The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (22 page)

Once a head is born into this world, it learns that blowing itself to bits is neither lightly done nor pleasant. How much easier it is to beguile one’s brain than to close it down.

And so we keep promenading to the toneless drum beating inside our skulls.

WORK

The tolerance that we, the people, have for submitting ourselves to a life of toil gives one a sense of why the rulers of this world have such contempt for us and enact their villainies whenever the mood strikes them. Consciousness is passed out to everyone; ambition and intelligence (with or without guile) are reserved for the Few. They are the elect; we are the electorate. Their game is to pretend to serve us, but we are the servants and they are the masters. Genius is welcome to the party of power when it can produce something its patrons want—once artworks, now weapons. The rest of the population, those who are not well endowed with street smarts or dominated by an ambition to dominate, need the power of the Few to gorge them with moral nourishment—a sense of order and security, a sense of being part of something greater than themselves, and, naturally, a sense of the future. In substance, these are also the services of religion, and anyone who is buying into one is a prime customer or victim of the other. This explains the traditional alliance between these power groups. As Machiavelli observed, two of the canniest means for crowd control are “good arms” and “good religion.” The originator of realpolitik, Machiavelli knew that both Bibles and battalions were indispensable for keeping the mob under control and husbanding “good” states such as those operated by the Medici, who, as we now know, were only also-rans among the mad tyrants racing over the course of history.

If Western religion has faltered or become too fragmented since Machiavelli’s time to shore up the state with the muscle it once had, its duties have ably been taken up by corporations, those secular religions which are joined at the hip and head of power. Like their political and ecclesiastic partners, corporations offer an arena of activity for those with a concupiscence for ruling others who, on their part, are fairly content to be ruled in exchange for a stronghold to take them in, a flag or a logo to wave, and, naturally, a ticket to the future. While almost everyone has desultory fantasies in which they are boss of the world, leadership itself does not tantalize many. Broadly speaking, most of us would rather sit on the sidelines, hooting and hollering at those who would be kings or queens.

Others, however, are irredeemably tempted by the sirens of power and cannot eschew this allurement, either as a destiny or simply a career path. A very small group of these types 100

are privileged with a superfluity of talent for dupery, and these are the ones who become the monarchs of the masses. What are revolutions all about? They are about a few organizers who are baffled that someone else is sitting in what should be their seat of power. They are called rebels one day and patriots the next. They have the rhetorical flair of all demagogues as well as memorable faces, qualities that must pair up if the revolution is to be successful. Somehow they manage to entrench their discontents and illusions in those who have nothing to gain, and much to lose, by fighting for them. Later, these revolutionaries will prove themselves worthy of their promotion by outdoing in villainy those they replaced. If they fought against a murderous regime, they will show their ex-compeers what murder really is. If they started a revolt against unjust taxation, they will end by taxing everyone in sight, except perhaps religions and corporations. This is the way it has always worked—war, death, and damage for the Many, spoils for the Few. If only the latter could satisfy their obscene proclivities without globalizing them.

But in order for their system to work, everyone must be involved. We do not even dream of saying, along with Herman Melville’s Bartleby, “I would prefer not to.”

A large corporation once financed a television commercial that blandly stated, "Owning your own business is part of the American dream." This may or may not be true, depending on how “American dream” is defined. Nevertheless, the phrasing and hauteur of this announcement is redolent of those oxymoronic slogans that George Orwell’s Winston Smith in 1984 (1949) had forced upon him day in and day out under the totalitarian regime that overshadowed his life. Will future advertisements blare through your television and computer that “Work is leisure” or “Overtime is your time”? The halcyon days of your life are over the moment you stop being a fetus and begin training to become a foot soldier for hire. Love it or hate it, you must either turn up for duty or become one of the walking wounded. Earning your bread by the sweat of your brow is traumatic and damnable. It is combat in slow motion. Some people, prevalently alpha males such as General George S. Patton, have a real tolerance for combat situations. But if you are not one of those people, then you can look forward to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Any reform in how human life is lived must begin by disobeying our orders to eat or be eaten. Our rulers could at least give us a third pick—euthanasia. But euthanasia-for-the-hell-of-it might cut down the customer base of those who dream of owning their own business.

Less common than major depression and other types of mental disease, the obsession to amass an excess of wealth afflicts only a select coterie among us. Nevertheless, many have a measure of this propensity, although they are generally relieved of it by prostration or inadequacy. Thereafter, they resign themselves to longing looks at the heights they once attempted to reach. Real success in money-getting must take place on a mountainous scale and beget Himalayas of assets. Being the owner of a small business may equip one with a modicum of shiny possessions and employ the workers of the world, but for all practical purposes it remains a realm of serfs and servants living in the foothills of a landscape owned by persons who might seem mythical if they did not appear on television and the covers of business magazines. The game is to get the small-timers to identify with the big-time players, those for whom the lines between money and power have become blurred. This is an elementary con, since on the whole people are 101

only too willing to believe they have a fair stake in the game. (A government-run lottery, which everyone knows as a “stupidity tax,” is proof against arguments to the contrary.) Napoleon referred to his troops as “cannon fodder,” but you can be sure that they spoke well of him, because by doing so they believed they were speaking well of themselves as the sidekicks of a Great Man. Such minds are convinced that they are part of a greater cause than any to which they could aspire on their own. They will argue for it, they will kill for it, and they will die for it. All they require is a paper-thin slice of a humongous pie, a walk-on role in a historical epic, and a few shares of common stock in Project Immortality and Sons, Inc. They will never be allowed or allow themselves to understand the real workings of the system. Shakespeare’s Henry V—a one-time rich kid who came into his own—called himself and his cohorts the “happy few.” For persons of wealth and power, the fewer they are the happier they are. As for the Many: the more, the more miserable. Whoever said “The more, the merrier” must have been on drugs.

Some disgruntled ingrates believe that the world owes them a living. Their rationale could be rendered in the following way. Although only two people are directly responsible for anyone coming into this life, that couple was egged on by thousands of years of breeders who never interrupted their coitus long enough to think that maybe there were already enough people who knew they were alive and knew they would die.

Cioran counted among his greatest accomplishments his success in breaking himself of the habit of cigarette smoking and the fact that he never became a parent. Nothing in Cioran’s file would lead one to think he was ever tempted to have children. His remark was a dig at people whose fecundity had swollen a world he would rather have seen in ashes. He also criticized those who gave in to the temptations of authorship, and was merciless in reproving his own predilections as he was those of others. But criticism of our own weaknesses does not aid our case against those whose weaknesses are not of the same species. Affairs of a deeply personal, non-malignant nature are immune to the faultfinding of their antagonists.7 They are ingrained into us and only await a detonator to set them off. We do not pick and choose our motivations, nor can we divine with exactitude their effects, should these cross our minds. Prospective parents may indeed be ogres, but it is too ghastly to contemplate that anyone consciously enters a new vertebrate into the rat race with the idea that its life will be preponderantly an unhappy one. Its death, a cheerless certainty, is another matter. None may plead ignorance on that score.

Then how do they do it? How are people able to look their children in the eye without flinching? How is it that they are not haunted by remorse for embroiling them in this high-volume business of putrefying bodies? What vow of silence keeps them from informing their offspring that they have been sentenced to suffer years of regimented schooling and a lifetime of work and worry before they will be allowed to rest a bit, with any luck, in the latter years of their term on this pretty blue planet? If people are going to reproduce, they should at least throw together a system that will provide for all the material wants of their progeny for the life of the product. In the immortal words of Gloria Beatty, “What’s the sense in having a baby unless you got dough enough to take care of it?” But the ordinary human stockyard cannot raise that kind of dough.

No one has ever put forth a praiseworthy incentive for reproduction. None are needed.

People do what they do, including the deed of procreation, because of overpowering 102

pressures—fears, infatuations, and so on—that come from within them and from outside them. All social orders command their members to imbibe in pipe dreams of posterity, the mirage of immortality, to keep them ahead of the extinction that would ensue in a few generations if the species did not replenish itself. This is the implicit, and most pestiferous, rationale for propagation: to become fully integrated into a society, one must offer it fresh blood. Naturally, the average set of parents does not conceive of their conception as a sacrificial act. These are civilized human beings we are talking about, and thus they are quite able to fill their heads with a panoply of less barbaric rationales for reproduction, among them being the consolidation of a spousal relationship; the expectation of new and enjoyable experiences in the parental role; the hope that one will pass the test as a mother or father; the pleasing of one’s own parents, not to forget their parents and possibly a great-grandparent still loitering about; the serenity of taking one’s place in the seemingly deathless lineage of a familial enterprise; the creation of individuals who will care for their paternal and maternal selves in their dotage; the quelling of a sense of guilt or selfishness for not having done their duty as human beings; and the squelching of that faint pathos that is associated with the childless.8 Such are some of the overpowering pressures upon those who would fertilize the future. These pressures build up in people throughout their lifetimes and must be released, just as everyone must evacuate their bowels or fall victim to a fecal impaction. And who, if they could help it, would suffer a building, painful fecal impaction? So we make bowel movements to relieve this pressure. Quite a few people make gardens because they cannot stand the pressure of not making a garden. Others commit murder because they cannot stand the pressure building up to kill someone, either a person known to them or a total stranger. Everything is like that. Our whole lives consist of metaphorical as well as actual bowel movements, one after the other. Releasing these pressures can have greater or lesser consequences in the scheme of our lives. But they are all pressures, all bowel movements of some kind. At a certain age, children are praised for making a bowel movement in the approved manner. Later on, the praise of others dies down for this achievement and our bowel movements become our own business, although we may continue to praise ourselves for them. But overpowering pressures go on governing our lives, and the release of these essentially bowel-movement pressures may once again come up for praise, congratulations, and huzzahs of all kinds.

Just because certain behaviors such as procreation are not praiseworthy does not make them blameworthy either. That praise or blame is publicly accorded to anyone for anything is also a function of pressure, this time the pressure upon groups and subgroups to create themselves and unendingly recreate themselves, sometimes on a tight schedule or a grand scale. Every day, people are recompensed with money and honors because they possess chance attributes for which they cannot rightfully be credited. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “If only the poor had profiles there would be no problem in solving the problem of poverty.” And those among the poor who do happen to be born with head-turning profiles have just the edge needed to rise out of the rabble. Even more outrageous are the advantages that accrue from flukes of parentage, those which give someone a gigantic head start on the field of his fellow mortals. It works the same way with individuals who produce something that society values—a book, a song, an invention.

These producers might seem to have a more legitimate reason to be proud of what they 103

have done than those who just happen to be physically attractive or just happen to be born into a family of wealth and reputation. In fact, we are as likely to take credit for what pure luck has made us as for what we have made of ourselves, figuratively speaking.

Most cruelly, the opposite also applies: persons without fetching looks, rich parents, or God-given gifts are often scarred by their inadequacies and know an unwarranted shame, just as in bygone days the children of unmarried couples were consigned to the status of social pariahs. If nothing else, though, almost every member of the accursed can join in the miracle of reproduction. As named above, pressures—fears, infatuations, and so on—