The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (21 page)

Directed by a manic will, they are able to infect others with their delusions by projecting decades and centuries of emotional prosperity.4

Naturally, we are all for feeling good rather than feeling bad, even to the point of pathology. Howbeit, nature did not make us to feel too good for too long (which would be no good for the survival of the species) but only to feel good enough to imagine, erroneously, that someday we might feel good all the time. To believe that humanity will ever live in a feel-good world is a common mistake.5 And if we do not feel good, we should act as if we do. If you act happy, then you will become happy—everybody in the workaday world knows that. If you do not improve, then someone must assume the blame. And that someone will be you. We are on our way to the future, and no introverted melancholic is going to impede our progress. You have two choices: start thinking the way God and your society want you to think or be forsaken by all. The decision is yours, since you are a free agent who can choose to rejoin the world of fabricated reality—civilization, that is—or stubbornly insist on . . . what? That we should rethink how the whole world transacts its business? That we should start over from scratch, questioning all the ways and means that delivered us to a lofty prominence over the amusement park of creation? Try to be realistic. We made our world just the way nature and the Lord wanted us to make it. There is no starting over and no going back. No major readjustments are up for a vote. And no nihilistic head case is going to get a bad word in edgewise. The universe was created by the Creator, goddamn it. We live in a country we love and that loves us back. We have families and friends and jobs that make it all worthwhile. We are somebodies, as we spin upon this good earth, not a bunch of nobodies without names or numbers or retirement plans. None of this is going to become unraveled by a thought criminal who contends that the world is not double plus good and never will be and who believes that anyone is better off dead than alive. Our lives may not be unflawed—that would deny us a future to work toward—but if this charade is good enough for us, then it should be good enough for you. So if you cannot get your mind right, try walking away. You will find no place to go and no one who will have you.

You will find only the same old trap the world over. It is the trap of tomorrow. Love it or leave it—choose which and choose fast. You will never get us to give up our hopes, demented as they may seem. You will never get us to wake up from our dreams. Your 96

opinions are not certified by institutions of authority or by the middling run of humanity, and therefore whatever thoughts may enter your chemically imbalanced brain are invalid, inauthentic, or whatever dismissive term we care to assign to you who are only “one of those people.” So get the hell out if you can. But we are betting that when you start hurting badly enough, you will come running back. If you are not as strong as Samson—

that no-good suicide and slaughterer of Philistines—then you will return to the trap. Do you think we are morons? We have already thought everything that you have thought.

The only difference is that we have the proper and dignified sense of futility not to spread that nasty news. Our shibboleth: “Up the Conspiracy and down with Consciousness.”

ESCAPING

We mortals seem to have an inveterate need to escape our baseline of emotion. This intolerance for stasis in our emotional lives, an unbalanced compulsion to modify our chemistry by artificial or natural means, jibes with what Buddhism avows is the unsatisfactory nature of life as such. We pine for escapades from the quotidian, the day-to-day grind whose enchantments come into relief only when contrasted with deadly alternatives. Besides the fact that we are biologically quixotic, why else succumb to romantic risk taking? In one of his plentiful moments of fulgurant clarity, Schopenhauer spelled out why he thought that “sexual desire, especially when through fixation on a definite woman it is concentrated to amorous infatuation, is the quintessence of the whole fraud of this noble world; for it promises so unspeakably, infinitely, and excessively much, and then performs so contemptibly little.”6 The lesson is a straightforward one: everything in this life is more trouble than it is worth. And simply to be alive is to be enwombed in trouble. This is something that has been recognized more in the East than in the West. Minor figures in Greek philosophy instruct us to seek equanimity rather than pleasure, but their lectures never caught on. Early Buddhist teachings cautioned their adherents not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to salvation from the average sensual life, which is why these doctrines were trounced by the commonalty of heads and mutated into forms more suited to the human creature. In addition, meditating Buddhists must be able to sit still as a stone, a knack that few are electrified into perfecting. As children, we spin in circles until we fall to the ground with vertigo, and this practice is repeated in one way or another throughout our lives.

Art products are among the most approved contrivances for thwarting one’s baseline of emotion. Both creators and consumers of these goods and services are “transported” by aesthetic manipulations, although such transports are not very keen when compared to those that satisfy a biological drive or an acquired habituation. As a method of escapism, creating or consuming art seems a harmless pastime. Those who depend on artistic distraction trust that they can always fall back on it, even when every other stimulus has abandoned them. Nevertheless, many have been disabused of this assumption. The writer who can no longer write is taught the blighted impotence of the newly paralyzed.

Musicians or music lovers who suffer from untreatable pain or depression are debarred from their haven of pleasure, frozen in a landscape where all sounds merge into the sameness of silence. How can these invalids replace what has gone absent from their lives, these children who can no longer spin about until they dizzily drop to the ground?

Deprived of even relatively mild tonics for enhancing one’s baseline of emotion—that is, 97

of getting high—they discover how dependent they were on their intoxicants. Ogden Nash’s noteworthy line “Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker,” aside from its original context of sexual seduction, may, at a higher level of abstraction, also concern how a body may be more effectively transported from its usual humdrum trajectory by the use of chemicals. The fact that they, too, are more trouble than they are worth is often due to legal and societal sanctions against them rather than to their effects either in the short run or over time. (You can either ask Art Linkletter, who believed that his twenty-year-old daughter Diane jumped to her death because she was on LSD, or William S. Burroughs, a long-lived narcotics addict and literary genius.) While conspirators in the War on Death enforce life at all costs, turning the act of suicide into a ritual of devastating loneliness, those who conspire for universal sobriety are sparked by the same heinous zeal. They might instead choose to attend to doings that cause far more misery, but why they do what they do is as much a mystery as why others do not. Call it a matter of choice, if you will.

What is the grievance that people—meaning those professionally normal people who make the rules—have against the escapist use of drugs? Manifestly, these individuals are not averse to dulling or altering their consciousness. This is what everyone does to get through their lives and not think about their forthcoming deaths, so why not do it by the most effective and proven agents, those that have helped us since the most ancient days of our race? To uncover a credible answer to this question requires that we turn our backs on a stringent Puritanism or an honorable concern with the public weal. These are only cover stories for condoning the sadistic punishments awaiting those who would cope with existence by unsanctioned means. Irrationality—and penalties for drug use are the quintessence of the irrational—explodes from assorted emotional origins: rage, love, fear, and so forth. Such explosions blow all mental composure to smithereens and leave behind them a rubble of ignorance of the worst kind—that of institutionalized self-deception.

The real arguments against the use of drugs cannot speak their names. That pleasure-inducing substances may dynamite the lives of individuals and their families is true. But since when has an advanced and still burgeoning society ever cared about individuals and families? They allow whole segments of their populations to founder without a wince.

And these are the segments in which drug use is most penetrant. They also include those persons who are of the least benefit to a society’s economy and would not be missed were they all to overdose themselves in a single day. These individuals and their families do not exist for a society in the first place, so their death has no meaning for the status quo.

What does have meaning for the happy, productive social beings who want to survive and reproduce, who want to keep existing, are these facts: (1) being on drugs is the closest one can come to being dead without actually dying; (2) drugs do what every form of pleasure does—they satisfy a need—only they do it better and without the intermediary agents and activities that bring profit to a society, such as popular entertainment, interest in one’s work-life, spending earned income on a new car, etc. No question that these agents and activities are non-chemical counterparts of drugs. They keep people’s minds off the MALIGNANTLY USELESS nature of human existence. They also net the big money and deliver it to the right people—those who exist, those who are driven to survive and to produce more people like themselves. Anti-drug programs are directed at these people, not at those who are officially dead to a society and who remind its 98

members, those who really exist, that drugs are next-door neighbors to death and do not contribute a cent to Project Immortality. Here are the real arguments against the use of drugs, the ones that cannot be uttered because by being uttered they would expose the blackness below every person’s life and the lies that are a society’s safety net above this blackness. To be on drugs is to expose as an impotent whimsy Schopenhauer’s Will-tolive, that irrationally thrashing force of vitality whose reality is not quite plausible and whose denial is only a head game with a metaphysical nimbus about it. To be on drugs is the short way round to a private Nirvana, a place where there is space for only one of us at a time, not for families, societies, nations, or religious subgroups and their gods—all the accoutrements of normal insanity. The problem is not that a social and political system that entitled people to use drugs would be overthrown; the problem is that it would have to welcome mortality into its system and even begin to profit from that mortality, as it would do once the middlemen of a living death had been cut out of the action. Although any drug war is a business running at a loss it can never recover, the fight must continue for Project Immortality and its dummy corporations. Never mind that immortality would lead anyone to drugs or suicide. But as a harebrained possibility, it performs the service of obscuring from the public consciousness, the consciousness of those who exist, the real meaning that drug use has for a society, excluding those unpersons who live in its ghettos. What a high price societies must pay for their witlessness, far higher—if our masters were not too politically self-interested to admit it—than that which could ever be incurred by drug use. Ask William F. Buckley, Jr., a good Catholic—why should they care what people do to or with their bodies?—and a defeatist on the subject of the American war on drugs, which may one day seem as quaint and thrill-packed as the era of Prohibition. But this will not happen until drugs have been branded and marketed by people who exist, and not sold on the street by and for those of us who, whatever the shade of our skin, are just niggers.

No one in a productive society wants you to know there are ways of looking at the world other than their ways, and among the effects that drugs may have is that of switching a mind from the normal track. Reading the works of certain writers has a corresponding effect. When receptive individuals explore the writings of someone such as Lovecraft, they are majestically solaced to find articulations of existence countering those to which the heads around them have become habituated. Drawn to peruse further that small library of the hopeless, the futureless, they may happen upon minds whose soundings into certain depths of thought immediately become indispensable to their existence. Some may fall to their knees to hear a voice other than theirs execrating this planet as a nightmarish penitentiary, not excusing its dust as that of a dreamy paradise in the making.

By these words they have been confirmed. So they trust in the errant madness and misery of everything. They trust in the horror of human existence and its flimsy fronts, behind and beyond which are the strings that pull at us. They trust in the greatness that would attend humankind’s self-administered oblivion, a feat so luminous it would bedim the sun. They trust in these things and many others.

After publishing his first book in French, which in English appeared as A Short History of Decay (1949), Cioran learned from the volume’s enthusiastic reception that his style of philosophical pessimism was exhilarating for certain readers. (Necessarily, Cioran was a 99

bedazing word-artist, which is a vital quality for any writer whose deep-dyed attitude is that of pessimism. Readers will put up with the most vapid prosaist as long as he supplies them with comforting lies. If you have nothing but bad news and bitching to offer, then you had better write with a silver pen.) Lovecraft, among other authors of his kind, can have the same exhilarating effect: rather than encouraging people to surrender, they may instead fortify them to carry on, even after being visited by what both he and Zapffe labeled as “cosmic panic.” This hygienic reaction makes the case: nothing is inescapably depressing about either Lovecraft’s works or those of any other writer who is not hollering Hooah for human life. Those asseverating to the contrary do so only out of a despicable prejudice. Then again, Lovecraft may be dandy, but a bullet in the head is quicker. Piteously, almost everyone quails at this option both in principle and in practice.