Free The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti Page A

one another in such a way as to suggest that human life is not worthless overall, or not so worthless that a case could not be made for its worth. With “useless,” the spirits of desirability and value do not readily rear their heads. What does arise is a note of futility. It is this condition of a vertiginous pointlessness untainted by implications of desirability or value that is brought to mind more quickly and emphatically by “useless” than by “worthless.”
    Because of this direct line to what is futile, “useless” is more negative, outstripping a bellicose pessimism and entering the airless spaces of nothingness. Naturally, the uselessness of existence may be repudiated as well or badly as its worthlessness. For this reason, the adverb “malignantly” has been annexed to “useless” to give it a little more semantic stretch, although not enough to shoo away any rebutters among the opposition.
    But to express with any adequacy the sucking emptiness within everything a 38

    nonlinguistic modality would be requisite, some delirious effusion out of a dream that coalesced every nuance of the useless and wordlessly transmitted into our heads the vacuity of a clockwork universe. Indigent of such means of communication, the uselessness of all that breathes and breeds must be spoken with a poor potency.
    9. One case of such discontent is that of the early nineteenth-century French Catholic writer Petrus Borel (a.k.a. “The Lycanthrope”), who asserted that he was a papist only because he could not be a cannibal. While Catholicism has since lost much of its bestial appeal in a literal sense, it continues to bleed whomever it can both psychologically and financially.

    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