The conspiracy against the human race pdf download

The Conspiracy against the Human Race is renowned horror writer Thomas Ligotti s first work of nonfiction. Through impressively wide-ranging discussions of and reflections on literary and philosophical works of a pessimistic bent, he shows that the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets.

Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror. The essay is currently available to view for free on-line or as a pdf download for members of the site, but is likely to be removed once Durtro publish the essay in hardcopy. Though I have not read his fiction, a perusal of book descriptions and reviews make me suspect that his short stories and novels are both literary and offbeat.

Through impressively wide-ranging discussions of and reflections on literary and philosophical works of a pessimistic bent, he shows that the greatest horrors are inherent both to the human situation and to reality itself, and are not the The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror pdf The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror. 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? Hollywood movies are heavily dependent on plotlines in which a broken family comes together again. But this is not the message the moviegoer is meant to take away from the mass- audience philosophizing of Hero.

This gives us leave to choose our own bullshit, much in the way afforded by religious scriptures such as the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Koran, Buddhist texts, and all other works in this or any other genre codes of law, for example.

Relatively speaking, feeling good is its own justification. As long as such states last, why spoil a good thing with self-searching interrogations in re: meaning and purpose? But a high tone of elation could also be a sign of psychopathology, as it is for individuals who have been diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder.

No one ever bought a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking who was not unsatisfied with his or her life. This dissatisfaction is precisely the quality that the great pessimists—Buddha, Schopenhauer, Freud—saw as definitive of the human packing plant.

But those who are on that road may nevertheless be considered at least relatively unsatisfied with how they feel and are playing a perilous game in trying to upgrade their emotional tone to a height from which they may have a very unhappy fall. Ask any major drug user. The world as such would continue to exist. For Hartmann, the struggle for deliverance is not between humanity and nature, but between the affirmation of all phenomena by their continuance in any form and the negation of same by the evolution of a super-developed form of being that could exterminate every scintilla of existence at the very source of creation.

It is uproariously implausible that humankind will ever leave off breeding. But we can imagine that someday we will be able to suffocate every cell on earth with reasonable certainly using a destructive mechanism not yet devised, since nuclear or biological weapons would probably leave simpler organisms unharmed and spoiling for a new evolution.

In his study Suicide , the French sociologist Emile Durkheim contended that "one does not advance when one proceeds toward no goal, or—which is the same thing— when the goal is infinity. To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness. Aside from a repertoire of tricks we can do that other animals cannot, the truest indicator of a human being is unhappiness. The main fount of that unhappiness, as Zapffe and others have written, is our consciousness.

And the more dilated consciousness becomes, the more unhappy the human. All other portrayals of what we are conceive of nothing but a troupe of puppets made to prance through our lives by forces beyond our control or comprehension. On the subject of whether or not life is worth the trouble, the answer must always be unambivalent. To teeter the least bit into the negative is tantamount to outright despair. If you value your values, no doubts about this matter can be raised, unless they occur as a lead-up to some ultimate affirmation.

In the products of high or low culture, philosophical disquisitions, and arid chitchat, the anthem of life must forever roar above the squeaks of dissent. We were all born into a rollicking game that has been too long in progress to allow a substantive change in the rules. Should the incessant fanfare that meets your ears day in and day out sound out of tune and horribly inappropriate, you will be branded persona non grata.

Welcome wagons will not stop at your door—not while world-renowned authorities are telling you from on high that Sisyphus must be imagined as happy or that you must love your fate, no matter how terrible and questionable it is Nietzsche. If such dictatorial statements genuinely reflected the facts of life, they would not need to be repeated like a course of subliminal conditioning. What does arise is a note of futility. Naturally, the uselessness of existence may be repudiated as well or badly as its worthlessness.

Indigent of such means of communication, the uselessness of all that breathes and breeds must be spoken with a poor potency. One case of such discontent is that of the early nineteenth-century French Catholic writer Petrus Borel a. While Catholicism has since lost much of its bestial appeal in a literal sense, it continues to bleed whomever it can both psychologically and financially. This is quite in contrast to the U. What they were is gone forever. The intent here is not to romanticize any particular people but only to draw attention to historical facts that live most vividly in the memory of their victims and must be repressed in the conscience of their perpetrators if the latter are to retain a good opinion of themselves, their god, their nation, their families, and the human race in general.

Such facts of life and death are just that—facts. To the extent they are submitted as an indictment of humanity or the natural world that spit us out, a mistake has been made, irrational emotions have been awarded a priority they do not merit. But we are not at the helm of either of these movements. We believe ourselves to be in control—that is the mistake. We believe ourselves to be something we are not—that is the mistake and that is the superstition.

To perpetuate the belief in these superstitions, to conspire in the suffering of future generations is the only misconduct to be expiated. To collaborate in our own suffering and that of human posterity is the mistake. Ask Adam and Eve, symbols of the most deleterious mistake in the world, one which we reenact every day.

In his book The Open Society and Its Enemies , Popper expressed deep concern with the reduction of human suffering. What else could the elimination of suffering mean if not to diminish it to the zero point? Naturally, Popper held his horses well before suggesting that to eliminate suffering would demand that we as a species be eliminated.

Other interesting movements of a similar type are Painism and Algonomy. He might have been complimentary, or equivocal, when speaking of our universal stature, and he might have tried to pass off what he was saying as true.

If he had hyped it as true and had been complimentary, or equivocal, he could have died a rich man because people will always spend their money on intriguing falsehoods. He also forged evidence to bolster belief in the bestselling Chariots of the Gods. Humanity had already uplifted itself to the status of beings created by a purposeful and good-willed god.

Lovecraft turned the customary concept of the biblical god upside down by having the human race descend by mishap from a race of monsters, however technologically advanced they may have been. He wanted to put humanity in the place he thought it deserved to be as the offspring of these monsters in whose footsteps, incidentally, we have been following on the technological front.

Schopenhauer lived at a time when philosophers had to be ablaze with immodesty if they were to grab the world with the truth of their ideas and only their ideas.

They had to reveal things as they really are in a big way or join the no-accounts and footnotes in their field. Not until science took the reins in the twentieth century did philosophers begin to take their cues wholly from empiricism rather than from self-enclosed logic based on shaky premises. Human destiny now took a back seat to provable or falsifiable data in physics, biology, astrophysics, chemistry, theoretical physics, geology, nuclear physics, mathematical physics, and so on.

Reality specialists who trafficked in human experience could go talk among themselves if they did not disturb the grown-ups while they figured out genetic codes and the location of black holes. To the fullest extent possible, specialists in human reality have attempted to merge their speculations with science. Along with their more technical and abstract brethren, their findings have been enunciated by and addressed to a group of people who already share a sense of what it is to be in the world, given their similitude in intellect, income, social status, and psychological fitness, as well as their generally appearing and behaving like one another.

What friction exists among them is usually confined to certain theoretical details expounded in their works. Each of them has his own answer to some piece of the puzzle of things as they really are. These specialists in human reality eventually die and others fill their positions. The friction goes on, no great progress is made, and everyone can feel safe that the puzzle will never be put together. Should the puzzle ever be put together, it would be the greatest disaster in human history.

To piece together a picture of things as they really are in both the human and nonhuman world is not what anyone wants, for it would be the end of us. If reality specialists had the chance to know everything—not just a Theory of Everything TOE —they would probably be unable to say no, not after millennia of pretending that this is what they have been working toward. But would they not also quake in their boots at this unprecedented ascension?

We aspire to omniscience, but should we ever actually become omniscient what would be the point in continuing to exist? The game would be over and done.

No mystery would be left to lend our lives a mystique, and without this mystique everything we do would be reduced to numbers we could look up in a computer file and have no need to puzzle over. We would be victorious. Everything having to do with humanity and nonhumanity would hit a wall and come to a stop. We seem to have set out on an expedition whose success would be our ruin. The only way out, perhaps, would be to fashion creatures less knowing than ourselves and exist through them.

What humiliation, what pathos that we should ever end up as gods. Is there nothing that can bring us into reconciliation with the cancer of existence? His plan to commit deicide could not work, though, while he existed as a unified entity outside of space-time and matter. Seeking to annul His oneness, he divided Himself into the time-bound fragments of the universe, which included organic life forms.

Through this method, He successfully excluded Himself from existence. In this light, the raging of human progress is thus shown to be a mightily apparent symptom of a downfall into extinction that has just gotten underway.

Similarly, the wisdom of religions such as Christianity and Buddhism is all for leaving this world behind for a destination unknown and impossible to conceive. One day, however, the will to survive in this life or any other will be universally extinguished by a conscious will to die and stay dead.

But consider this: if God exists, or once existed, what would He not be capable of doing? Why should God not want to be done with Himself as a reaction to His suffering the sickness and pain now reflected in His creation? Why should He not have kicked off a universe that was one great puppet show destined to be crunched or scattered until an absolute nothingness had been established? This article is also available through an Internet search at the time of this writing.

For rebuttals of all other religious interpretations of the universe and our place in it, see the vast library of materials written to this purpose. Zwolf philosophische Essays in Mind, July, It is part of the cog-and-wheel functioning of the physical and psychological machinery that motivates an individual to go about his business. After the threat is dealt with, this system once again returns to its autonomic functioning. Only in a small percentage of humans is meaning a component of being on which they consciously and voluntarily fixate without external provocation.

Only when we feel that something great is about to be revealed does anything seem to mean something. And this experience, as the preceding quotes from Borges and Lovecraft concur, is stirred by works of art or by an aesthetic vision of things in the world.

Meaning arises on the brink of knowing and topples with the incursions of scriptures, doctrines, and narratives that specify the mysterious as an object, a datum. To wail adamantly that a god exists is to kill that god or turn it into a plastic idol. To say that a god might exist is to vivify it with the meaning of mystery. Given the antimony on this issue between Borges and Nietzsche, should one writer be heralded over the other as genuine, authentic, or whatever term of approval one cares to wield?

The question is moot to the highest possible or impossible power. Each man was handling the stress of a hyper-diligent consciousness in his own style and not in one pressed upon him by cognitive meddlers. This belief is perceptibly valuable for those who will suck upon anything to nurture their oneiric belief in a universe that has an overarching purpose or meaning of a religious nature. For Lovecraft, the experience of cosmic wonder, even as it partook of a sense of horror, was elemental to his interest in remaining alive.

He saw the universe as nothingness in motion and lived to tell about it. A man of tender sensibilities, Lovecraft was almost certainly filled with a similar dread, the difference between him and Pascal being that he also beheld the dreadfulness of his place in the universe with fascination. What the fallout of the Singularity might be is unknown. It could begin a dynamic new chapter in human evolution.

The prophesized leap will be jumpstarted by computer gadgetry and somehow will involve artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and other habiliments of high technology. According to another gang of futurists, the Singularity will not happen: we will go on with our lives as stumblebums of the same old story, puppets of a script we did not write and cannot read. Understandably, the former view is more exciting than the latter, the more so in that an apocalypse has been inserted as a wild card.

In this sense, the Singularity is the secular counterpart of the Christian rapture, and its true believers foresee it as happening within the lifetime of many who are alive today, as the earliest Christians, not to mention those of subsequent ages, believed in the imminence of Judgment Day.

Whether heaven or hell awaits us, the critical aspect of the Singularity is that it provides a diversion for those among the technological elite who are ever on the lookout for twinkling baubles to replace the ones with which they have grown bored. The Singularity encapsulates a perennial error among the headliners of science: that there has never been nor will ever be the least qualitative difference between the earliest single-celled organisms and any human or machine conceivable or not conceivable in a world whose future is without a destination.

That we are going nowhere is not a curable fate; that we must go nowhere at the fastest possible velocity just might be curable, although probably not. Either way, it makes no difference. Zapffe deplored 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.

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 reserved his leisure hours for the most evidently purposive waste of time—mountain climbing. Like Scientology, the Singularity was conceived by someone who wrote science fiction. One of its big-name proponents, the American inventor Raymond Kurzweil, established a regimen of taking nutritional supplements per day in hopes of living long enough to reap the benefits of the Singularity, which may include an interminable life-span among its other effects.

It is as easy to make fun of religious or scientific visionaries as it is to idolize them. Which attitude is adopted depends on whether or not they tell you what you want to hear. Given the excitements promised by the Singularity, odds are that it will collect a clientele of hopefuls who want to get a foot in the future, for nobody doubts that tomorrow will be better than today. More and more it becomes clear that if indeed human consciousness is a mistake, it is the most farcical one this planet has ever seen.

When gods and their true believers come into the picture, the rhetoric of insolence is an unsatisfactory exercise in self-gratification for an infidel, much as the sarcasms of a literary critic are thrown away on a book that everyone agrees is a bad job. Only the blasphemies of the faithful who feel themselves ill-used by their deity carry the music of hatred that the unbeliever attempts in vain. Take the Book of Job. Were its protagonist an actual man and not a lesson in fearful obeisance, or whatever his story is supposed to convey, the Old Testament might contain a symphony of rancor greater than any this world has known.

But Job turns legalistic rather than abusive; he wants to argue why he should be spared his hellish trials. No good can come of that. Any argument can go on interminably. The Norwegian himself did not take the trouble to do so. No reason he should, since first he would have to imagine a new humanity, which is not ordinarily done outside of fiction, a medium of realism but not of reality. Conscious that this assignment is impossible and thankless, nothing prohibits us from attempting it.

Perhaps the new humanity would be a race in which everyone is a becalmed visionary who has recognized an unwavering retreat from the worldly scene as a benevolent proceeding. This task, as Zapffe indicates, need take only a nicely limited number of generations to complete. While their numbers tapered off, these dead-enders would be the most fortunate in the history of our species.

Rightly pleased with themselves as the unsurpassed conquerors of human suffering, the last survivors could universally share material comforts previously held in trust for the well-born or money-getting classes of world history. With ample food and housing already at hand for this short but decisive epoch, the nature of labor could radically change. Euthanasia would be offered to all without being imposed on any.

What a relief, what an unburdening to have closed the book on humankind. Yet it would not need to be slammed shut. As long as we progressed toward a thinning of the herd, couples could still have children and new faces could be brought into the fold as billions became millions and then thousands. New generations would learn about the past, and, like those before them, be glad they never lived in those days, although they might play at cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, management and labor.

The last of us could be the very best of us who ever roamed the earth, the great exemplars of a humanity we used to dream of becoming before we got wise to the reality that we would never make it as a mob always on the make for new recruits. Quite naturally, this depiction of an end times by a collective suicide pact will seem abhorrent to those now living in hope of a progressively better future, one that will exculpate them from a depraved indifference to the suffering predestined for their young.

It may also seem a romanticized utopia, if not a front for a tyrannical oligarchy run by fanatics of extinction rather than anything like a social and psychological sanctuary for a species harboring the shared goal of delimiting its stay on earth. Without an iota of uncertainty, humankind is and will always be unsuited to engineer its own deliverance.

The delusional will forever be with us—they will forever be us—thereby making pain, fear, and abnegation of what is right in front of our face the preferred style of living and the one that will be passed on to countless generations.

There is nothing remarkable about people wanting to continue into perpetuity in this way and to shrug off anyone who is in noncompliance. Hordes turned out for his funeral in Schopenhauer could not fill a classroom with students who wanted to hear his lectures.

By these occurrences, we are again reminded that humankind has always displayed a vigorous immunity to the morally injurious disillusionment that attends new ideas. Scientists do not set out to shake up the status quo. Their purview is that of trifling matters relating to the physical workings of the world. They also seek payment and maybe notoriety for their work.

Knowledge of the origins and ornamentations of the universe, including those of organic life, changes nothing about how we live and how we die. Buddha was purportedly incurious about how or why the universe and its inhabitants came to be. What possible difference could such information make to someone who had consecrated himself to a single end: to become liberated from the illusions that held his head to the grindstone of existence?

In a very real sense, Buddhism was the prototype for the field of neuroscience, which may yet deliver a blow from which the self-image of humankind will not soon recover. What remains to be seen is this: will neuroscientists substantively modify our concepts about who we are and where we stand or merely cause our heads to make some pettifogging modifications.

In the s, Persinger modified a motorcycle helmet to affect the magnetic fields of the brain of its wearer, inducing a variety of strange sensations. These included experiences in which subjects temporarily felt themselves proximate to supernatural phenomena that included ghosts and gods. A field of study called neurotheology grew up around this and other laboratory experiments. Even if you can substantiate a scientific find with a cudgel of data that should render the holy opposition unconscious, they will be at the ready to discredit you—imprisonment, torture, and public execution having gone the way of chastity belts.

The bonus of this deadlock for writers of supernatural horror is that it ensures the larger part of humanity will remain in a state of fear, because no one can ever be certain of either his own ontological status or that of gods, demons, alien invaders, and sundry other bugbears. A Buddhist would advise that we forget about whether or not the bogeymen we have invented or divined are real. The big question is this: are we real? But none should hold their breath for a verdict in this case, which will be in deliberation until the day that human beings cease to walk the earth, although not because they listened to the Last Messiah.

Aside from its lack of a god-figure, it sits atop two courageous and cogent observations, numbers one and two of the Four Noble Truths. The first is the equation between life and suffering.

The second is that a craving for life is the provenance of suffering, which is useless and without value.

Pace C. Lewis [The Problem of Pain, ], whose apologetics are applauded by Christians for giving them ammo against logicians who cannot square an all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful God with the demonic sadism of His world.

Theodicy notwithstanding, what more could a believer ask for than a chance to clean up in the afterlife by wagering their pains in this one? These Two Noble Truths lead off a philosophy of hopelessness that might have amounted to something if prescriptions for salvation had not followed, as they did with the Third Noble Truth: that there is a way out of suffering.

Now everything was up for grabs. How tragic that Buddha, or the committee that wrote under his pseudonym, did not stop with the first two of the Four Noble Truths but wandered into preaching a way that individuals—and ultimately all of humanity—may be released from the shackles of suffering. That way is through the Noble Eightfold Path that leads to enlightenment and Nirvana.

Please note that the foregoing sentence does not apply to all sects of Buddhism. As with other belief systems, Buddhism is a compilation of do-it-yourself projects, and some of them are unlike the faith herein encapsulated. This principle has its parallel in every philosophy, ideology, and bag of myths that has ever been presented to the world: because no two heads are contoured the same, no one system or collocation of systems will ever be an immaculate fit.

If truth about yourself is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude. The Buddhists have made a stand on this point by attacking the thought process itself. With its dual objectives of enlightenment and cutting oneself loose from rebirth, Buddhism early on joined all other religions in pitching a brighter future for believers and their deliverance from the woes of this world.

It seems to be a superior conception—or non-conception, if you prefer—to the ethereal theme parks of other religions on this basis: one is not asked to believe that something is true because a dogmatic authority says it is true; instead, one is invited to see the truth for oneself once maximum enlightenment kicks in, an invitation we are forewarned is extended only to those who do not doubt the truth in advance of lolling restfully in it.

Chesterton would have condoned Buddhism on this point. In the marketplace of salvation, enlightenment is categorically the best buy ever offered so say its ad-men.

Roughly speaking, enlightenment is the correction of our consciousness and the establishment of a state of being in which muddy illusion is washed away and a diamond of understanding shines through. This is the supreme payoff. Millions of people have spent their lives, and some have even lost their minds, trying to win it without ever comprehending, as they sucked their last breath, what it was they had gambled to get. Had they indeed attained enlightenment without being aware of having done so?

Were there stages of enlightenment and, if so, how far had they gotten? But enlightenment seems to be a well-defended redoubt whose location cannot be triangulated by speech, the only rule being that if you have to ask yourself if you have arrived, then it is certain you have not. Nevertheless, it does seem that a charmed circle of individuals have reached a state that corresponds to that of enlightenment as delineated—vaguely or rapturously—in scads of scriptures, diaries, copyrighted publications, and public depositions.

And they appear to have come to it unwarned, sometimes as a result of physical trauma or a Near-Death Experience.

Perhaps the capital instance of enlightenment by accident is that of U. Krishnamurti, who claims to have experienced clinical death and then returned to life as the kind of being glorified in the literature of enlightenment, although it should be added that U.

Contrary to the popular holy man Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, who at the age of sixteen reported his death and enlightenment, then spent the rest of his life as a chain-smoking guru.

To his good fortune, he had no problem with his new way of functioning. He did not need to accept it since by his account he had lost all sense of having an ego that needed to accept or reject anything. How could someone who had ceased to partake in the commerce of selves, who had discarded his personhood, believe or not believe in anything so outlandish as enlightenment. What he repeatedly exclaimed in interviews is the impossibility of human beings, except perhaps one in a billion, to keep their heads from overlaying teachings of any kind on their lives as animals who are born only to survive and reproduce, not to build either cultures or castles in the air.

G never spoke of a solution for what our heads have made of our lives. We are captured by our illusions and there is no way out. That U. Read Online Download. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. Noctuary by Thomas Ligotti. Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti.

At once a guidebook to pessimistic thought and a relentless critique of humanity's employment of self-deception to cope with the pervasive suffering of their existence, The Conspiracy against the Human Race may just convince readers that there is more than a measure of truth in the despairing yet unexpectedly liberating negativity that is widely considered a hallmark of Ligotti's work.

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