquiry. Ligotti argues that horror fiction is perhaps the only genre honest enough to acknowledge the horrifying realities of existence. His prose is sharp and hypnotic, pulling readers into his dark vision with a style that is both elegant and ominous. This isn’t a book for those looking for optimism or solace. It’s an uncompromising, nihilistic exploration that some will find revelatory while others may struggle with its unrelenting bleakness. Whether one agrees with Ligotti or not, *The Conspiracy Against the Human Race* is a fascinating, haunting, and intellectually rigorous work that forces readers to confront their deepest existential fears.

Despite previously delving into philosophical pessimism (mainly Arthur Schopenhauer and Emil Cioran), this book did a great job giving a tour of pessimistic thought and adding its own insights. A must-read for anyone interested in pessimism.

Notice even the eloquence of the reviewers. You see, this is what Magician Ligotti is accomplishing. The level of expression, the beautifully crafted sentences and vocabulary requiring (for me at least) the benefit of the Kindle lookup function... I’m myself now feeling linguistically challenged to make the grade even in this my own review. Whether you do or do not accept the main thesis: consciousness is a cruel joke played on humans and other living things (start with Schopenhauer and move forward from there), the writing is...stunning. I LOVED it...truly. We now live in a world of increasingly diminished articulation. The internet has championed speed and pith over quality and depth. It’s very hard to find truly great writing out there. Well, it’s here. As for the content...if you don’t care for Schopenhauer you’ll probably not appreciate this book. If you are a Schopenhauer disciple than you’ll probably be blown away with the force of the writing. Consider that the point of departure here. One criticism I do have is why exactly Ligotti finds the whole “life thing” so terrible. Yes...there are countless horrors (the Holocaust, slavery, inevitable death, childhood cancer, etc etc) but are there not also joys? Sport, to name one. And solving really big problems (like inventing antibiotics and anesthesia), raising happy children, building a good piece of furniture, writing a great song or play (see: Beatles, Beethoven, Shakespeare...), and being in love. OK, so it’s temporary. But that doesn’t destroy the temporary truth of the Good. On this I don’t think Ligotti proves his premise philosophically, however his manner of presentation is superb. That’s the best I got. Have another miserable day. Bye.

- Professor Nobody in "Pessimism and Supernatural Horror - Lecture Two." In a cogent, straightforward elucidation that pulls no punches, reclusive author lets us in on what feeds the atmosphere of lurking perniciousness pervading his short stories of the metaphysical horror kind. The root cause of human suffering is identified as consciousness being a double-edged sword, which has greatly facilitated humanity's evolutionary premiership, yet at the same time allows more than just a glimpse at the 'malignant uselessness' of being via its (self-) reflexive mode: "Our minds now began dredging up horrors, joyless possibilities, enough of them to make us drop to the ground in paroxysm of self-soiling consternation should they go untrammeled" (p. 27). Persistent companions in Ligotti's dreary exploration are "an analyst of disaster" (p. 176), the little-known Norwegian thinker Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990), German philosopher Schopenhauer (compare his will-to-live to lust for life born out of karmic ignorance), and literary predecessor Lovecraft (pp. 53, 57-61, 184-5, 192-3, 203-5). The four strategies of "cognitive double-dealing" (p. 42), albeit it's questionable how cognizant we are of their presence, that conspire to keep mankind in the dark regarding their ontological predicament, are: isolation - disturbing realizations/impressions, if any, are exiled into the subconscious whence they may reemerge to haunt us; anchoring - institutional/societal constructions (religion, moral, country and family); distraction - hobbies and disinfotainment mediaplex; sublimation - science, art, philosophy. This set of self-defensive and -deceptive mechanisms to survive in reduced awareness ("minimize consciousness") are compared to the theory of psychoanalytic repression (pp. 67-72) and Russian writer Tolstoy's four categories of escapism, including voluntary death by suicide (pp. 148-50). Some of the topics of the resultant puppet show of "unrealit[ies] on legs" (p. 42) include: 'heroic pessimists' (Miguel de Unamuno, Joshua Foa Dienstag, William R. Brashear, Albert Camus); uncanniness that presupposes a tension between the ideal of an objective quality and a subjective experience of a perceiver - "No one wants to be other than they are, or think they are [:] idealized beings, integral and undivided, and not mechanisms - human puppets who do not know themselves as such" (p. 91, 92); free will vs. determinism; the futility of transhumanism; an illuminating view on depression (pp. 113-7); death-anxiety/thanatophobia and pain as being an indicator of end's approaching and paradoxically, we might add, that of life as well - we are in pain, hence alive; musings of literary criticism concerning Gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe (1764-1824) and Poe, a comparison of Luigi Pirandello and Roland Topor (pp. 194-201), in addition to that of the supernatural element (pp. 202-4) in "Hamlet" (extraneous) and "Macbeth" (integral). "[T]he supernatural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. This mind does not keep a chronicle of 'man's inhumanity to man' [Robert Burns] but instead tracks a dysphoria symptomatic of our life as transients in a creation that is natural for all else that lives, but for us is anything but" (p. 211). Throughout the corpus, and especially in his discussion touching upon consciousness, self and ego (pp. 101-13), the author fails to make any distinction between the latter two, although I believe it's more than merely a semantic game, as demonstrated by Jung and Co. In light of my limited readings in Tibetan Buddhism, Ligotti seems to be mistaken in positing NDE resulting in ego-death to be "a state corresponding to that of Buddhist enlightenment" (p. 135). Granted, ego is a major stumbling block to liberation through full awareness, but eliminating it won't make you a buddha or bodhisattva who is released from the relentlessly spinning karmic wheel of conditioned existence. If it were so, Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) would be hailed as an enlightened being, wouldn't he? Ego could be viewed as a parasite that hijacked and made itself the captain on the ship of awareness exploring the ocean of consciousness. Desperation and hopelessness reach their nadir in utterances like the following: "There is nothing more futile than consciously look for something to save you, [particularly in] a world that is not worth the emptiness it is written on" (p. 133, 134). No more uplifting is the solution he offers, namely that of antinatalism: "non-coital existence as the surest path to redemption from the sin of being congregants of this world" (p. 34). In closing, Horace Walpole (1717-97) once said, "Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think," - therefore tragicomic?!

I've been reading books loosely associated with the group known as Speculative Realists (a group of thinkers who critique 'correlationism', the view that we can never reach what is real beneath our language systems, our means for perception, or our finite manner of being-in-the-world) and came upon this book whose forward is written by Ray Brassier. The alignment between Speculative Realism and Ligotti lies in the realization that humans are sentient puppets who have effloresced out of a mindless material universe and will one day disappear without a trace. As Ray Brassier write in Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction "...earth will be incinerated by the sun 4 billion years hence; all the stars in the universe will stop shining in 100 trillion years; and eventually, one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now, all matter in the cosmos will disintegrate." Ligotti writes, "There will come a day for each of us--and then for all of us--when the future will be done with. Until then, humanity will acclimate itself to every new horror that comes knocking, as it has done from the very beginning. It will go on and on until it stops. And the horror will go on, as day follows day and generations fall into the future like so many bodies into open graves." In his book, Ligotti starts by discussing a short essay, "The Last Messiah", written by an obscure Norwegian philosopher, Peter Zapffe whose dissertation, _On the Tragic_ has never been translated into English. According to Zapffe, we have evolved an excess of consciousness, which makes us aware that we will someday die. Consciously or unconsciously we deploy all sorts of techniques to ignore and mask this uncomfortable fact. At some point though, when these techniques fail, and the soporific effects of the Abrahamic faiths have worn off, when religion, alcohol, drugs, sex and a personal relationship with Jesus no longer mask this painful truth, you come face to face with the realization that you are just a gene copying bio-robot, a puppet of nature who thinks he has control of the strings, a being towards death. You grasp desperately at your only consolation: life after death. However, you've realized that this is just one of the futile techniques used to make life livable. Besides, you've already realized what an eternity of consciousness means. It means eventually doing the same things over and over again an infinite number of times, having the same conversations with the same people an infinite number of times, having sex with everyone who ever lived or ever will live an infinite number of times. It is then you realize your only salvation lies in the extinction of consciousness. You realize that consciousness itself is the real supernatural horror that has intruded unexpectedly into nature. The source of horror lies in human consciousness itself. If you have followed me thus far, then you have a taste of what is in store for you when you open the covers of this book. After discussing Zapffe, he goes on to discuss other philosophers of pessimism eventually exploring these themes in relation to other authors in the horror genre. The book serves as a hermeneutic key, or Rosetta Stone as it were, to unlocking the meaning of Ligotti's own works of horror. If you are interested in these themes or have realized, to paraphrase Ray Brassier, in Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction , that nature is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the `values' and `meanings' which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable, pick up a copy.

Good to read

If you've ever wanted to know why people fear, where fear steams from, how it works and what it is across the spectrum of human experience, while also getting an education into pros and cons of pessimism, ideologies such as nihilism, anti-natalism and more areas that dwell in the shadows of our minds, then this is the book for you. It opens your eyes to how the meaninglessness of the universe and the meaning we ascribe it, from the vantage point of humanity, relates to crafting true horror and pathways to living a confident life. 10/10.

Llegué a este libro tras ver la multipremiada serie "True Detective", ya que el personaje del Detective Rust Cohle (McCoughney) se adhiere a esta corriente filosófica. El libro es un ensayo filosófico. No una historia de terror. Lo recomiendo ampliamente. Si bien no concuerdo con gran parte de sus postulados, pocas veces es posible encontrar un libro que exponga algo tan poco convencional y tan diferente a todo lo que hayas leído antes. Y también se aprende al comparar tus creencias con otro sistema de creencias. Es un libro que le exige al lector mantener la mente abierta.

O principal motivo de ter me interessado por essa obra foi a descoberta de que integra a inspiração para a 1ª temporada da série True Detective. O autor destrincha um tema bem difícil, traça críticas bem interessantes sobre a força motriz da existência, o sentido que nos faz continuar a perpetuar um ciclo de sofrimento. Pena que ainda não há versão traduzida para o PT-BR, mas com os recursos de tradução e auxílio de leitura do Kindle fica bem mais fácil apreciar essa filosofia tão singular e instigante.

Best philosophy book I read.