The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (17 page)

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was first published in 1935. Since that time, scientists have continued screwing around to extend our days of pain and have done almost nothing on the other front. It is as if they have taken on Victor Frankenstein as a role model and emulate him as they can. In his 1994 award-winning bestseller How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, surgeon Sherwin B. Nuland recounts how he persuaded a ninety-two-year-old woman to undergo an operation that would squeeze from her a few more months or years of life. While she initially declined, content to die at what was already an advanced age, Dr. Nuland ultimately wore her down and got her into the operating room, figuring, as he states, that his patient was “one of those people to whom survival was not worth the cost.” He admits that he duped her by withholding the full horror of that cost as it would be extracted in the form of postoperative agonies should she survive the surgery.

She did survive long enough to suffer those agonies and to let Nuland know what a louse she considered him to be. After some compulsory passages of hand-wringing doubt about his underhanded ministration, the doctor defends himself by confiding that, had he not performed this operation, he would be criticized by his peers at the hospital’s weekly surgical conference for not following standard operating procedure. Nuland’s fellow surgeons would have viewed a decision not to operate as his patient’s rather his own. And that would be bad, since doctors should be the only ones to decide such things as whether or not a patient goes under the knife.

In their actions, Nuland and his colleagues played out a mainstay of the horror genre: that of an experiment gone wrong. This convention became proverbial in Mary Shelley’s novel published in 1818. It is as if Nuland and his fellow mad doctors took the botched surgery in that book as their guiding light. “What protocol would Frankenstein follow?”

they might have asked themselves. He was their mentor: the one for whom Life was the greatest stunt of all, and one that he longed to master. Additionally, Nuland had already sized up the old woman as “one of those people.” Although not as precocious as McCoy’s Gloria in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Nuland’s patient knew when to throw in the towel. She thought she might be allotted that much control over her life.

What she did not know was that she was living in Frankenstein’s world, and by damn she would live and die by Frankenstein’s Oath: “We, as certified protectors of the species and members in good standing of the master-class of the race, by the power invested in us by those who wish to survive and reproduce, vow to perpetuate and enforce the fiction that life is worth having and worth living come hell or irreparable brain damage.”13 How 77

could an old woman who had been stigmatized as “one of those people” go up against such a juggernaut of chicanery? How can anyone?

Eventually euthanasia will become standard practice for the terminally ill, and perhaps for anyone who so chooses this sure cure. Until then, those who reject Frankenstein and affirm McCoy’s Gloria must take care of themselves . . . if they can work up the guts or get a little help. But standing in the way of their making the right move are some formidable obstacles. One of them is the conscience (archaic for “consciousness”) that Shakespeare’s Hamlet avowed “makes cowards of us all.”14 Another obstacle is the peer pressure that Dr. Nuland felt would be pointed in his direction. Still another is that of

“other people” whose lives are entwined with those of suicides and who die with them though they live on after the “crime” of self-murder. If nature made a mistake by spewing out creatures in which consciousness grew like a fungus, she still knew enough to implant in them a universal instinct that serves the species and spurs on its members to chew off a leg to escape capture and killing, whose dominant drives are survival and the spreading of themselves far and wide.

As Ernest Becker expostulated in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Denial of Death (1974), a work that later kindled a branch of psychology with the marvelous name of Terror Management Theory, human beings are in thrall to the fear of death, and this fear determines the entire landscape of our lives. To skip around our death anxiety, we have engineered a world to deceive ourselves into believing that we will linger beyond the final breakdown of our bodies. We know this fabricated world because we see it around us every day, an offense to the eye. Shamelessly indiscreet are houses of worship where people go to get a whiff of meaning . . . and meaning means only one thing—immortality.

In heaven or hell or reincarnated life forms, we must go on and on—us without end.

Travesties of immortalism are effected day and night in obstetrics wards, factories of our future that turn out a product made in its makers’ image, a miracle by which we enter into a devil’s bargain with God, glorifying Him with the credit and giving us a chance to have our names and genetics projected into a time we will not live to see.15

But Becker did not anatomize this scheme as quite so simple. Those churches cannot be just any churches—they must be our churches. The same holds true of progeny and its stand-ins. In lieu of personal immortality, we are willing to compromise by accepting the survival of persons and institutions that seem to extend who we are—our families, our heroes, our religions, our countries.16 And anyone else who presents a threat to our sense of self, anyone who does not look and live as we do, should abstain from treading on our turf because in this world it is every self for itself and all of its facsimiles. In such a world, one might extrapolate, the only honest persons—from the angle of self-delusion, naturally—are those who brazenly implement genocide against outsiders who impinge upon them. Genocide is the pulse of every culture, even the multicultural Land of the Free. “And anyone who doubts this can ask any Indian,” as the expatriate American writer James Baldwin once said. Will the human creature ever undergo a reformation, an evolutionary leap beyond its ancient recourse to genocide by methods either egregious or discreet? It seems a long shot.

78

Against those who let loose genocide for their own augmentation, some are boosters for its total inverse as shown to us by Gloria Beatty. They will shut the door quietly and act according to the logic of pain. Others, misguidedly, may think their suicide will have an impact as a laconic critique of the world or as vengeance against certain parties. But for a members-only society, speaking confidentially, the truth is a darker thing. Would-be perpetrators of a worldwide extermination, they would kill themselves only because killing it all is closed off to them. They hate having been delivered into a world only to be herded as sheep to the abattoir. They despise the conspiracy of Lies for Life almost as much as they despise themselves for continuing to function within it and to criticize those who are party to it by any other method than the erasure of the whole lot. If they could unmake the world by pushing a button, they would do so without a second thought. There is no satisfaction in a lone suicide. The phenomenon of “suicide euphoria” aside, there is only fear, bitterness, or depression beforehand, then pain in the act, and nothingness afterward. But to push that button, to depopulate this earth and void its orbit as well: unalloyed satisfaction, as of a labor well done . . . and the end of labor for eternity. This would be done for the good of all. Those who unknowingly nurture the conspiracy against the human race are also its victims.17

FICTIONS

Before Horace McCoy crafted They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? as a novel, he offered it to Hollywood in the form of a film treatment. This was astute from both a financial and an aesthetic standpoint. But the treatment was rejected, and it was subsequently converted into a novel which sold poorly and in translation became a favorite of the French existentialists. While McCoy's novel is bleak, it is also boring. The 1969 film adaptation won or was nominated for a slew of Academy Awards, arguably because McCoy was right: a narrative whose setting is a dance marathon should take the form of a movie.

Another outstanding example of story-to-screen adaptation is Apocalypse Now (1979), which comes as close as any movie to rivaling source material that is above the grade of popular entertainment, in this instance Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1902).

Naturally, without Heart of Darkness there would be no Apocalypse Now. And, in the final analysis, Apocalypse Now suffers upon subsequent viewings because it is the nature of cinematic images to grow overly familiar and lose their effect, whereas this does not occur with Heart of Darkness or any other notable literary work. But whether the book was better than the movie or the other way around is beside the point: they are both but a means to kill time for their consumers and to make a living or a name for their creators.

As Pascal wrote, “All man's troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room.” While this often-quoted statement is both unconvincing and impracticable, it does play up some facts that might not otherwise receive serious deliberation. We are all born into a society resembling that in Zapffe’s “The Last Messiah,” one where people occupy themselves, when they have the leisure to do so, with such things as movies, books, songs, and other toys for the mind and senses. Together, these form the recreational wing of a conglomerate chaired by our social, political, and spiritual overseers, who purvey their products like pimps. (Pascal himself, foreshadowing Zapffe, made much in his writings of distraction [divertissement] as a self-deceptive scheme by which humanity attempts to turn its consciousness from that which would make it vulnerable to a resolute 79

despair.) We also have utensils for distraction and anchoring forced into our hands by schools and other institutions. If we really put our minds to it, we might see through the mechanisms of this conspiracy. But as it is, we are helplessly obedient to its first, and only, commandment: “Thou shall have thy head and hand-cart filled with the most hair-raising bullshit known to man or priest.” Those shopping for a good deal in a used-up world will follow this exhortation with unflagging avidity, for they must have no inkling of any business other than show business. The mass media is the first line of defense against any tip-off that there might be a way to exist—or not exist, as it were—other than agitating our brains like machines spitting out popcorn in a movie theater. We are particularly discouraged, both by our own heads and the heads of all the nations, faiths, and families of the world, from going head-to-head with the inescapable troubles of existence and perhaps grappling with those troubles by more effective means than those offered by the entertainment industry in its multifarious forms or the tribal shaman with his chants and gyring. (“We think, but only what our religions and televisions tell us to think.”) Is the threat to the social order so great that constant pressure must be brought to bear on every participant in the global calamity? If a momentary lapse into reason leads the stragglers among us into the arms of silence and solitude, this is more than compensated by the majority’s unashamed distaste and biological indisposition for tranquility over turmoil. Why go into apoplexies of angst that we will run out of conflicts with ourselves and others? There will always be debacles aplenty for our distraction. The horsemen of Peace, Love, and Understanding are not going to ride into town and confiscate our weapons. And a world of peace, love, and understanding would be as useless as any other.

Although few would own up to it, even to themselves, we love havoc in both life and art.

What we call “evil” captivates us from childhood to old age, never paling in its seductive entreaties, its heady effects on our imaginations and our glands. We are gluttons for atrocity and yawn at the quiescent. The most prominent of the angels is the one who started a war in heaven. In a milieu where there seemed no place for anything new, he invented evil . . . and has been on our minds ever since. One thing about infamy—it is never boring. The diabolical is a bracing jolt to our enervated systems; screams echo in our blood and invigorate us. The penalty we pay for this reprobate indulgence is a nominal one: formalized and shiftless expressions learned by rote and spoken at regular intervals against intemperance in carnage, carnality, intolerance, or whatever seems to be the evil of the moment. But any quietist leanings we may have—as in the wake of a gruesome episode that has disheveled our personal or public history—are fast abandoned as we return to sup at the banquet table of horrors. Individually, as well as in cosmetically distinguishable yet more deeply uniform groups, humans are not the whip-smart life form we are advertised to be. We have nothing but scorn or rebuke for quiescence and, like the children we are, will not sit still for a moment if instead we can be running aimlessly about until we drop dead from either enfeeblement or injury. Of course, Pascal could not have been such an imbecile that he meant we should sit still in one room every second of our lives. That room did not build itself, and the person sitting in it will probably seek out food now and then. (Remember the Shakers, the monastic laborers, and the Buddhists in the wilderness.) But beyond attaining food and shelter, our species has pursued a range of 80

activities every one of which leads to hell or heartbreak. Let it be said—human beings are the most retarded organisms on earth.

TRAGEDY

In conformance with the human race itself, tragedy is a derivative of unintended circumstances—a car crash, a premature death (no such thing), a spectacular “act of God,” the birth of consciousness. In the theater, tragedy is a genre. And in musical theater it is a miracle. Among such miracles is Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (1979). In the custom of any great tragedy, it is based on source materials—a 1974 play by Christopher Bond—that it brilliantly surpasses. But Sweeney Todd deviates from most works in this genre, with or without music, in that it underlines the tragedy of our species in a way that makes us part of a catastrophe of evolutionary proportions.

People size up the world differently. If this were not so, we would all be living in harmony with one another, which has never been and never will be the rule. Actually, universal harmony, which is a mere metaphor, would not liquidate differences, which can mean anything from a good-natured divergence of opinion to dreams of genocide. To put things truly right, to make a world truly just, assonance itself would need to dissolve into a single pitch sung by a multitude of voices—a unison impossible outside of heaven or a fairy tale. So we fall back into harmony. Because without harmony, there can be no music, no singing, no anything. Harmony is created by differing tones. At its extreme, it is dissonance. Our common crime on this earth is that we prefer difference to unity, dissonance to monotony. ("For what's the sound of the world out there?. . . It's man devouring man, my dear.”) To claim otherwise is a lie. We do not love oneness and cannot abide sameness, let alone endure the redemption of eternal silence. What we want—the sound of what we embrace—is the screech that cuts the air and signals the opening to Sondheim’s melotragic telling of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.