The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (14 page)

In Ecce Homo (1888; published posthumously, 1908), Nietzsche wrote, “Never have I felt happier with myself than in the sickest and most painful periods of my life. . . .”

While Nietzsche does not explicitly correlate his “sickest and most painful periods” with being happy with himself, or draw a line between his sickness and pain and any kind of 64

happiness aside from that of self-satisfaction, one is hard pressed to understand these words to have some substance other than the claim that the “sickest and most painful”

periods in Nietzsche’s life entailed a material correspondence with his feeling happy.

Seemingly a gross perversion of the facts on Nietzsche’s part, every word in his oeuvre supports his boast and is made radiant by it. If we may be incredulous of the specifics of the man’s ideas, his honesty deserves the benefit of the doubt. Nothing in Nietzsche’s life or work suggests that the creator of the superman faked his convictions or lied about his experience. We must then ask: what was the secret of his self-happiness? His answer: an unqualified ratification of whatever existence hurled at him. Acutely sensitive to the

“terrible and questionable” in life, his vivaciousness was not impeded by their effects.

The jolly tone of his writings, unmarred by embitterment (as he was addicted to telling his readers), signifies his ferocious joy. How he ascended to this state of grace is as mysterious as how one clasps the brass ring of Buddhism’s enlightenment. But the human exhibition is bursting with mysteries, as the transmuted lives of U. G. Krishnamurti and John Wren-Lewis bespeak, so why not count Nietzsche’s happiness among them?

Furthermore, the whole of his thought hinges on this prodigy, so we must take him at his word if we are to bother taking him at all. On his honor, Nietzsche was untouched by what other mortals might suffer as hindrances to their cheer. Migraines, gastrointestinal dysfunctions, and other pathologies were for him translated into happiness and became parents of his joy. If only he had been a theist, Nietzsche’s “word” might have caused theodicy to go out of fashion, drying up all the rivers of ink that have flowed from the Book of Job. With Nietzsche as the anti-Job, mollifications for the thrashings we take from a god who is paradoxically all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving would become outmoded, and even indefensible in themselves. His would not be a Jobian patience but a Nietzschean jollity for the floggings visited upon him by the flighty Yahweh. He would have praised every lash laid upon him and stood for more in the flagellation brothel the Elohim created in six days and has since kept in business by delegating its operations to every dominator or dominatrix that ever applied for the job.

Nietzsche would appear an anomaly in that sickness and pain stimulated him to loftier heights of happiness than he knew during times when he was relatively sound of body.

Among ordinary people, the simultaneity of happiness and pain is more the rage. Most banal is the default from an interruption of pain back to one’s life-norm of happiness. The strange truth is that people whom one would expect to be unhappy are not, or not for long. Happiness happens . . . or seems to happen, which amounts to the same thing. Even survivors of mind-numbing horrors may recover and become happy, although this does not put the lie to the lives of those who do not bounce back. But for all that, the statistics of positive psychology back up the story that—whoever they are, wherever they live, and whatever their living conditions—no large percentage of the world’s population may be counted among the unhappy. Yet no one can disavow those whom we might designate as unhappy people, people who have never known a day of happiness in their lives or whose unhappy moments are so overwhelming that it would be indecent to consider a fugitive gaiety that may come their way as anything else than jeering exception to the rule of their unhappiness. There are also people who, if they only could see the pain and grief that awaits them in the future, would ordain this vision sufficient to excuse self-slaughter at the earliest opportunity. Perhaps most mournful are those who have lived a life of 65

happiness, then come to suffer in a way that extinguishes every memory of that life, leaving them to curse their entrance into this world. For these unfortunates, Marcel Proust was indecorously wide of the mark: one may search for lost good times without ever regaining them. And just as happiness cannot be restored in the wake of an indelible adversity, there are also torments that no enumeration of happy moments can abrogate from our days. These lacerating fortunes are everlasting certainties. They are surer than the suns of the universe because suns can explode or grow cold, but wherever there is life there is pain. Yet pain is also an asset, for without its distress signals an organism is destined for a siege of insults to its anatomy. Ask anyone with leprosy.

Whatever adventures in happiness we may have—without quibbling about whether they are absolute or relative—all take place in the shadow of souls whose torments will end only with death. Worse, the fatally wrecked must live in the shadow of others who are happy, if indeed the former are not so unfit that they are past noticing the universe or any mirth within it, existing in a windowless confinement of ill-fate, an unappealable seclusion where the only possible comparisons are between one horror and another. How could anyone find happiness in a world where such incurables are always within walking distance? We do it all the time, most surely, but should that dispense us from the guilt of being happy while those by-standers to happiness are everywhere, tears and blood pouring from their eyes? They could have brought it on themselves of course. Maybe they were just asking for it, doing the things they did, or not doing other things, and being the way they were. Somehow they could be the ones to blame for their own ill-being.

They might have committed some sin, some blunder within the Tao, some crime in the eyes of a cosmic law. Perhaps disrespect of the Holy Spirit placed them among the damned in both life and death.9 Or maybe they were just indolent in the pursuit of happiness, while we earned ours, paid for it as we would any other commodity. The managers of society want us to be happy, which makes it politic to be mindless of anyone who is not happy along with us. What good is it being happy if you cannot be left in peace with your happiness? But any killjoy will tell you: “If even one person’s life is a living hell, then the world and any happiness within it is MALIGNANTLY USELESS.”10

This censure of the happy is moralistic, to say the least. It is a party pooper’s attempt to compromise anything that might be called happiness. It turns the very idea of happiness into an unconscionable delusion conceived by lucky clods or a deplorable rationalization dreamed up by swine. Most of all, it makes being happy seem the unforgivable sin of the saved against their siblings in the pit, who are too much occupied with horror to hear the gospel of happiness. Unshaken by these moral protests, positive thinkers and pessimists alike may retort: “Happiness is not a natural birthright. You must be thinking of death.”

Nothing is as certain as the fact that human beings require their existence to be justified.

Without this justification, we could not go on living as we have all these years. Though our existence may be futile or absurd or painful makes no difference as to whether or not it is justified to us. People can go on existing with so little justification that they themselves could not tell you what justifies their existence. But if they could tell you, this is what they would say: “I exist to be happy.” This is the only justification for human existence—happiness or the prospect of happiness. What constitutes happiness, we must own, is near boundless in character. It may even be something that seems horrible, like 66

being burned at the stake for one’s convictions. Or it may be doing something that would make a person unhappy not to do, like sacrificing his or her life for another, which if it were not done could devastate that person’s future happiness. All we can really say about the nature of happiness is that to be happy is not to be unhappy. Nobody would say with candor, “I exist to be unhappy.” Even someone who commits suicide may be said to have existed for some happiness or prospect of happiness that they did not believe would ever be theirs (Schopenhauer, “On Suicide”). There are also those who commit suicide because the prospect of ending the unhappiness of their lives makes them happy. That is how far people will go to be happy, and it is the only thing that justifies our existence.

Any other justification is just the surface beneath which lies the real justification, which is to be happy or have a hope of being happy. This hope may not be for happiness in this world but in an afterlife. Whatever happiness may mean to us, we must have it or expect to have it; without this having or expecting to have, our existence would not be justified and we could not go on living as we have been all these years. Even if we are mistaken that we are happy or can ever be happy, we would go on living with this mistaken justification. Our existence must be justified and only happiness or the prospect of happiness, actual or mistaken, can do that. The question remains: why do we need to go on living as we have all these years? The answer is that we do not. Nothing that we know or can possibly know informs us otherwise. And if we do not need to go on living as we have all these years, then we also do not need our existence to be justified by happiness or the prospect of happiness. At this point, then, we must rethink the thesis that human beings need their existence to be justified by happiness or the prospect of happiness.

There was never anything certain about that. Human beings can live themselves to death in a state of unhappiness and with a total lack of expectation of happiness. Some human beings may believe they require their existence to be justified, which is close to saying that they believe that their existence is justified. But their belief has its origins in one thing: the fact that they already exist. Human beings that exist and are conscious of existing—as opposed to fetuses, toddlers, the brain damaged and super retarded, coma patients, etc.—almost universally do not like the idea that their existence may be wholly without justification and therefore purposeless, meaningless, and useless. They also do not much care to brood upon their upcoming nonexistence, which is about all they would have to do if their existence was not justified by happiness or the possibility of happiness.

These facts make existence itself into a problem for those who are conscious they exist.

For them, which is to say anyone reading this book as well as its author, existence is not just a problem but is the only problem. Pitifully, there is no solution to this problem that would not destroy our conception of ourselves with nothing to replace it. Before we existed, we did not exist. And nonexistence does not need to be justified any more than does existence. Proof: nonexistence antedates our existence; since existence cannot be said to be an improvement over its forerunner, this rather invalidates any justification that could possibly be conceived for either existence or nonexistence. The latter, nonexistence, does have the advantage over its counterpart given that it does not have the handicap of existing. One might go out on a limb and say that existence is no worse than nonexistence, but that is not a justification for the replacement of one by the other. And although happiness may be thrown in to sweeten the pot of our existence, this does not justify bearing progeny who, if they had never existed, would not suffer from their inexperience of being happy in life. Nor would they suffer from uncertainties about being 67

happy after they are processed by death into the kingdom that may or may not be to come. Fact is, nothing can justify our existence. Existence of any flavor is not only unjustified, it is useless, malignantly so, and has nothing to recommend it over nonexistence. A person’s addiction to existence is understandable as a telltale of the fear of nonexistence, but one’s psychology as a being that already exists does not justify existence as a condition to be perpetuated but only explains why someone would want to perpetuate it. For the same reason, even eternal bliss in a holy hereafter is unjustified, since it is just another form of existence, another instance in which the unjustifiable is perpetuated. That anyone should have a bias for heaven over nonexistence should by rights be condemned as hedonistic by the same people who scoff at Schopenhauer for complaining about the disparity between “the effort and the reward” in human life.

People may believe they can choose any number of things. But they cannot choose to undo their existence, leaving them to live and die as puppets who have had an existence forced upon them whose edicts they must follow. If you are already among the existent, anything you do will be unjustified and MALIGNANTLY USELESS. And anyone’s disposition to mock this paragraph as sophistical or detect in it some affinity with their own temper is their prerogative.

NOTES

1. Some quotes from U. G. may be useful here. The likeness between U. G.’s contentions and those of Zapffe, as well as to others made or to be made by the author of the present work, are fairly blatant. As U. G. has said, “All insights, however extraordinary they may be, are worthless. You can create a tremendous structure of thought from your own discovery, which you call insight. But that insight is nothing but the result of your own thinking, the permutations and combinations of thought. Actually there is no way you can come up with anything original.” The following selection is taken from interviews with U. G. collected as No Way Out (1991).

The problem is this: nature has assembled all these species on this planet. The human species is no more important than any other species on this planet. For some reason, man accorded himself a superior place in this scheme of things. He thinks that he is created for some grander purpose than, if I could give a crude example, the mosquito that is sucking his blood. What is responsible for this is the value system that we have created. And the value system has come out of the religious thinking of man. Man has created religion because it gives him a cover.