The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror by Thomas Ligotti (PDF)

Description

In Thomas Ligotti’s first nonfiction outing, an examination of the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life through an insightful, unsparing argument that proves the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination but instead are found in reality.”There is a signature motif discernible in both works of philosophical pessimism and supernatural horror. It may be stated thus: Behind the scenes of life lurks something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world.”His fiction is known to be some of the most terrifying in the genre of supernatural horror, but Thomas Ligotti’s first nonfiction book may be even scarier. Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy. At once a guidebook to pessimistic thought and a relentless critique of humanity’s employment of self-deception to cope with the pervasive suffering of their existence, The Conspiracy against the Human Race may just convince readers that there is more than a measure of truth in the despairing yet unexpectedly liberating negativity that is widely considered a hallmark of Ligotti’s work.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Came on time and in pristine condition. Great book too, I read it at the local nursing homes and the elders just can’t get enough! Great read for kids too.

⭐Thomas Ligotti’s “The Conspiracy Against The Human Race” eloquently and poetically describes the feeling already familiar to every outsider of life, to every pessimist, to those who know and have felt deep down that life is as Ligotti describes “malignantly useless.” The titular ‘Conspiracy’ refers less to a cabal of individuals and here to the necessity of conscious beings to develop methods of limiting the extent of their own awareness, of stifling consciousness by anchoring themselves to constructs of order and distracting themselves from the inherent meaninglessness of human existence in the thresher of life. Relating the inexhaustible void to primordial terror, and existential terror to horror fiction, Ligotti uses this ‘contrivance of horror’ to explain ideas present in the works of authors such as Peter Zappfe, Thomas Metzinger, Emil Cioran, Algernon Blackwood, HP Lovecraft, and Ligotti’s own works. Ligotti illuminates the driving forces of cosmic and existential horror and creates a sound and endearing defense for pessimism. Truly a must read for any fan of cosmic horror or existential philosophy.

⭐STOP! Read the title of this review again. Do you see what is going on here? The question answers itself. “What do you want?” Answer: “out of life.” Birth itself should be evidence enough to anyone as to having lost in the genetic lottery. The fortunate are the not-born though ‘they’ will never be aware of their good fortune. The unfortunates are those who are born and painfully aware of it – of birth and its consequences; condemned to both a life sentence and a death sentence; only human existence could contain and condemn us to such a tragic irony. Consciousness is a distortion of existence and creates an experience of tension and struggle. In terms of existence, consciousness is derivative, secondary and actually parasitic. This renders existence itself a burden. We are victimized by Fate, tyrannized by evolution and cursed by genetics. This tortured existence is the root of our tormented human experience.The only defense is not to be fooled by hope or to be made a fool out of by hope. Our best chance at ethics is when we see each other as the fellow prisoners thrown into a world that refuses to reveal itself to us and that will always retain some hidden features just beyond our grasp no matter how much we come to understand. In terms of the overall conspiracy, the only important feature of our existence revealed to us is the permanent inscrutability of our existence in a blank, anonymous and indifferent world. If you have read this far then I am sorry because you cannot unread this review or unlearn these most fundamental principles of human existence unless you prefer to live in state of self-deception (as most people need to do), so you might as well continue and read this book, explore the darkness and learn just how deep the conspiracy against the human race runs but you may not like what you find. Alternatively, it may confirm what you already suspect. On the bright side, at least the human race is not totally bereft and barren, it at least begets, confusion, contradiction and conspiracy. In any case, just understand that writer of this review is one who is in a state of existence without Being who walks alone, without purpose, through a broken world.

⭐I’ve read many books in my 45 years but the research and time that the author put into this book is sheer genius the material needed to be said I will re-read this book forever it’s part of my life now

⭐Thank you for writing all these arguments and elaborations so eloquently. Sometimes, books on antinatalism, or just pessimism in general, can be so daunting to read. Some authors can become long-winded or too “academic,” no matter how valid their points are. This book is superbly well-argued and captivating to read.Life as we know it is “malignantly useless.” This bleak but true viewpoint is all there is to so-called “awakening,” or “enlightenment.” If we exist as humans, we have already lost a terrible lottery, and we are doomed to consciously continue this miserable existence until death. But at least, for some hours, I have felt that someone else truly understands, and it is almost heartwarming to know that I am not insane, or alone, in this wretchedness.

⭐Thomas Ligotti is principally known as a writer of supernatural horror stories and – in 2016 – one of only two living authors to have had their work published in Penguin Classics. That the second author is Morrissey may or may not be construed to take some shine off the accolade. Unlike his collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe, this book is not fiction. It peaked my interest as a purported expression of philosophical pessimism, for which I have some interest. However, I was aware of Ligotti’s avowed condition as an anhedonic recluse with a long history of anxiety and depression, and was hoping he’d provide more than just a projective rationalisation of his own unenviable situation. Unfortunately, what he has produced is a work of confusing extremes and by his own admission paradoxes.There is a lot more going on in the book than a straightforward expression of philosophical pessimism, of which there are numerous strains and degrees. In the first instance this is not a work of philosophy, indeed at times he’s explicit about his disdain for philosophical systems and even logical argumentation. He isn’t trying to teach you anything you shouldn’t already know; at least, that is, if you share his pessimistic outlook, which he claims quite early on to be rooted ultimately in a person’s innate disposition rather than any rational assessment of things as they are. Given that belief, one almost wonders why he bothered to author a book of this kind. Most of it is actually an attempt to append a lot of other claims upon his basic pessimistic outlook including anti-natalism (which despite what he suggests does not flow necessarily from all forms of pessimism), determinism and an odd sort of anti egoism, in which he claims that the delusion of selfhood ranks highest in the hierarchy of fabrications that compose our lives. As if things weren’t bad enough!Pessimism, philosophical or otherwise has been a rich seam of thought for many centuries and has substantially helped define what philosophy (at least in its continental guise) is today. Though to read Ligotti’s book you’d think that all the best writing in this vein had been done by the later part of the 19th century. The big exception is a short obscure work by the Norwegian Peter Zapffe, The Last Messiah (1933), which the author introduces us to early in proceedings.Zapffe’s text is mostly a highly rhetorical refashioning of Freud’s theses from Civilisation and Its Discontents, with some crude Darwinian flourishes and antique pop psychology thrown in for good measure. The function of culture, which in Freud’s essay is framed as a means to draw us away from our savage tendencies – though at the price of making us all neurotic – is in the Norwegian’s version a kind of mass deception, keeping human beings with their tragically overdeveloped consciousness from confronting the truth of their bare, meaningless, biological existence. When these cultural strategies, which Zapffe glosses as Isolation, Anchoring, Distraction and Sublimation fail, we are thrown into despair. Or as he puts it: “The dread of being stares us in the eye, and in a deadly gush we perceive how the minds are dangling in threads of their own spinning, and that a hell is lurking underneath”. You can see why a horror writer might be attracted to this and I suppose he’s entitled to his pet miserablist. Zapffe is the intellectual bare bones upon which Ligotti hangs the lion’s share of the book, most of the work of which is done by the end of the long first chapter titled The Nightmare of Being, in which he applies the learning of Zapffe to subjects as wide ranging as Buddhism, science-fiction films, cognitive psychology and a somewhat implausible phenomena called “ego-death”.One of the difficulties of Ligotti’s exposition is that he consistently conflates the tradition and propositions of so-called “negative thought” – an anti-dialectical current running through late 19th century philosophy, in particular the writings of Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – with a more common or psychological pessimism which has occasionally been termed “depressive realism”. The latter maintains that non-depressed people hold a “positivity bias” which colours their general outlook, whereas the supposed “negativity bias” of the depressive actually gives a more realistic appraisal of the world. I would argue that most of the opinions expressed in the book (especially those on politics and psychology) emanate from a position of depressive realism rather than a philosophically informed negativity or pessimism, and it’s this which accounts for the at times heavy handed or just plainly dismissive approach the author takes. This is shown clearly in his discussion of emotion which he declares to be the “substrate for the illusion of being a somebody among somebodies”, merely “living arbitrarily”. And here he make a key distinction: “to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive” (p104).Plainly then Ligotti feels his depressive state gives him an advantage, though recent empirical research has found no evidence of this. Moreover, does the mere capacity to feel emotion render life arbitrary? Intuitively this seems false. Most people have a fairly good handle on how they react to particular situations and our perception of a person’s personality and character is largely dependent on a degree of consistent affective response. If we are such false and arbitrary creatures why is personal change considered to be such a hard thing to achieve?What strikes the reader throughout the book is the vehemence of Ligotti’s exposition, and its hard generalisations. For instance, even the central concept of pessimism is for the author very black and white: “People are either pessimists or optimists. They forcefully “lean” one way or the other, and there is no common ground between them. For pessimists, life is something that should not be, which means that what they believe should be is the absence of life, nothing, non-being, the emptiness of the uncreated” (pg30). This is the extreme position that the author takes with him for his subsequent survey of an idiosyncratic selection of traditions, scientific disciplines and phenomena. It’s as if he felt he could only undertake this work from the position of an uber-pessimist, the effect of which is to invalidate from the get-go most of what he covers as “just not pessimistic enough”.Schopenhauer, for instance – whose general sentiment he approves of – is otherwise dismissed, owing to his unwieldy philosophical system and assertion of his concept of the “Will-to-live”; just another “intellectual labyrinth for specialists in perplexity”, according to Ligotti. There’s virtually nothing from the existentialist tradition beyond Schopenhauer, perhaps for the good reason that many of those philosophies accept Ligotti’s axiomatic view of the objective meaninglessness of human existence, but go on to build systems which nevertheless avoid the extreme conclusions Ligotti believes follow naturally from that first premise. The philosophies of Heidegger, Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty all start with the existence (or facticity) of human beings as a meaningless negativity, or ‘thrown-ness’ to use Heidegger’s term in translation.There is undoubtedly some just plain nasty posturing in the book. Ligotti’s attitude to environmentalism is one example, which he considers a “barricade” against the facts of life; a cause “that snubs the real issue. Vandalism of the environment is but a sidebar to humanity’s refusal to look into the jaws of existence” (pg64). Now, one could try to claim this was a poorly articulated variant of Heidegger’s critique of technology, which views the destruction of the natural world as an extension of the “forgetting of Being”. But that would be granting to Ligotti far too much. In truth the book is littered with grumpy expressions of this kind, which seem grounded in little else than the author’s desire to shock. Despite what Ligotti may think, the ‘Disenchantment of the World’ – to use Max Weber’s famous expression – is not fresh news to the average educated reader.It’s possible that the unusual force of his exposition is due to it being composed from within the American context, home to widespread fundamentalisms of all shades and where his most basic claims would undoubtedly shock a significant proportion of the population. From the thoroughly disenchanted and disillusioned shores of Europe, however, he appears like a man battering down an open door.While Ligotti is content to diminish the ontological stability of the self through his commitment to determinism and denial of the existence of the ego (Lacan would support him here), his nihilism stops short at fields which produce results that chime with his world view; these primarily being 19th century psychiatry and modern cognitive science.Accordingly, the self is a fabrication comparable to those other empty distractions he lists such as religion, the Nation and the family. Science is apparently not such a fabrication or distraction. Though one might well question what sort of science is possible without a degree of ontological stability for the knower. If we cannot even be certain about the status of the self, then any knowledge of the external world and by extension, any possible science, seems on very shaky ground. When it comes to epistemology Ligotti is a highly selective Pyrrhonian skeptic, unequivocal about the groundless nature of our intuitions, our sense of self and any feelings that life might be ok. Yet when it comes to cognitive science, evolutionary biology and 19th century psychiatry he’s happy to take many of their knowledge claims at face value, though often with regret that they’re not pessimistic enough. Where is the epistemological ground upon which the claims of these fields are based? And indeed, following Zapffe, is not all science just another distraction, another story we’re telling ourselves about ourselves to avoid the dark truth of the “MALIGNANTLY USELESS” (Ligotti’s capitalisation) rut of being in which we exist?There is a strong sense that in all this he insists too much, and there is a great deal of repetition and hyperbole in many of his observations. The book is also bereft of anything by way of structure, which given its tone makes it a less than pleasant reading experience. Each chapter drifts rather arbitrarily between popular culture, science and literature without ever reaching a conclusion. This all changes for the final chapter, Autopsy on a Puppet: an Anatomy of the Supernatural. Here it’s as if a curtain has been pulled back and light allowed into a dusty old room. For the final quarter of the book Ligotti’s tone changes markedly, ditching the posturing and instead embarking on a mini history of supernatural horror fiction. Here he writes fluidly and positively about his chosen field and its antecedents, from Ann Radcliffe in the late 18th century through Poe, Lovecraft, and even forays into Shakespeare and the works of Joseph Conrad. There are some interesting observations about the role of “atmosphere” in Schopenhauer and how it links with a sense that “behind the scenes of life there is something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world” (p175). In another register the desire to find out just what that “something” is became a highly prominent feature of late 19th and early 20th century Western thought and is sometimes referred to as “the hermeneutics of suspicion”. It is frequently applied to the works of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud all of whom were arguably pessimists, though in different ways.There is little else to say about the book except to highlight another paradox of this author. In an interview Ligotti gave in 2011 he claimed to identify as a socialist and argued that a concern for justice was paramount, especially where the issue of reducing suffering was at stake. And yet here the same author writes: “Both the inhumane and humane movements of our species are without relevance. None of us are at the helm of either of these moments. We believe ourselves to be masters of our behaviour – that is the blunder” (p226).Quite how he can square his commitment to socialism with this statement and the whole gamut of other dead-end positions he takes in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is anyone’s guess. From the perspective of his commitment to determinism, where is the sense in talking about justice and injustice? And from the perspective of the pessimist, where would the motivation even come from to attempt to change things as they stand, let alone institute some (admittedly rather palliative) form of socialism? As he repeatedly says, we are just deluded puppets. Taking all Ligotti’s positions together at face value leaves us with neither knowledge of the self or the outside world, nor the will to get out of bed to open the front door in order to find out. No political program could possibly emerge from it.This is undoubtedly a book of paradoxes which is often frustrating and at times hard to take seriously. I would not recommend it for anyone interested in the tradition of philosophical pessimism. It clearly reflects Ligotti’s interests and his psychology but makes no attempt to argue a coherent position or address up-to-date scholarship. I’m left wishing he’d dedicated more time to his reflections on the history of supernatural horror, which I found insightful and far more readable than what had gone before. Perhaps the joke is on us and the cranked up nihilism (which elsewhere he refutes) and no-holds-barred pessimism is an attempt at a new kind of horror literature. Undoubtedly some passages do stick in the memory, though I’m not sure they do so for the right reasons. I’m reminded of Jhonn Balance: Why be bleak when you can be Blake?

⭐I have read reviews which suggest this book is not one to read if you’re in a bad place, and I would agree that is the case if you somehow take solace in God, or the fundamental decency of humanity. Since it’s unlikely anyone of that description will be so much as considering this title, I would actually describe it as life affirming in a bizarre type of way, and for me has been a fulcrum for a ton of ideas. For Ligotti finds an outlet for his anxiety in a logical thought progression evolving a theory which makes absolute sense, until you consider the alternative. It’s written in a very engaging way for a book about how everyone is better off not existing at all, you can tell he’s more than an academic writer. I actually found myself laughing out loud in patches, because Ligotti’s pessamistic cynicism is expressed so deliciously. It also gives plenty of jumping off points to explore Nihilistic thought a little further. And that’s the thing, please don’t stop at this book, because that really will sap your will to live. Read ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ for example. It’s life’s absurdity that cold logic should be so cruel until you factor in the mystery of Being, of our thoughts and feelings and lives and beliefs and values and hobbies mattering to US; the profundity of emotions, whatever form they take.

⭐For when you find Cioran too cheery, there’s this.I’m not sure I agree with some of the conclusions: ultimately he tries to project his pathology onto everyone. It’s a little sad that he rationalises his misery to such an extent that he is completely trapped in his own prison, but I have to respect the depth of his erudition and the total conviction with which he goes about this. There’s very few books willing to explore the kind of theories he proposes, so bravo to that.He’s leagues ahead of most writers, bit however much blank humour and perversely uplifting sentiment there is here, it’s not as funny, beautiful or positive as the gold standard for this kind of thing, which for me is Cioran’s The Trouble With Being Born.

⭐I am not an academic reader, however with inclination towards filosophy. I struggle with the very long phrases in this book, and need my dictionary close at any rate. I don’t believe this is written to satisfy the wide variety of readers, especially “normal people” like me. English is not my first language, and this could be one of the reasons too, though this is not the first English philosophic translation I came across, I find it difficult to follow.I clearly must Downgrade a notch.

⭐Tedious over intellectualisation of the authors depression combined with trite anti-natalist musings. Boring. Uninspired. Worth a read anyway if you’re a fan of his horror because it’s always worth while to get a glimpse into an author’s mind. But don’t expect to be gripped by some powerhouse of intellectual thought.

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