The Conspiracy against the Human Race

241 Pages·2015·11.22 MB·English

The Conspiracy against the
Human Race
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A Contrivance of Horror
Thomas Ligotti

Hippocampus Press
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New York

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Copyright © 2010 Thomas Ligotti. Foreword © 2010 by Ray Brassier.
Thomas Ligotti photograph © 2010 by Jennifer Gariepy.
Parts of this work were published, in different form, in the following
publications: “Literature Is Entertainment or It Is Nothing: An Interview
with Thomas Ligotti” by Neddal Ayad, Fantastic Metropolis (website),
October 31, 2004; “Thomas Ligotti on Sweeney Todd,” Horror: Another
100 Best Books, Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, eds., 2005; Introduction
by Thomas Ligotti, The Tenant by Roland Topor, 2006; “‘It’s All a Matter
of Personal Pathology’: An Interview with Thomas Ligotti” by Matt Cardin,
The Teeming Brain (weblog), 2006.
All excerpts from the works of Peter Wessel Zapffe © Gisle R. Tangenes;
used with permission. All excerpts from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft ©
Robert C. Harrall; used with permission of Lovecraft Properties LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ligotti, Thomas.
The conspiracy against the human race: a contrivance of horror / Thomas
Ligotti. – 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-9824296-9-3 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-0-9844802-7-2 (pbk.)
1. Horror in literature. 2. Literature–Philosophy. 3. Pessimism in literature. I.
Title.
PN56.H6L55 2010
809’.9164–dc22
2010008781
Published by Hippocampus Press
P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156.
http://www.hippocampuspress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or
by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Jennifer Gariepy. Cover production by Barbara Briggs
Silbert. Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos.
First Digital Edition(s) May 2012
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
ISBN 978-1-61498-030-8
Digital book(s) (epub and mobi) produced by Booknook.biz.

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To the memory of Peter Wessel Zapffe

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my appreciation to Tim Jeski and Scott Wetherby
for supplying me with materials essential to the writing of this work; to
the members of Thomas Ligotti Online and its administrator, Brian
Edward Poe, for participating in a forum of commentary on an early
version of The Conspiracy against the Human Race; to Robert Ligotti for
being a ready test subject whenever I needed an alert response from a
mind akin to my own; and to Jennifer Gariepy for the encouragement and
insight she has afforded me over many years. In addition, I would be
more than remiss not to acknowledge the counsel and labors of S. T.
Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Jonathan Padgett, with special recognition
reserved for Nicole Ariana Seary, who granted me the benefit of her
talents and experience during the most crucial stages of this book’s
composition. Finally, I am indebted, as are all devotees of philosophical
pessimism who are not knowledgeable of the Dano-Norwegian language,
to Gisle R. Tangenes for his translations of and writings on the works of
Peter Wessel Zapffe. The responsibility for the use made of these valued
contributions lies entirely with the author.

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C
ONTENTS

Foreword by Ray Brassier………………………………….9
Introduction: Of Pessimism and Paradox………………….13
The Nightmare of Being…………………………...............19
Who Goes There?.................................................................85
Freaks of Salvation………………………………………..119
Sick to Death……………………………………...............147
The Cult of Grinning Martyrs………………….................169
Autopsy on a Puppet: An Anatomy of the Supernatural….183
Notes………………………………………………………229

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FOREWORD
Ray Brassier
We know what verdict is reserved for those foolhardy enough to dissent
from the common conviction according to which “being alive is all right,”
to borrow an insistent phrase from the volume at hand. Disputants of the
normative buoyancy of our race can expect to be chastised for their
ingratitude, upbraided for their cowardice, patronized for their
shallowness. Where self-love provides the indubitable index of psychic
health, its default can only ever be seen as a symptom of psychic debility.
Philosophy, which once disdained opinion, becomes craven when the
opinion in question is whether or not being alive is all right. Suitably
ennobled by the epithet “tragic,” the approbation of life is immunized
against the charge of complacency and those who denigrate it condemned
as ingrates.
“Optimism”; “pessimism”: Thomas Ligotti takes the measure of these
discredited words, stripping them of the patina of familiarity that has
robbed them of their pertinence, and restoring to them some of their
original substance. The optimist fixes the exchange rate between joy and
woe, thereby determining the value of life. The pessimist, who refuses the
principle of exchange and the injunction to keep investing in the future no
matter how worthless life’s currency in the present, is stigmatized as an
unreliable investor.
The Conspiracy against the Human Race sets out what is perhaps the
most sustained challenge yet to the intellectual blackmail that would
oblige us to be eternally grateful for a “gift” we never invited. Being alive
is not all right: this simple not encapsulates the temerity of thinking better
than any platitude about the tragic nobility of a life characterized by a
surfeit of suffering, frustration, and self-deceit. There is no nature worth
revering or rejoining; there is no self to be re-enthroned as captain of its
own fate; there is no future worth working towards or hoping for. Life, in
Ligotti’s outsized stamp of disapproval, is MALIGNANTLY USELESS.
No doubt, critics will try to indict Ligotti of bad faith by claiming that the
writing of this book is itself driven by the imperatives of the life that he
seeks to excoriate. But the charge is trumped-up, since Ligotti explicitly
avows the impossibility for the living to successfully evade life’s grip.
This admission leaves the cogency of his diagnosis intact, for as Ligotti
knows full well, if living is lying, then even telling the truth about life’s
lie will be a sublimated lie.
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Such sublimation is as close to truth-telling as Ligotti’s exacting nihilism
will allow. Unencumbered by the cringing deference towards social utility
that straightjackets most professional philosophers, Ligotti’s unsparing
dissection of the sophisms spun by life’s apologists proves him to be a
more acute pathologist of the human condition than any sanctimonious
philanthrope.

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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.”
Returning to Bahnsen, he grew up to become a philosopher who not only
had nothing either positive or equivocal to say about humanity, but who
also arrived at a dour assessment of all existence. Like many who have
tried their hand at metaphysics, Bahnsen declared that, appearances to the
contrary, all reality is the expression of a unified, unchanging force—a
cosmic movement that various philosophers have characterized in various
ways. To Bahnsen, this force and its movement were monstrous in nature,
resulting in a universe of indiscriminate butchery and mutual slaughter
among its individuated parts. Additionally, the “universe according to
Bahnsen” has never had a hint of design or direction. From the beginning,
it was a play with no plot and no players that were anything more than
portions of a master drive of purposeless self-mutilation. In Bahnsen’s
philosophy, everything is engaged in a disordered fantasia of carnage.
Everything tears away at everything else … forever. Yet all this
commotion in nothingness goes unnoticed by nearly everything involved
in it. In the world of nature, as an instance, nothing knows of its
embroilment in a festival of massacres. Only Bahnsen’s self-conscious
Nothing can know what is going on and be shaken by the tremors of
chaos at feast.
As with all pessimistic philosophies, Bahnsen’s rendering of existence as
something strange and awful was unwelcome by the self-conscious
nothings whose validation he sought. For better or worse, pessimism
without compromise lacks public appeal. In all, the few who have gone to
the pains of arguing for a sullen appraisal of life might as well never have
been born. As history confirms, people will change their minds about
almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their
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hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general
have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in
this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-
conscious nothings.
Must all reproof of our species’ self-contentment then be renounced? That
would be the brilliant decision, rule number one for deviants from the
norm. Rule number two: If you must open your mouth, steer away from
debate. Money and love may make the world go round, but disputation
with that world cannot get it to budge if it is not of a mind to do so. Thus
British author and Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton: “You can only
find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.” What
Chesterton means to say here is that logic is irrelevant to truth, because if
you can find truth without logic then logic is superfluous to any truth-
finding effort. Indeed, his only motive for bringing logic into his
formulation is to taunt those who find logic quite relevant to finding truth,
although not the kind of truth that was pivotal to Chesterton’s morale as a
Christian.
Renowned for stating his convictions in the form of a paradox, as above,
Chesterton, along with anyone who has something positive or equivocal
to say about the human race, comes out on top in the crusade for truth.
(There is nothing paradoxical about that.) Therefore, should your truth run
counter to that of individuals who devise or applaud paradoxes that stiff
up the status quo, you would be well advised to take your arguments, tear
them up, and throw them in someone else’s garbage.

To be sure, though, futile argumentation has its attractions and may act as
an amusing complement to the bitter joy of spewing gut-level
vituperations, personal idolatries, and rampant pontifications. To absolve
such an unruly application of the rational and the irrational (not that they
are ever separable), the present “contrivance of horror” has been anchored
in the thesis of a philosopher who had disquieting thoughts about what it
is like to be a member of the human race. But too much should not be
telegraphed in this prelude to abjection. For the time being, it need only
be said that the philosopher in question made much of human existence as
a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our
lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness—
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