The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (23 page)

steer us through life’s whipping winds, and who among us can say that we do not do their bidding in one form or another, thus releasing the bloated imperatives created within us?

Whether we create the body of a child, compose a body of work, or are just an anatomical piece of the body politic, we need to flaunt something that proves we are not completely useless and have earned the right to hold our heads up among our kind. This is the system of insanity to which consciousness has chained us. No surprise, then, that such a system is not about to grant an income to those who wish they had never been born. This is not how our species works. No different from any other on this planet, it flourishes while it can and at a fiendish cost to the individual organism. Among human beings, lip service is paid to the value of every life. This is a staggering lie that anyone with a good head on his shoulders should be mortified to underwrite.

The individual is only a means to a dead end in this world, yet our species is more or less characterized by the egos of individuals. Once again, tragedy emerges as a function of consciousness, which is always a consciousness of difference: the difference between the human and the non-human, the difference between one human and another, the difference between how the world is and how we would wish it to be. Because we have no natural enemies, we must look to our fellow puppets for our prey, falling upon everyone and everything like a stick-wielding Punch, beating the dickens out of whatever irritates our consciousness of difference. Any form of government, any economic system, any set of ideological or religious principles could serve to lessen the tribulations of organic existence on one condition: we would need to recognize that, in all constitutive facets of life, our interests and our fate are shared by all. Such unanimity, most naturally, can never be reached.9 As Zapffe noted, consciousness leads our heads to stray from both the facts and from one another. While the life-slog of one person is at every major point indistinct from that of all other persons, the ways in which we confront our common lot are divergent unto madness. To live by our differences is to live in chaos. It is to live with the kind of delusions we impute to those heads which are torn by disease, those which are psychotically fragmented and in conflict within themselves. These individuals of an extreme alienation are tolerated by the world’s normal citizenry only if they do not disturb the peace, break any laws, or go off their medication. Our mistake, the mistake that limits and defines us, is in resisting the diagnosis that everyone is among the alienated and that no messianic alienist will ever succeed in curing us. And unanimity—

like peace, love, and understanding—would not offset the nuisance and vanity of being alive and aware in this world.

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NOTES

1. There have been isolated instances in which a solitary writer by chance publishes a work whose subject matter strikes a chord with a wide readership. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is a famed example. Banned as obscene in several countries and rejected by U.S.

publishers, the novel first appeared in 1955 from a French press that specialized in erotica. Three years later, following several laudatory reviews by distinguished literary figures, the book was made available to American readers, who were taken with its portrayal of a sexually precocious adolescent girl and her lovers. More finely, readers were taken in by the controversy surrounding the book rather than taken with the book itself. The central figure of Nabokov’s next novel, Pnin—which appeared in 1957, one year before the U.S. edition of Lolita—is a university professor, which happened to be Nabokov’s occupation at the time. In post-Lolita editions of Pnin, the titular professor is depicted on the dust jacket as an ogler of young co-eds, deceptively publicizing the book as something of a follow-up to Lolita, than which nothing could be more untrue. That, of course, is show business. But the important thing is that the success of Lolita brought financial independence to the solitary Nabokov, who left the United States and moved to Switzerland, where he lived for the rest of his life. Among major twentieth-century writers, few were as obsessed with death and suffering as Nabokov. Pnin contains two consecutive sentences that critics should never forget when analyzing his work: “Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam.” In their economy, their sense, and their four-time mouthing of the letter “M,” these words sound a thrilling echo of the opening sentences of Poe’s “Berenice.”

The unique thing about Nabokov is that he practiced the writing of fiction as a form of sorcery. His novels and stories draw you in with their language, their humor, and a troupe of demented narrators who seem to be descendants of Poe’s band of madmen. But behind the language and the humor there is another dimension, a world of a terrible desperation where Nabokov works a wizardry that makes the impossible happen right before the reader’s eyes—specifically, defeating the limitations of time and space, recovering the losses brought about by the ravaging vicissitudes of one's life, heckling the tragicomic congeries of the historical record, and, ultimately, conquering death. This is the world of Nabokov's works, and it is most perceptible and moving in Lolita, wherein the leading characters, who are declared legally dead in the preface to the book, are all brought back to life in quite spectral ways by the writing of the book itself. Of course, the magic does not really work, except from an exclusively aesthetic perspective, which is the saddest and deepest meaning of Nabokov's fiction.

2. Perhaps even more than Poe or Lovecraft, Burroughs was the American master of the febrile. He set the standard of fever, nightmare, and the grotesque by which all other writers who aspire to these qualities in their works should be calibrated. In his last novel, The Western Lands (1987), he writes of the smell of rotting metal, and Burroughs never wrote about anything that was not tangible to his senses. That is sick genius if there ever was such a thing. Now, this descant on sickness might raise a question in some people’s minds: if this is the sort of thing one adores, then why not just read case histories of psychopaths and psychotics, suicide notes, and such books as Daniel Paul Schreber’s A History of My Nervous Illness (1903)? Indisputably, many people are very interested in real-life misery. Ratings for television news shows confirm this fact. But some individuals do not care for the evening news, viewing it is as a ticker tape of fragments and abstracts from a world simmering in its own stupidity. Real-life misery has no coherence to it, no vision to channel. As Mark Twain said, “Life is just one damn thing 105

after another.” Not every mortal who owns a television wants to consume the raw data of the world any more than they must. Instead, they would prefer to attend to the words of someone who will stand up and say, “Life is just one damn thing after another” rather than surrender their heads to some jackass of a news anchor who presents the day’s horror as so many human interest stories and tearful installments of emotional pornography because his corporate overlords figure they can use this kind of stuff to sell advertising minutes. Everyone knows that this is the case. Everyone knows that this is an abomination. And everyone, more or less, is hooked on it. As for Mark Twain, not many can unglue themselves from the rollicking righteousness of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) long enough to behold his late-blooming sagacity as it appears in the dialogue “What Is Man” (1906) or Letters from the Earth (written 1909; published posthumously, 1942). Naturally, few will give the time of day to these works, which are as un-American as those of Burroughs.

Burroughs is also germane as an example of a writer who, in some quarters, has been exiled to the hinterlands of the pessimistic, nihilistic, or whatever you like. This penalization, of course, has only been applied by those who have actually read his works.

As renowned as Burroughs’ writings may be, they have been all but invisible to those who really get het up about such things as pessimism and nihilism—namely, social conservatives, religionists, and normal folk in general—as have the writings of almost anyone who is exemplary of the major trends in literature and thought since the late nineteenth century. If he were more extensively read, Burroughs, along with most authors considered “modern” in a broad sense, would be one of the names on the list of forbidden writers that the Vatican used to keep. As it is, the names to be included on such a list have long past the point where they can be kept up to date for the indignation of those who believe that morals, meanings, and other such nonsense—whether divinely revealed or naturally evolved—are real. Perhaps this dual contingent of the holy and the humanist at some point realized they could not stride along with trends of the sort that Nietzsche foresaw in the 1880s and have therefore blinded themselves to the existence of any current of ideas that are a threat to them on the sociopolitical game board. Even though Naked Lunch (1959, Olympia Press, the same concern that published Nabokov’s Lolita) was the subject of the last major censorship trial in the history of U.S. jurisprudence, it was still only a book and not a very popular one. In the same year that Naked Lunch was being considered in the Massachusetts legal system for a permanent slot as a banned title, teenage Christians were getting all the press by burning their Beatles albums because of a remark John Lennon had made about his band being bigger than Jesus. Some years later, Lennon would become much beloved for his song “Imagine,” which envisions a world of atheistic communism. By then, though, Lennon had been relegated to the same colony in which Burroughs and others had already settled.

3. One of the most balls-out idiotic rationalizations that philosophy has used to soothe our fear of death is the following pitch: we accept with great aplomb that we did not exist before we were born; why, then, should we fear the nonexistence that will postdate our death? Here is the answer: although we did not exist prior to our birth, after we are born we can and often do acquire a sense of what things were like long before we were alive, even those events during the billions of years prior to our birth and the events that astronomers and astrophysicists think possible billions of years into the future. This sense of the eternal, or the near eternal, will terminate when we do, and there is no sense in pretending that this is no big deal for us. As for the near term following upon our late being, we can only imagine that it will not differ greatly from the time during which we lived, with the exception that we will not exist anymore. We will be dead. We will be 106

stiffs like every other stiff we have witnessed in repose while the loved ones wept and mere acquaintances checked their watches because they had places to go and people to see who were not yet in rigor. Go ahead and dream of the negligible eons before and after your death . . . and fear not, if you choose. Our selves may be illusory, but our horror of death—a horror that is unique among horrors—cannot be assuaged as an inaccurate conception of human life. Subjectively, this horror is as real as our worst nightmare, the only distinction being that we cannot awaken from it. Objectively, it is one minus one equals zero. Now, as any lover of logic would remonstrate, neither stand trotted out above on how we should face death is an arresting evocation of rationality. But any fool knows that logic goes limp at those times when it most counts, while reason, some fellow said, is the flashiest pimp for irrationality that ever strode down the mean streets of life.

Another issue altogether is the When and the How of our dying. That will happen while we still exist and can be nothing but a source of fear. No philosophical rationalization exists for why we should be unafraid of the manner in which we will be dumped into oblivion. This is the greatest oversight in the history of human thought.

4. The requisite optimism of politicians may shine a light on the near universal disesteem in which they are held. Everyone naturally likes to hear that things are not going to hell either in the short or the long term. But when someone tells us that everything is all right all the time and will only get better with no end in sight, we have a feeling deep down that we are being taken for a ride by a bullshit artist. Drawing upon our life experience and the benefits of a normally operational intellect makes it impossible to guzzle the whole hogshead of any politician’s optimism. In a section of The World as Will and Representation that is devoted to arguing the reality of pain over the illusion of pleasure, Schopenhauer closes with these words: “I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind” (emphases not added). Even those who do not wholly endorse Schopenhauer’s opinion of optimism in the widest sense can still gain some understanding of what he is talking about when they hear some political monstrosity deliver a stump speech or maneuver around the facts at a press conference. It is on such occasions that most the demonic aspect of optimism reveals itself and repels many who normally prefer an optimistic spell to be cast upon them. “Wickedness,” of course, is a moral category reserved for believers in such fabrications, including Schopenhauer. But to see the horribly clownish rictus on the face of a winning candidate bellowing out a victory speech while his supporters hop about like devil worshippers around the body of a sacrificed babe can make the most hardened non-moralist begin to pronounce commonplace value judgments left and right.

5. One school of evolutionary psychology thus hypothesizes the origins of our error: pleasurable emotions and sensations germinated because they were adaptive. Example: release from the stress of sexual desire was once the catalyst for reproduction. (Following the outbreak of language, everyone began praising sexual pleasure for its own sake, while no one has ever celebrated the biological drive that leads to it, just as everyone praises a good meal but not the hunger that makes it so pleasurable.) But knowing the devious ways of nature, should anyone be thunderstruck that she has put a lid on the intensity of our pleasure and a time limit on how long it may last? If our pleasure did not have both a cap and a ticking clock, we would not bestir ourselves from our enjoyment long enough to attend to the exigencies of the body. And then we would not survive. By the same token, should our mass mind ever become discontented with the crumbs of pleasure 107