Free The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti

euphemistically put it, “a state of perpetual unhappiness”? To counter this glum assessment of things, the world’s religions all offer goals that they say are very much attainable, if only in the afterlife or the next life. More down to earth, but no more realistically, Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) represents the unattainable goal of the title figure as an apologetic for going on with life rather than ending it. As Camus insisted in his discussion of this gruesome parable, “We must imagine Sisyphus as happy.” The credo of the Church Father Tertullian, “I believe 37

    because it is absurd,” might as rightly be attributed to Camus. Caught between the fabrications of the latter and the rationalizations of the former, Zapffe’s proposal that we put out the light of the human race extends a solution to our troubles that is as satisfying as that of either Tertullian or his modern avatar Camus, who considered suicide as a philosophical issue for the individual but overlooked—not unreasonably for a writer seeking an audience at the start of his career—the advantages of an all-out attrition of the species. Aside from a repertoire of tricks we can do that other animals cannot, the truest indicator of a human being is unhappiness. The main fount of that unhappiness, as Zapffe and others have written, is our consciousness. And the more dilated consciousness becomes, the more unhappy the human. All other portrayals of what we are conceive of nothing but a troupe of puppets made to prance through our lives by forces beyond our control or comprehension. In the end, Camus’ injunction that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy is as typical as it is feculent. On the subject of whether or not life is worth the trouble, the answer must always be unambivalent . . . and positive. To teeter the least bit into the negative is tantamount to outright despair. If you value your values, no doubts about this matter can be raised, unless they occur as a lead-up to some ultimate affirmation. In the products of high or low culture, philosophical disquisitions, and arid chitchat, the anthem of life must forever roar above the squeaks of dissent. We were all born into a rollicking game that has been too long in progress to allow a substantive change in the rules. Should the incessant fanfare that meets your ears day in and day out sound out of tune and horribly inappropriate, you will be branded persona non grata. Welcome wagons will not stop at your door—not while world-renowned authorities are telling you from on high that Sisyphus must be imagined as happy or that you must love your fate, no matter how terrible and questionable it is (Nietzsche). If such dictatorial statements genuinely reflected the facts of life, they would not need to be repeated like a course of subliminal conditioning. And this is exactly how such “good news” is delivered to us—without pause and without appreciable contradiction. Ergo, we must recognize that Zapffe’s proposal for the salvation-by-extinction of the human race is not a solution to the absurdity of life.
    8. “Worthless” rather than “useless” is the more familiar epithet in this context. The motive for using “useless” in place of “worthless” in this histrionically capitalized phrase is that the former term is linked to the concepts of desirability and value and by their depreciation introduces them into the mix. “Useless,” on the other hand, is not so inviting of these concepts. Elsewhere in this work, “worthless” and its associated forms serviceably connect with the language of pessimism and do their damage sufficiently.
    But the devil of it is that “worthless” really does not go far enough when speaking of the overarching character of existence. Too many times the question “Is life worth living?”
    has been asked. This usage of “worth” excites impressions of a fair lot of experiences that are arguably desirable and valuable and that follow upon