The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti

By Max Finkel*

“Hell, purgatory, and heaven are not for us, except insofar as all three are here and now, on this earth. The great tragic poets knew all three, and their visions can illuminate our hell.” (Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy And Philosophy)

If there is a conspiracy against the human race then who are the conspirators? For Thomas Ligotti, there is not a localized origin point that serves as the locus of propagation. Rather, the conspiracy emanates amorphously, spilling itself through time and eerily entwining itself between beings in a clandestine treaty with optimism the stain of its treatise. The conspiracy remains concealed for many reasons – among them repression, denial, and the bare verity that the human psyche bears an unconscious feature which is the storehouse of pre-cognitive activity, lifelong traumas, unspeakable ideas and unspecified strangeness. Etymologically, the word conspiracy is derived from the Latin conspirare, which means “to agree” or “to plot.” A further breakdown could be made ~ con = “together with” + spirare = “breathe.” What clues remain hidden in this term which was carefully placed within the title of Ligotti’s book—an “agreement,” a “plot,” “together with,” “breathe.” If there is a foundation to human existence and to the living in general, it is the activity of breathing. If there is a foundation that connects the varieties of human cultures, it is the evolutionary impulse to continue, to multiply, to persist…to live on.

“It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know. You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” (Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable)

In Ligotti’s view, part and parcel with human existence as we know it is an idea that is the lifeblood of a common style towards life, so prevalent that is has become a norm. And a norm for so long that it has become an unquestioned, or unconscious axiom, from which our thoughts, ideas, and responses to existence issue from. Simply stated, this given is the belief that “life is all right.”  Through a resuscitation of a rich variety of pessimisms, Ligotti provides a contestation against this affirmative valuation and offers a liturgical contemplation of horror, death, and the misplaced meaning of it all still yet to be found. To any who have tasted alienation, estrangement, or any variation of feeling deeply that things as they are are out of joint, The Conspiracy Against The Human Race provides a peculiar form of deliverance through an invitation to not shoo one’s ontological angst away but welcome one’s queasiness as clarity’s signature. Making the conspiracy conscious involves a thorough uncoupling of Life and Happiness. Many systems of thought equate these two and set up an equation along the lines of – the more the human knows life’s inner machinery, the happier they will become.  For Ligotti, following Peter Wessell Zappfe, knowing Life more clearly is knowing the horror more clearly, the interminable givens of our predicament – sickness, old age, death, loss, heartbreak, etc. Is Ligotti’s book simply the outpouring of a distressed human convinced that this, just this, should not be? Or is there something more at work beneath the surface, an ethics perhaps and maybe even a moral stance?

Is this a something more that is rarely unearthed because the eyes of the conspiracy enact a supreme phobia of anything that does not have a happy ending or a grand transformation waiting in the wings?

For Ligotti, pessimism begins from the ground and the human misfortune of being a “hunk of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.” This is the most honest starting point for thought according to Ligotti. We don’t have to begin here, we can begin our thinking elsewhere, with an assumed transcendent awareness who we actually are or from a hidden utopia which is always already – puppets held in the left hand of the puppet master, along for the ride ~ in the puppet master we will forever abide. There are countless places to begin our thinking, Ligotti, encourages the reader to begin in the flesh and in the unspoken, that which is absent from common visions and ideas about life. He is interested in a mundane silence that is the tacit terrain we try so hard to keep hidden from the world and even from our self. Ligotti is an existentialist of sorts, holding tightly to death as the most formative feature of existence. Death is not something to get over, nor can we. Death can be obscured through a variety of strategies – including isolation, anchoring, distraction and sublimation – but it forever maintains its station as that which is just over the horizon and just under the surface, the more one digs the more it recedes and the faster one runs the quicker it vanishes. To hide ourselves from the reality of finitude, human life becomes an ongoing activity of minimizing our consciousness and an ongoing repression of this “biological paradox” that we are. “This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are…” Is the activity of meditation a methodology of minimizing or maximizing consciousness? I leave that for you to decide.

“No doubt, critics will try to indict Ligotti of bad faith by claiming that the writing of this book is driven by the imperatives of the life that he seeks to excoriate. But the charge is trumped-up, since Ligotti explicitly avows the impossibility for the living to successfully evade life’s grip. This admission leaves the cogency of his diagnosis intact, for as Ligotti knows full well, if living is lying, then even telling the truth about life’s life will be a sublimated lie.” (Ray Brassier, Foreword to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race)

It is becoming more common to speak of the human as always already a mere mouthpiece of a culturally constructed worldview or ideology. To become a stooge of this sort is to enter into a level of automaticity in which the thinking faculty mutates into a mimic like faculty that merely reflects the positions of those segments of breathing earth we have deemed as on the right track in life. I write as one of these stooges. Most are stooges or “puppets” and I say this without an ounce of animosity or derogatory flare. Ligotti is up to something different in his text than simply naming customary ways of subject formation and diagnosing kinds of subjects through kinds of language. Ligotti is concerned not with what is said, but with what is not said. Faithful to the term conspiracy, he brings to light that which cannot be said without condemning the speaker to an everlasting stranger. A mute covenant that “life is all right” forms the very milieu of human life. Ligotti’s basic definition of an optimistic posture is holding to the idea that life should be as opposed to not be. A pessimism is that which begins from a different starting point, not from the idea that life should be but from the clear comprehension of the “’brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.” He aptly names the prevalent and highly conditioned attitude of optimism in all of its pretty guises and the way in which the optimistic trait is capable of copulating with almost any vision of life – a rebirth, an awakening, a release can always be inserted after any period of disdain, disgust, or disenchantment. Ligotti’s book advocates for a suspension of tragedy as birth canal to some more authentic and fulfilling life and invites the reader to remain with that which we are ever so quick, if we look at all, to pass over in silence.

“As a fact, we cannot give suffering precedence in either our individual or collective lives. We have to get on with things, and those who give precedence to suffering will be left behind. They fetter us with their sniveling. We have someplace to go and must believe we can get there, wherever that may be. And to conceive that there is a ‘brotherhood of suffering between everything alive’ would disable us from getting anywhere. We are preoccupied with the good life, and step by step are working toward a better life. What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next — as if we were playing a board game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead and the human puppet.”

---

*See Max Finkel’s bio here. All unattributed quotations are from Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against The Human Race (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010).