The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (8 page)

10. It was also no impediment to Weininger’s posthumous reputation—after killing himself by gunshot at the age of twenty-three—that he was an anti-Semitic Jew who converted to Christianity, a life-path that has always looked good on the resume of a citizen of Adolph Hitler’s homeland. In regard to the Führer’s own reputation, at least he was a bungler whose genocidal proclivities did not cause the way of life of his target group to falter. This is quite in contrast to the U.S. government’s successes with the aboriginal occupants of its particular land mass. What they were is gone forever. The intent here is not to romanticize any particular people but only to draw attention to historical facts that live most vividly in the memory of their victims and must be repressed in the conscience of their perpetrators if the latter are to retain a good opinion of themselves, their god, their nation, their families, and the human race in general. Such facts of life and death are just that—facts. To the extent they are submitted as an indictment of humanity or the natural world that spit us out, a mistake has been made, irrational emotions have been awarded a priority they do not merit. What has been called “man’s inhumanity to man”

should not be an enticement for our species to end it all. That deduction is another mistake, as much as it would be a mistake to tub-thump for our survival based on the real abundance of what is valued as “humane” behavior. Both the “inhuman” and the

“humane” movements of our race do have a passing relevance, no carping about that.

But we are not at the helm of either of these movements. We believe ourselves to be in control—that is the mistake. We believe ourselves to be something we are not—that is the mistake and that is the superstition. To perpetuate the belief in these superstitions, to conspire in the suffering of future generations is the only misconduct to be expiated. To collaborate in our own suffering and that of human posterity is the mistake. Ask Adam and Eve, symbols of the most deleterious mistake in the world, one which we reenact every day.

11. A more respectable figure than Mainländer, the twentieth-century Austrian-born philosopher of science Karl Popper pointed his readers in much the same direction as his less honored predecessor, although he was not as intellectually reckless in his methods.

In his book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Popper expressed deep concern with the reduction of human suffering. To this purpose, he revamped the Utilitarianism of the nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, who wrote, “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong at they tend to promote the reverse of happiness.” Popper remolded this muddled, if sonorous, summation of a positive Utilitarianism into a negative Utilitarianism whose position he handily stated as follows: “It adds to clarity in the fields of ethics, if we formulate our demands negatively, i.e. if we demand the elimination of suffering rather than the promotion of happiness.” Taken to its logical and most humanitarian conclusion, Popper’s demand can have as its only end the elimination of those who suffer and the stifling of future generations that will keep suffering with absolute surety if our species does not hold off 39

incarnating itself. What else could the elimination of suffering mean if not to diminish it to the zero point? Naturally, Popper held his horses well before suggesting that to eliminate suffering would demand that we as a species be eliminated. Even so, the Austrian-born philosopher inseminated others with the basics for a Negative Utilitarianism, a marginal school of thought that has made a world-mission of the yearning to “eliminate” pain in human life. Other interesting movements of a similar type are Painism and Algonomy.

12. When Lovecraft wrote that the human race was created as a “joke or mistake” by extraterrestrial beings who inhabited this world in the distant past, he was saying something new, or at least saying it in a way that was new as regards the place of humankind in the universe, which is rather humble. He might have been complimentary, or equivocal, when speaking of our universal stature, and he might have tried to pass off what he was saying as true. If he had hyped it as true and had been complimentary, or equivocal, he could have died a rich man because people will always spend their money on intriguing falsehoods. In 1968, Erich von Däniken published Chariots of the Gods, a book in which he dramatized how extraterrestrials had intervened in human life, just as Lovecraft did in such works as At the Mountains of Madness (1931) and “The Shadow out of Time” (1934). Before he started making millions with this crackpot fakery, Von Däniken had a rap sheet of criminal convictions that included theft, fraud, embezzlement, and tax evasion. He also forged evidence to bolster belief in the bestselling Chariots of the Gods. But Lovecraft’s mission was not to deceive; it was to express a negative attitude to oppose the dominant positive attitude with respect to the

“highest species” active on this little planet. Humanity had already uplifted itself to the status of beings created by a purposeful and good-willed god. Lovecraft turned the customary concept of the biblical god upside down by having the human race descend by mishap from a race of monsters, however technologically advanced they may have been. He wanted to put humanity in the place he thought it deserved to be as the offspring of these monsters in whose footsteps, incidentally, we have been following on the technological front.

13. Schopenhauer lived at a time when philosophers had to be ablaze with immodesty if they were to grab the world with the truth of their ideas and only their ideas. They had to reveal things as they really are in a big way or join the no-accounts and footnotes in their field. Not until science took the reins in the twentieth century did philosophers begin to take their cues wholly from empiricism rather than from self-enclosed logic based on shaky premises. Human destiny now took a back seat to provable or falsifiable data in physics, biology, astrophysics, chemistry, theoretical physics, geology, nuclear physics, mathematical physics, and so on. Reality specialists who trafficked in human experience could go talk among themselves if they did not disturb the grown-ups while they figured out genetic codes and the location of black holes. To the fullest extent possible, specialists in human reality have attempted to merge their speculations with science.

Along with their more technical and abstract brethren, their findings have been enunciated by and addressed to a group of people who already share a sense of what it is to be in the world, given their similitude in intellect, income, social status, and psychological fitness, as well as their generally appearing and behaving like one another. What friction exists among them is usually confined to certain theoretical details expounded in their works. Each of them has his own answer to some piece of the puzzle of things as they really are . . . for human beings, that is. These specialists in human reality eventually die and others fill their positions. The friction goes on, no great progress is made, and everyone can feel safe that the puzzle will never be put together.

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This insures job security for every sort of reality specialist. Should the puzzle ever be put together, it would be the greatest disaster in human history. To piece together a picture of things as they really are in both the human and nonhuman world is not what anyone wants, for it would be the end of us. If reality specialists had the chance to know everything—not just a Theory of Everything (TOE)—they would probably be unable to say no, not after millennia of pretending that this is what they have been working toward. But would they not also quake in their boots at this unprecedented ascension?

We aspire to omniscience, but should we ever actually become omniscient what would be the point in continuing to exist? The game would be over and done. No mystery would be left to lend our lives a mystique, and without this mystique everything we do would be reduced to numbers we could look up in a computer file and have no need to puzzle over. We would be victorious . . . and bored to death. Everything having to do with humanity and nonhumanity would hit a wall and come to a stop. We seem to have set out on an expedition whose success would be our ruin. The only way out, perhaps, would be to fashion creatures less knowing than ourselves and exist through them. What humiliation, what pathos that we should ever end up as gods. Is there nothing that can bring us into reconciliation with the cancer of existence?

14. This idea parallels Mainländer’s fantasy in which the Will-to-die that should inhere in humanity is only a reflection of a suicidal God who, in the beginning, masterminded His own quietus. His plan to commit deicide could not work, though, while he existed as a unified entity outside of space-time and matter. Seeking to annul His oneness, he divided Himself into the time-bound fragments of the universe, which included organic life forms. Through this method, He successfully excluded Himself from existence.

“God is dead,” wrote Mainländer, “and His death was the life of the world.” Once the great individuation had been accomplished, the momentum of its creator’s self-annihilation would continue in a piecemeal fashion until nothing remained standing.

And those who committed suicide, as did Mainländer, would only be following God’s example. Furthermore, the Will-to-live that Schopenhauer argued activates the world—a concept logically developed but only within a mythological framework—was revised by his disciple Mainländer as evidence not of a movement of a tortured life within beings, but as a deceptive cover for an underlying death wish in all things to burn themselves out as hastily as possible in the fires of becoming . . . or begoing, as it were. In this light, the raging of human progress is thus shown to be a mightily apparent symptom of a downfall into extinction that has just gotten underway. (See Bill Joy’s essay “Why the future doesn’t need us,” in which the co-founder of a computer vendor and IT services provider speculates how technology may someday save—that is, kill—us all.) Similarly, the wisdom of religions such as Christianity and Buddhism is all for leaving this world behind for a destination unknown and impossible to conceive. One day, however, the will to survive in this life or any other will be universally extinguished by a conscious will to die and stay dead. In Mainländer’s philosophy, Zapffe’s Last Messiah is not a sage who will be unwelcome but a force that has been in the works since God took his own life. Rather than resist our end, as Mainländer concludes, we will come to see that

“the knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom.” Elsewhere the philosopher states, “Life is hell, and the sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell.” (Sayings of this sort are what make Schopenhauer worth the trouble of reading, and neither his heady mythology nor that of Mainländer strengthens their case.) In the more brutish terms of modern wiseguyism—as seen on coffee mugs, T-shirts, and bumper stickers—“Life’s a bitch and then you die.” Other cultures have their own versions of this covert commonplace, as in the Italian proverb “You live with little and die with nothing.” Such words would no doubt have comforted Mainländer as 41

indicative that a clandestine sapience among our species was proceeding on its course.

Mainländer’s cosmic scenario, though coherent on its own terms and rather sublime, is likely to give pause to those accustomed to more widely spread, though no less bizarre, religious ideations. But consider this: if God exists, or once existed, what would He not be capable of doing? Why should God not want to be done with Himself as a reaction to His suffering the sickness and pain now reflected in His creation? Why should He not have kicked off a universe that was one great puppet show destined to be crunched or scattered until an absolute nothingness had been established? These questions and the answers Mainländer “revealed” are in fact odd, but no more so than the beliefs of, let us say, Islam or Hinduism . . . or any other major or minor religion for that matter. For a rebuttal of Mainländer’s thought, see H. P. Blavatsky’s “The Origin of Evil,” which first appeared in the journal Lucifer (October 1897). This article is also available through an Internet search at the time of this writing. For rebuttals of all other religious interpretations of the universe and our place in it, see the vast library of materials written to this purpose. (The above precis of Mainländer’s philosophy is sourced primarily in T.

Whittaker’s review of Die philosophie der Erlosung and Die philosophie der Erlosund.

Zwolf philosophische Essays in Mind, July, 1886.)

15. “Meaning” figures as an autonomic system, something that is noticed when it goes on the fritz but not when it is in working order. It is part of the cog-and-wheel functioning of the physical and psychological machinery that motivates an individual to go about his business. While it routinely hums softly in the background of a person’s life, a meaning system will often come to the fore when it is threatened. After the threat is dealt with, this system once again returns to its autonomic functioning. Only in a small percentage of humans is meaning a component of being on which they consciously and voluntarily fixate without external provocation. If for most of our race, meaning comes straight from a handbook that may be referenced by page and paragraph, chapter and verse—

“God exists,” “I have a Self,” “My country is the best in the world”—for this small percentage meaning originates from only one source—a sense of mystery. In his essay

“The Wall and the Book,” The twentieth-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges writes: “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon” (emphasis added). Lovecraft’s

“Notes on the Writing of Weird Fiction” opens with this sentence: “My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature” (emphasis added). This sense of mystery that is never dissipated by express knowledge but is forever an imminence or expectancy explains much of the attraction of the best supernatural stories (Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space, Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius”), which have at their center an abyss of the unknown, with perhaps a miasma of death floating about its edges. Only when we feel that something great is about to be revealed does anything seem to mean something. And this experience, as the preceding quotes from Borges and Lovecraft concur, is stirred by works of art or by an aesthetic vision of things in the world. Meaning arises on the brink of knowing and topples with the incursions of scriptures, doctrines, and narratives that specify the mysterious as an object, a datum. In themselves, all objects and data in existence are 42