THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE - THOMAS LIGOTTI

I got this from the library after finishing Ligotti’s TEATRO GROTTESCO a few weeks ago. Say what you will about Ligotti, the man certainly has a worldview. This book, which is non-fiction, seemed like the purest distillation of how he feels about things. And things are not good. Their actually the worst they could be, to hear Ligotti tell it. I read some Schopenhauer in college but this is far and away the most pessimistic single work I’ve read. To simplify, Ligotti views consciousness, especially human consciousness, a terrible mistake. Life is meaningless and absurd and full of pain and the more one is aware of this the more one suffers. Also, since deterministic forces rule our lives, we are basically cursed, nightmarish puppets. It was unsurprising, based on his fiction, that Ligotti has thought a lot about the ways in which people are like puppets and the ways in which puppets are terrifying. As I’ll bet you could have guessed, Ligotti is a hardcore anti-natalist and and seems to broadly be supportive of suicide. While large portions of the book are something akin to straight forward philosophy (though largely jargon free) the book also features a lot of criticism. Ligotti traces this pessimism he’s describing though philosophy and fiction, pointing out and expounding upon his predecessors. He’s taken with a Norwegian named Peter Zapffe who wrote fiction and philosophy around the same subjects and who talks about how one of the ways to deal with this crushing insight into life is to sublimate it into art. Since Ligotti, to my knowlege, hasn’t killed himself, he’s clearly chosen to deal with his psychic burdens in this manner. Ligotti talks cleverly and at length about various horror writers who touch on these themes. He’s got lots of smart stuff to say about H.P. Lovecraft and Poe. He could be the world’s saddest English professor, if he wanted. Overall though, I would agree that these feelings are best sublimated into art. This book was alright but his fiction is better. He’s great a driving home a point, I really like how he always capitalizes MALIGNANTLY USELESS, a phrase he uses often to describe human life but in the end, I’m more dazzled by his imagination than his worldview. 0 meaningless lives.