The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (12 page)

When this occurs, a humane intervention just seems like the thing to do . . . and let the

“good fight” begin. The problem is that to beat the strong, one must be—or become—

relatively stronger. As everyone knows, the strong are not necessarily better than the weak, nor are they necessarily worse. They are only stronger. Prevailing over an adversary, though that adversary may have committed some atrocious acts, does not mean the victors are more virtuous—except perhaps in their own eyes. And those eyes are now going to cast about for other fights, ones that seem good to them . . . or to their self-interest, which amounts to the same thing. The stronger powers, which seem to be getting stronger all the time, will always believe they are in the right. Whether or not they are fighting a good fight, they will be convinced that they are fighting the best fight they can drum up. Ultimately, the strongest of the strong will fight for the sake of remaining strong and becoming stronger. Deprived of a method for determining what is better or worse in a world of no stupendous meaning, the might of the strong will have to suffice as our standard. As for the weak, they will take it out on their one-time persecutors and plunderers when the time is right. No one can elude the fatalism of horror, whatever they believe or do not believe.

We do not have the power to make our lives monumentally better, only monumentally worse. The reform-minded, particularly if they are adherents of a hazy utopia, are always saying, “We would be so much better off if only it weren’t for this institution or that, this government or that, or if we had no civilization at all, no economy, no barricades between us and greater satisfactions of the human body, mind, and heart. If only . . .” Then there are the missionaries and cultists of one faith or another, pondering to themselves and anyone else who will listen, “If only everyone could cling to that which I cling, everything would be so much better. If only everyone were like me. If only. . .” And the politicians, professional or armchair, chime in with their disbelief that anyone could possibly hold an opinion obdurate to their own. “If only my enemies could see as I see. If only they weren’t so benighted by lusts and longings that do not affect me, everything would be so much better. If only. . .” Even level-headed realists cannot help thinking that things would be so much better if only more stopgaps were in effect, more bandages to patch up the world one square inch at a time. But no “if only” can cut it even as a 56

palliative for what ails us. Nothing will ever be so much better. There will always be horror pumped up to us from its limitless source—conscious and self-conscious life, the Big Mistake. And nothing keeps this horror going like unfounded beliefs and their emetic symbols: the stake, the lynch rope, the ovens, the car bomb. . . . To tolerate belief or to spit on it? The dilemma is nothing new. Perhaps it is only as a form of therapy or distraction that leads one to review matters that are so well worn, depressingly well worn, maddeningly well worn. (“If only people would stop making more people—then nothing would need to be so much better. If only. . .”) All said, a dissembled tolerance is another one of those things that make the world go round. And few of us—infidels and fideists alike—find the way of the hypocrite to be unduly challenging.

HYPOCRISY

Consciousness is the headwater of all deception and self-deception. To be conscious is inevitably to be a hypocrite. We can stomach our own kind, or just enough of them who either prove useful to us or are not handily destructible, only by the terms of the following contract: we will eat some of the other fellow’s excrement if he will eat some of ours. This is the ecumenical way, and the hypocritical one. Being a grossly transparent hypocrite is de rigueur for making it in this life. Try going through a single day in which you tell those around you what you really think: you will lose everything—your job, your family, your friends. Even more ruinous would be to act on your feelings, whether they are deeply held or fleeting. You would be dead or in prison in no time. Some speak of our hypocrisies as “useful fictions” and ballyhoo them as staples for both the individual and society. Others are more skeptical.

In Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception (1996), Daniel Goleman studies how people and groups play along with factitious designs to forestall the animus and anxiety that would be loosed if a code of honesty were somehow enforced. Noam Chomsky published a book called Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (1989) in which he argues that the master class of a nation such as the United States of America could not hold up without lying to its citizenry and, more importantly, getting them to lie to themselves. With Zapffe, one could contend that nothing would hold up in this world without a scaffolding of hypocrisies and lies. This is the stuff of which civilizations are made—fabricated realities, not those stark necessities we have so bedecked with bells and whistles that we cannot recognize what is underneath. As noted above, the latter are simple: food, shelter, and clothing. Anything beyond these necessities for subsistence is fabricated reality, and all of us are scalp-deep in its countless accretions and extensions, its vast architecture of fervid dreams over the past five thousand years or so. In the genre of science fiction, narratives set in a post-holocaust society often accentuate its lunacy, tyranny, and conflict, which is to say that the gravest possible lesson will leave humanity unchanged. As if nothing happened, the characters living in these blasted environments immediately set about rebuilding fabricated realities from the remnants of the ones that are in ruins.

While some have had expressed momentous reservations about this edifice of claptrap known as civilization, this colossally garish spectacle of bad taste, we do not often pass up an opportunity to commend ourselves for erecting it. We grovel at the memorials of 57

some author, artist, inventor, or national leader who lived before us. We gape in wonder at the base of an Egyptian pyramid or an Aztec pyramid or any other pyramid we come across. Without question, we are cuckoo for pyramids. How stupefying that these mounds of rocks should be seen as showpieces of an ancient grandeur rather than as tombs of our sanity. And still we go at it full force. Is there any doubt that everyone will be suppurating with vainglory when the first pyramid, in the guise of a splendorous installation decreed by civilization’s potentates, is built on Mars?

Arrogance goes hand-in-hand with hypocrisy. Worm-ridden with self-assurance, it flicks sanity into the gutter and inflates the fault-ridden into the meritorious. The mind boggles that hypocrisy ever got a bad name, since it is but a by-product of consciousness itself, which motored us in style past all the other beasts of the earth. The ability to act in conflict with ourselves, to say we believe something is true that we know is not, has been a prerequisite for our survival. Without it, we would be compelled to wrestle with that most secret of lies: our integrity as persons, our wholeness as selves. Hypocrisy—in other words, the practice of lying about lying—shields us from seeing ourselves as we are: a collocation of fragments that fit together as a biological unit but not as anything else, not as that ghost which has been called a self, a phantasm whose ecotoplasmic unreality we can never see through. By staying true to the lie of the self, the ego, we can hold onto the illusion that we will be who we are all our lives and not see our selves die a thousand times before our death. While some have dedicated themselves to getting to the bottom of how these parts create the illusion of a whole, this is not how pyramids are built. To get a pyramid off the ground takes a lot of ego—the base material of those stacks of stones that tourists visit while on vacation. Of course, a pyramid is actually a polyhedron, that is, a mathematical conception which pyramids in the physical world resemble . . . at least from a distance. The nearer one gets to a pyramid, the more it reveals itself to be what it is: a roughly pyramidal conglomeration of bricks, a composition of fragments that is not what it seems to be. This is also how it works with humans. The world around us encourages the build up of our egos—those pyramids of self-esteem—as if we needed such encouragement. Although everyone is affected by this pyramid scheme, some participate in it more than others: they are observably more full of themselves and tend to their egos as they would exotic plants in a hothouse. It helps if they can wear down the self-esteem of others, or simply witness this erosion. As the American novelist and essayist Gore Vidal said famously and often: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” None of this could work without the distance we put between what we are and what we think we are. Then we may appear to exist apart from our constituent elements. Self-esteem would evaporate without a self to esteem. As with pyramids, it is only at a distance that this illusion can be pulled off. Hypocrisy is that distance.5

WORLDVIEWS

Incongruities in how people believe things to be, or how they should be, are the stuff of

“worldviews.” Elaborate or simpleminded, these agglomerations of judgment and hooey spice up our lives, which might be banefully boring without them. On the level of worldviews, minds great and small, not to forget armies, may contest the issues which inflame them. This is the surface level of sanctimony, folly, and cant. It also happens to be where most of us spend our time as we sleepwalk through existence, fighting for dear 58

life to blockade what consciousness would allow into our heads: pain and the anticipation of pain, decay and the only end of decay. Such is the sanatorium to which we have committed ourselves, and it just aggrandizes our insanity to place special import on the opinions, mythologies, religions, philosophies, or cultural products of any given people in any given geographical region or historical period.
We are all in the same stewpot, as is any other species. But we are unaffected by this fact, and it is the differences among us, not the likenesses, which prompt almost all our behavior
.
And if those differences are not visible enough in broadcast media or on placards of protest, then we should more sedulously inspect the heads around us.

Human beings are born into a certain society, and they tend to follow that society's crazed precepts to stay in the good graces of those who authorize cognitively prudent conduct. In medieval Europe, for example, atheists were not as profuse as they have since become.

Too successful in eradicating godlessness, the Church had to make do with heretics, those who deviated from its dogma in an ostentatious way. So it was with Marguerite Porete, who wrote a book wherein she recorded a mystic vision of the afterlife that disagreed with the tenets of ecclesiastic officials. It was her belief that qualified individuals would posthumously dissipate into a unity with the divine. (This metaphysical fabulation, in an atheist-pessimist format, would later be revived by Schopenhauer; see earlier references to the Will.) In its broad strokes, Marguerite’s afterlife is all right. It sure beats the Church’s massively stomach-turning congregation of God, Jesus, Mary, the angels, the saints, and other celestial VIPs. More imaginative and inspired, but not as catchy, as that of the Church, Marguerite’s heaven got her burned at the stake. Her punishment by incineration must have lent spice to a time and place of mesmerizing congruousness.

In later centuries, a potpourri of Western worldviews emerged, but the principles of the Middle Ages remained the rage: if you bought the same cultural wares as your neighbors, the authorities would let you in the gate; if you did not buy them, you were shown the door. Then you could go live in the woods or the desert or the jungle with the lower animals. When you are alone in the wilderness, opinions or beliefs of any kind are dropped as the absurd accoutrements they are. But after being in the wilderness for a while, you may come around to feeling sociable. Maybe you could try living in a community of “like-minded” social deviants. However, they had better be so alike that they are clones of one another or the day will come when someone steps over the line and factions begin to teem. Our brains will always discriminate—that is their nature. They fix on superficial differences we spy in one another, redundantly speaking, since all differences among us are superficial. Whether they are excoriated as bigotry or dignified as worldviews, our differences are only heretical subtleties that in past centuries would have gotten one tortured or killed or both.

Is there any cause for us to speak of whims as worldviews? Are they more than just frippery we show off to disguise the fact that we have only one suit in our closet . . . and it is made of tissue and bones? Answers: of course there is and of course they are. If we do not take ourselves with dead seriousness, then we might as well cut our throats. Not to do so—take ourselves seriously, not cut our throats—would bring the roof down on our heads, which need to think that something of moment is going on in this world, 59

something to make it worth living in and reproducing in. The most dangerous idea is that we should all be free to do as we like as long as what we do hurts no one else. Those suggesting this idea will get nowhere or dead, based on the social and political atmosphere in which they live. We can rest easy, though, as this idea would be impossible to bring into our lives, and not only because free will is a lie.6 In both the natural and the human worlds, nothing can survive without hurting something else, thus savaging that most dangerous of all ideas. This is no news; it is just the way it is. And we are not blazingly bright enough to go against that way. Some schools of Buddhism admonish those with an itch to liberate themselves from their conditioned existence to leave their homes and their lives behind. To become liberated is to die to the cares of life, one of them being that we will die. Until we relinquish everything, we are lost. Can this recommendation be classified as a worldview? If so, then it will be kicked it aside as nihilistic, pessimistic, anti-social, or just plain goofy. It will not receive government or corporate funding. Conclusion: there is no greatness in humankind, only the voracity for infantile skirmishes in a sandbox. How better to conceal our quandaries? How better to keep our heads out of the know?