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

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