The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (3 page)

throes of the real thing, albeit it may produce an award-winning tearjerker, as in the case of the 1971 film adaptation of Erich Segal’s 1970 bestselling novel Love Story.) These tactics keep our imaginations from scrutinizing too closely the smorgasbord of pains and death-agonies laid out for us. Alongside these corporeal unpleasantries is the abstract abashment some persons suffer because, at the end of the day, they feel their lives are destitute of any meaning or purpose.5

While every other creature in the world is insensate when it comes to meaning and purpose, those of us on the high ground of evolution are full of this enigmatic hankering, a preoccupation that any comprehensive encyclopedia of philosophy treats under the heading LIFE, THE MEANING OF. This is why Zapffe inferred that beings with consciousness are a mistake in the world of nature. We have a need that is not natural, one that can never be satisfied no matter how many big lies we swallow. Our unparalleled craving may be appeased—like the yen of a dope fiend—but we are deceived if we think it is ever gone for good. Years may pass during which we are unmolested by LIFE, THE

MEANING OF. Gratification of this want in our lives can come from anywhere or from nowhere. Some days we wake up and say, “It’s good to be alive.” If everyone were in such high spirits all the time, the topic of LIFE, THE MEANING OF would never rise up in our heads or our conversations. No one is nagged by the meaning of a life that is affluent with ease. But this ungrounded jubilation soon runs out of steam. Our consciousness, having snoozed awhile in the garden of incuriosity, is pricked by some thorn or other, perhaps DEATH, THE MEANING OF. Then the hunger returns for LIFE, THE MEANING OF, the emptiness must be filled again, the pursuit is resumed. And we will persist in chasing the impossible until we are no more. This is the tragedy that we do our best to cover up in order to brave an existence that holds terrors for us at every turn, with little but blind faith and habit to keep us on the move.

As posited above, consciousness may have facilitated our species’ survival in the hard times of prehistory, but as it became evermore acute it evolved the potential to ruin everything if not held firmly in check. Therefore, we must either outsmart consciousness or drown in its vortex of doleful factuality. Given this premise, Zapffe makes his second proposition, which is that the sensible thing to do would be to call off all procreative activities, thereby stamping out what has often been called the “curse of consciousness.”

Not only would it be the sensible thing to do, but it would also be the most human, even the only human, gesture available to us.6 Questions now arise: is the condition of being human what we think it is? And what do we think it is to be human? Nowhere in philosophy or the arts are there answers on which we can all agree. Science has us down as a species of organic life. But whatever it means to be human, we can at least say that we have consciousness.

To repeat: we can tolerate existence only if we believe—in accord with a complex of illusions, a legerdemain of impenetrable deception—that we are not what we are. We are creatures with consciousness, but we must suppress that consciousness lest it break us with a sense of being in a universe without direction or foundation. In plain language, we cannot live with ourselves except as impostors. As Zapffe points out in “The Last Messiah,” this is the paradox of the human: the impossibility of not lying to ourselves 19

about ourselves and about our no-win situation in this world. Thus, we are zealots of the four strategies delineated above: isolation (“Being alive is all right”), anchoring (“One Nation under God with Families and Laws for all”), distraction (“Better to kill time than kill oneself”), and sublimation (“I am writing a book titled The Conspiracy against the Human Race”). To the mass of us mortals, these practices make us what we are, namely, beings with a nimble intellect who can deceive themselves for their own good. Isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation are the wiles we use to keep our heads from dispelling every illusion that keeps us up and running. (“We think, therefore we know we are alive and will one day die; so we had better stop thinking, except in circles.”) Without this cognitive double-dealing, being alive would bare itself as a sordid burlesque and not the fabulous thing we thought it was. Maybe then we would know what it is to be human instead of just puppets beating the boards and one another. But that would stop the show that we like to think will run forever.

Being royally conscious of the solemn precincts in which we exist, of the savage wasteland that lies beneath all the piddling nonsense, would turn our world in on its head.

For those who care about such things, it could also abolish the bestial world-policies of dog-eat-dog, big ones eating the little ones, and every swine for himself. Saddled with self-knowledge, however, we thrive only insofar as we vigilantly obfuscate our heads with every baseless belief or frivolous diversion at our disposal. But as much as our heads are inclined to clog themselves with such trash, a full-scale blockage is impossible. This impossibility makes us heirs to a legacy of discontent.7 Those who treasure philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence are hopelessly frustrated with living in a world on autopilot when they would like to switch it over to manual consciousness just long enough for humanity to crash and burn. Most can live with discontent because it is concomitant with their hope that humanity will forever “survive” (Middle English by way of Middle French from the Latin supervivere—to outlive or live beyond). Reality bulletin: we, as a subcategory of the mélange of earth’s organisms, may outlive other species, but we will not live beyond our own time of extinction, as over ninety-nine percent of preceding life forms on this planet have not lived beyond theirs. We can pretend this will not happen, fantasizing super-scientific eternities, but in good time we will be taken out of the scene. This turn of events will be the defeat of Project Immortality, which has been in the works for millennia.

Our success as a species is calculated in the number of years we have extended our lives, with the reduction of suffering being only incidental to longevity. The lifespan of domesticated and non-domesticated animals has never changed, while ours has overtaken that of all other mammals. What a coup for us. Unaware of the length of their stay on earth, other warm-blooded life forms are sluggards by comparison. Without consciousness of death, we would not frantically disquiet ourselves to lengthen our mortal tenure. And how we have cashed in on our efforts: no need to cram our lives into three decades now that we can cram them into seven, eight, nine, or more. Time runs out for us as it does for all creatures, sure, but we can at least dream of a day when we choose our own deadline. Then everyone will die of the same thing: satiation with a durability that is MALIGNANTLY USELESS.8 Without a terminus imposed on our lifetimes, their 20

uselessness would become excruciatingly overt. Knowing ourselves to be on a collision course with the Wall of Death may be a horror, but it is the only thing that makes it possible to value that which comes before. While this quid pro quo may be a bad value, without it there is no value, for those who care. The eternal afterlife awaiting some of us on the other side of the wall is, quite naturally, only another end-of-the-line established to make this life valuable . . . or at least livable, which amounts to the same thing.

Immortality in either this world or the next is an endgame that goes on forever: perpetual life in name only, it is, like death, the end of anything we can know. Rather than pushing us through the unknown, it pulls us right up to its threshold and leaves us there. From where we stand, immortality and death are synonymous: a two-headed monster of semantics. Having no value for us except as “endness,” they generate value backwards into life. This value may be unevenly distributed among the living, and for some it is nonexistent. Others must be satisfied with mere driblets of value that stream thinly back from a terminal point in death or immortality. These are enough to seduce them into putting up with the present and looking to the future. But not until the future is behind us can there be any peace on this earth or in our heads. Then we may finish this long and arduous voyage without a thirst for the value that trickles into our lives from their certain end. If we could get over that nonsense, Zapffe’s prospectus for our self-extermination would be a walk in the park.

Neither of Zapffe’s main propositions—the mistake of consciousness or the corrective of shutting down the assembly line of reproduction—is exclusive to his philosophy.

Buddhism has long preached that ordinary consciousness is the greatest roadblock to the deliverance of human beings from the crucible of existence. In his Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (1913), the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno speaks of consciousness as a disease bred by a conflict between the rational and the irrational. The irrational represents all that is vital in humanity, including a universal desire for immortality. The rational is identified with the conclusions of consciousness, primarily that we will all die. The coexistence of the rational and the irrational turns the human experience into a wrangle of contradictions to which we can submit with a suicidal resignation or obstinately defy as heroes of futility. (Unamuno’s penchant is for heroic course with the implied precondition that one has the physical and psychological spunk for the fight: “I think, therefore I will die; but I cannot let that keep me from acting as if I did not think.”) The contradiction between the rational and the irrational in Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life is echoed by French existentialist superstar Albert Camus as the

“absurd” (see footnote number seven to this chapter). On the scientific side there is mismatch theory. This subsidiary concept of evolutionary psychology studies characteristics of our species that were once adaptive but have since become inimical to surviving in the environment we have made for ourselves. The same idea was cited by Theodore Kaczynski (a.k.a. The Unabomber) as a rationalization for the mayhem he committed in his one-man war on technological “advancement.” The combination of our species’ aggressive nature with its relatively recent leap in consciousness and intellect was incarnated by Kaczynski himself, whose sophisticated brain and violent actions fit like a velvet glove in a chain mail gauntlet. Another luminary of “civilization,” the British physicist Stephen Hawking, has also alleged that our vigorous exercise of conscious thought without a counterbalancing diminution of aggression is a formula for 21

disaster. In the immemorial past, the cocktail of intelligence and ferocity gave us a leg up on the predatory competition, but it has since become a real powder keg of perils, not to mention being the nucleus of those psychological discontents popularized by Sigmund Freud.9

In his 1910 doctoral dissertation, published in English as Persuasion and Rhetoric (2004), the twenty-three-year-old Italian philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter vehemently critiqued, very much in same terms as Zapffe, the maneuvers by which we falsify the realities of human existence in exchange for a speciously comforting view of our lives.

Michelstaedter’s biographers and critics have speculated that his hopelessness regarding any person’s ability to break through their web of illusions was the cause of his suicide (two bullets from a gun) the day after he finished his dissertation. Other examples could be offered of serious philosophers and intellectuals who have observed that, while officially we crow about our brain-to-body ratio, much of our time is spent trying to keep that beast in our skulls well sedated. Few thinkers—by definition, one would have to say—have been untroubled by our self-awareness. Specialists in self-awareness revel in its mysteries as if they could crack this conundrum by immersing themselves in it (sublimation). Finaglers by profession, they are able to bail themselves out of any cognitive fix and sneak away with their old ideals and psychic infrastructure intact. They are also content with the stellar fact of human life that Michelstaedter could not accept: no one has control over how they will be in this world, a truth that eradicates all hope if how you want to be is immutably self-possessed (persuaded) and without subjection to a world that would fit you within the limits of its illusions and unrealities (rhetoric). But individuals are defined by their limitations; without them, they fall outside the barrier of identifiable units, functionaries in the big show of collective existence, attachés to the human species. The farther you proceed toward a vision of humankind under the aspect of eternity, the farther you drift from what makes you a person among persons in this world. In the observance of Zapffe, an overactive consciousness endangers the approving way in which we define ourselves and our lives. It does this by threatening our self-limited perception of who we are and what it means to know we are alive and will die. A person’s demarcations as a being, not how far he trespasses those limits, create his identity and preserve his illusion of being someone. Transcending all illusions and their emergent activities would untether us from ourselves and license the freedom to be no one. In that event, we would lose our allegiance to our species, stop reproducing, and quietly bring about our own end. The lesson: “Let us love our limitations, for without them nobody would be left to be somebody.”

Concerning the doctrine that our species should refrain from reproduction, a familiar cast of characters comes to mind. The Gnostic sect of the Cathari in twelfth-century France were so tenacious in believing the world to be an evil place engendered by an evil deity that its members were offered a dual ultimatum: sexual abstinence or sodomy. (A similar sect in Bulgaria, the Bogomils, became the etymological source of the term “bugger” for their adherence to the latter practice.) While mandated abstinence for clerics was around the same time embedded in the doctrines of the Catholic Church, even though they betimes give in to sexual quickening, its raison d’être was said to be the attainment of grace (and in legend was a requisite for those in search of the Holy Grail) rather than to 22