The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (13 page)

PESSIMISM

Rulers in society are not heroically consumed by interests other than their own. They say they are, but they are not. A spectacularly tiresome historical motif is the use of the Many to procure wealth and power for the Few. (This apprehension may also be laid at the doorstep of Hume, who specialized in detaining his readers with obvious but unspoken realities.) From time to time, those among the Many wonder why persons of wealth and power do not willingly take it easy at some juncture in their lives rather than straining to pursue as much wealth and power as they possibly can. Rulers of such entities as corporations, countries, and religious denominations seem loath to decelerate their acquisitiveness for wealth and power below full throttle. The only constraints on those trying to increase their wealth and power are others who are doing the same. And none of them will ever take a break from their covetous ways, not willingly. They will never take it easy. They do not know how. They only know that if their entities of wealth and power do not grow bigger and bigger, they will die. And they will. Everything and everyone else does. But rulers in society do not like to think about that. They want their entities to exist for all time. They want them to be undead.

During much of the twentieth century, social thinkers worried about technology becoming so efficient that human beings would be freed from devoting the plurality of their time to labor, which includes those hours spent preparing for labor and recovering from labor, leaving workers with a surplus of leisure and not enough distractions to fill their days. Attuned to auguries of a palmy future, these observers had qualms that this boom of idleness would trigger an existential meltdown, one characterized by the perturbations of those who were unused to contending with a surfeit of uncommitted hours. As usual, the predicted apocalypse did not arrive. Workers never quaked in horror before leisure’s abyss or recoiled at the thought of having too much time on their hands.

Theoretically, a life of leisure for all is possible. But the Few will always want to procure 60

more and more wealth and power. And for this they need workers willing to spend the plurality of their time working.

Some speculative minds have faith that we are en route to a utopia where people are not mainly absorbed in a job that is killing them or despondent because they do not have a killing job. They do not know what the specs for this utopia could be, as believers cannot conceive of heaven. Are their speculations, then, any less pitiful than those about the Kingdom of God? Pessimist answer: no. Pessimist reason: utopias are ersatz heavens unsupported by any knowledge, logic, or portents we have or can ever have. Life is suffering and the promise of a future of non-killing jobs or a jobless leisure is but an inveiglement to keep us turning on this infernal Ferris wheel of life, a booby prize when set beside nonexistence. Pessimist conclusion: at all levels, the systems of life—from sociopolitical systems to solar systems—are repugnant and should be negated as MALIGNANTLY USELESS.

Having a pessimist view of things is a fluke of temperament, a slippery word whose synonyms all mean the same fantastical thing: a steadfast quality of mind and emotion.

(Like pyramids, temperaments are best seen as a long-distance illusion.) Made from the same dross as every other mortal, the pessimist tends to cleave to whatever validates the temper of his thoughts and emotions. Denied contentment with the world, he can only publicize his discontent. He does this for the amusement of his kindred malcontents and perhaps to put his disputants on the defensive about the bilge they have been swilling all their lives. Everyone not only wants to think they are right but to have others unwaveringly affirm their least notion as unassailable. Pessimists are no exception. But they are few and do not show up on the radar of our race. Immune to the blandishments of religions, countries, families, and whatever else that—with a smattering of emotive images and strains of maudlin music—can move the average citizen to tears or violence, the pessimist is invisible in both history books and the media. Without belief in gods or ghosts, unmotivated by a comprehensive delusion, he could never plant a bomb, plan a revolution, or shed blood for a cause. Pessimists are indeed lackadaisical as partisans in the human drama.

The Gnostic sects of the early Christian era negated what everyone else believed.

Naturally, the pezzonovanti of the Church (as Godfather Vito Corleone would say) not only murdered their bodies but did what it could to murder their ideals. For an atheist living in a religious society, a befitting pose would be to start praying if you want to win friends and influence people of wealth and power. This fact is most patent in what Americans hallow as the greatest country that history has ever excreted. No mistake: those who negate what the throngs about them affirm are not worldly wise.

Thoroughgoing pessimists do not even deign to talk about wisdom except perhaps to indicate that it is just another spook of our consciousness. We may possess cleverness and cunning and savoir-faire. We may know how to maneuver our way through life and filch what we can from the limited store of goods that fortune holds. But are these talents what people mean by wisdom? If not, then what can it be said to be? Answer: it can be anything that a guru or a salesman says it is. Words that have no meaning are high-margin merchandise. Ask any wise guy.

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Pessimist thinkers often exhort inaction and avoidance of society, although few of them have actually done either. The Romanian-born French writer E. M. Cioran—whose philosophical essays are an assault on the unmitigated crumminess of all creation, a position that has led some commentators to pigeonhole him as a latter-day Gnostic, minus the god-figure—wrote that manual labor in a monastery is the closest thing to a solution for the madness and pain of existence . . . yet he himself was a literary man about town who would never have been elected to a monastic hall of fame. Obsessed with suicide, he showered laurels upon Heinrich von Kleist and others who themselves assigned the hour and the manner of their dying. But Cioran clung to existence until he was finally taken down while in the stupor of Alheimer’s disease, doomed like Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf to be a suicide without portfolio. And Schopenhauer, while arguing that life is a bootless venture that pays us off with pain, was always ready to throw himself into the fray with opponents dead or alive but did not throw in the towel on his own long life due to an anti-suicide clause in his philosophy. One might also fairly opine that he was never pained enough, as was Nietzsche, to consider suicide as a fall-back position should his miseries became too much for him to bear. Compassion for the ailing of others Schopenhauer had in abundance, but what most cowed his imagination was boredom, a pestilence that cannot be calculated among the worst in the world. How blessed by chance he must have been. To add to the diversions with which Schopenhauer’s life was rich, he also played the flute. Nietzsche claimed that, because he occupied himself in this way, Schopenhauer could not have been a true pessimist. This slur might be considered in light of the fact that the later philosopher, who turned pessimism into affirmation like water into wine, was a piano player and songwriter. But this fact does not make Nietzsche wrong. Schopenhauer styled himself a pessimist, an unexampled and true pessimist, which does not mean that he was one. Nothing can prove that, or anything else that Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or anyone has to say about matters of real weight. Flute-playing is not an avocation that one associates with someone who preached self-denial in all aspects of one’s life as a means to a life-negating salvation.

But if Schopenhauer practiced the flute rather than what he preached, does that disqualify him from being a pessimist, one who wrote with wearying prolixity that all life was pain and nothing else? Probably not. It does cause a person to wonder about Schopenhauer, though, and by extension to wonder about the words and ways of anyone who would cut a figure as a pessimist. And what a pestering wonder it is when some mortal decries the very world in which he prospers. Late in his lifework as the premier pessimist of the twentieth century, Cioran jotted the following note: “At Saint-Séverin, listening to the organist play the Art of the Fugue, I kept saying to myself, over and over, ‘There is the refutation of all my anathemas.’” Does this passing thought reduce Cioran’s writings to a hoax on himself and as well as those who treasure philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence? Again, probably not. But the fact that he was never disabused of the value of music does undercut his integrity, as if the nonexistence of integrity in us all were not one of the leading themes of pessimism. It does seem, however, that there is nothing one can speak or stunt one can perform to make an impeccable outward show of execration that any speck of the organic has arisen within this universe . . . or any other universe that might 62

have existed before the creation known to us or that may come after it, as well as all universes in theoretical coexistence with ours.

Certain philosophers of Greek antiquity—homeless intellectuals hanging around the edges of the agora—based their lives on the principle of doing as little as possible and doing it alone. If wisdom is to be had, this may be the course to take—at least for pessimists. Sun Tzu’s Art of War (c. sixth century B.C.E.) or Niccolò Machiavelli’s early sixteenth-century handbook for those running a state were not written for pessimists, who tend to be wash-outs in world affairs. Nor were the maxims of Balthasar Gracian’s Art of Worldly Wisdom (1637), number thirty-seven of which proffers the following advice for those who by constitution are intemperate in their worldly aspirations: “Keep a store of sarcasms and know how to use them. This is the point of greatest tact in human intercourse. Such sarcasms are often thrown out to test people's moods, and by their means one often obtains the most subtle and penetrating touchstone of the heart. Other sarcasms are malicious, insolent, poisoned by envy or envenomed by passion, unexpected flashes that destroy at once all favor and esteem. Struck by the slightest word of this kind, many fall away from the closest intimacy with superiors or inferiors that would not have been the slightest shaken by a whole conspiracy of popular insinuation or private malevolence. Other sarcasms work favorably, confirming and assisting one's reputation.

But the greater the skill with which they are launched, the greater the caution with which they should be anticipated and received. For here a knowledge of malice is in itself a means of defense, and a shot foreseen always misses its mark.” The managers of the earth would not be ill advised to memorize all 300 of Gracian’s maxims. One never knows when they might come in handy in dealing with our kind.7

All counsels of “wisdom” are a sorry tradeoff for the simplistic defeatism built into the pessimist way of looking at things, which has nothing to do with getting on in the world and seeks only to forfeit the game. Pessimists’ defenses against despair are rather expeditiously eroded, while the major part of the species seems able to undergo any trauma without significantly reexamining its execrable mantras, including “everything happens for a reason,” “life goes on,” “accept the things you cannot change,” “whatever will be, will be,” and any other old saw to get people to keep their chins up. One can either sign on to this program or suffer the consequences. Pessimists, on the other hand, construe the Creation to be objectionable and useless on principle—the worst possible dispatch of bad news.8 It seems so bad, so wrong, that, should such authority be unwisely placed into their hands, they would make it a prosecutable malfeasance to produce a being who might turn out to be a pessimist. Disenfranchised by nature, however, their kind is impressed into this world by the reproductive liberty of positive thinkers who are ever-thoughtful of the future. Pessimists also look to the future—that madhouse that is always under construction—but with a well-founded disregard rather than a groundless hope. Retrospectively, how could anyone who once looked to the future with hope not wish to reconsider? Then again, they might stand firm in their hope for the future’s future. At whatever point in time one is situated, the world seems to have a superabundance of future. And unless you are a pessimist, the future always looks better than the past or present.

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HAPPINESS

Counter to our every intuition, quasi-scientific studies affirm the following: the breaks we get in this life, whether wondrously favorable or unrectifiably calamitous, have no bearing on our “happiness.” Schopenhauer and others rate happiness in relative terms—

not as something positive in itself but only as a greater or lesser state of pain. Such a perspective is fine for the pessimistic set, but indications are that most people consider themselves happy most of the time. This finding has been authenticated by workers in the field of “happiness studies” (a.k.a. “positive psychology”). As one might gather, this discipline was not instituted to smear happiness as a misconception. Even though almost anything is debatable to the verge of a drooling frenzy, it seems there is no denying the world’s inventory of happiness, according to those who study it. If a research poll includes the statement “I am happy—true or false,” respondents will say “true” far more often than “false.” While it may be a shameful admission to let on that one is not happy, this cannot be construed to mean that those pleading happiness as their dominant humor are lying through their teeth. People want to be happy. They believe they deserve to be happy. And philosophers who inform them they can never be happy are not part of the dialogue.

Zapffe prescribed that we quit reproducing because all of our behavior unmasks us as beings whose consciousness has made sure we will never be happy, leading us to twist our heads into knots in an attempt be happy anyway. This twisting of our heads is responsible for an unsightly and tragic existence founded on lies that we tell ourselves are truths, which would not be so terrible if our lies were not always letting us down, leading us to twist our heads into still more knots in a futile effort to use our consciousness to kill our consciousness, which is what makes us what we are and do not want to be—beings who must bamboozle themselves and one another if they are to wring what seems to be a little happiness from a world that does not know or care if we are happy but just wants us to survive and reproduce as if we were any other organism and not one hobbled by nature with this fluke, mutation, or mistake of consciousness. Yet Zapffe is reputed to have been a man buoyant of heart, even when he was not pursuing his favorite pastime of mountain climbing. In the five volumes of his Selected Letters (five volumes, 1965-76), Lovecraft mentions his nervous disorders and other troubles in his life, but more often he wrote about what a fine time he had in the sunny outdoors or expatiated on the joys of his travels around the United States and Canada or joked around with a correspondent about a wide range of subjects in which he was well-studied. Cioran had friends galore and admitted in an interview that he loved to laugh. Schopenhauer himself was a bon vivant who lived it up even as he was working on his blanket condemnation of living. Unless an obtrusive physical or psychological woefulness pushes suffering front and center in their lives, and is more or less chronic, people—including those philosophical people who, if given a choice, would choose never to have been born—will apprise a pollster that they are happy or must stand accused of prevarication.