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2010 Bram Stoker Award Nominee for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction. The Conspiracy against the Human Race is renowned horror writer Thomas Ligotti's first work of nonfiction. Through impressively wide-ranging discussions of and reflections on literary and philosophical works of a pessimistic bent, he shows that the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination. The worst and most plentiful horrors are instead to be found in reality. Mr. Ligotti's calm, but often bloodcurdling turns of phrase, evoke the dreadfulness of the human condition. Those who cannot bear the truth will pretend this is another work of fiction, but in doing so they perpetuate the conspiracy of the book's title. --David Benatar, author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence;Department of Philosophy, University of Cape Town, South Africa

http://www.amazon.com/The-Conspiracy-Ag ... 0984480277

Review

The Conspiracy against the Human Race is renowned horror writer Thomas Ligotti s first work of nonfiction. Through impressively wide-ranging discussions of and reflections on literary and philosophical works of a pessimistic bent, he shows that the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination. The worst and most plentiful horrors are instead to be found in reality. Mr. Ligotti's calm, but often bloodcurdling turns of phrase, evoke the dreadfulness of the human condition. Those who cannot bear the truth will pretend this is another work of fiction, but in doing so they perpetuate the conspiracy of the book s title. --David Benatar, author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence; Department of Philosophy, University of Cape Town, South Africa

The Conspiracy against the Human Race sets out what is perhaps the most sustained challenge yet to the intellectual blackmail that would oblige us to be eternally grateful for a gift we never invited. --From the Foreword by Ray Brassier --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


About the Author

Thomas Ligotti is one of the foremost authors of supernatural horror literature. In this genre, he has been classed with Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. His works include Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe, My Work Is Not Yet Done, and Teatro Grottesco. Ligotti lives in Florida. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Book Description
Publication Date: June 23, 2012
Should the human race voluntarily put an end to its existence? Do we even know what it means to be human? And what if we are nothing like we suppose ourselves to be? In this challenging philosophical work, celebrated supernatural writer Thomas Ligotti broaches these and other issues in an unflinching and penetrating manner that brings to mind some of his own imperishable horror fiction. For Ligotti, there is no refuge from our existence as conscious beings who must suppress their awareness of what horrors life holds in store for them. Yet try as we may, our consciousness may at any time rise up against our defenses against it, whispering to us things we would rather not hear: Religion is a transparent fantasy, optimism an exercise in delusional wish-fulfillment, and even the quest for pleasure an ultimately doomed enterprise.

Drawing upon the work of such pessimistic philosophers as Arthur Schopenhauer and Peter Wessel Zapffe, as well as the findings of various fields of study such as neuroscience, moral philosophy, Terror Management Psychology, the sociology of self-deception, and the theory of uncanny experience, Ligotti presents a compelling contrivance of horror for the consideration of his reader. Perhaps most provocatively, Ligotti sees in the literature of supernatural fiction a confirmation of the cheerless vision he is propounding, dovetailing into his book the overarching theme that, having been ousted by evolution from the natural world, the human race has been effectively translated to a supernatural order of being. In this state of existence, we are denied slumber in nature s arms and must exist in a waking nightmare in which we are taunted by hints of our true nature.

Written with the pungency and panache we expect from a master of English prose, The Conspiracy against the Human Race is a hypnotic guide to the darker regions of one of the most interesting minds of our time.

"The Conspiracy against the Human Race is renowned horror writer Thomas Ligotti's first work of nonfiction. Through impressively wide-ranging discussions of and reflections on literary and philosophical works of a pessimistic bent, he shows that the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination. The worst and most plentiful horrors are instead to be found in reality. Mr. Ligotti's calm, but often bloodcurdling turns of phrase, evoke the dreadfulness of the human condition. Those who cannot bear the truth will pretend this is another work of fiction, but in doing so they perpetuate the conspiracy of the book's title."
--David Benatar, author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence; Department of Philosophy, University of Cape Town, South Africa

FourthBase » Fri Apr 04, 2014 5:47 pm wrote: Fuck this guy. Fuck antinatalism. Fuck pessimism. Fuck True Detective. Fuck horror as a genre.

FourthBase » 04 Apr 2014 22:47 wrote:Sounds like an absolute waste of time, written by someone who has pathologically misinterpreted life, but instead of offing himself like that unfortunate (but authentic, at least) Mitchell Heisman schmuck, this pompous twat gets to make a living serving vulnerable minds soul-poison. Fuck this guy. Fuck antinatalism. Fuck pessimism. Fuck True Detective. Fuck horror as a genre.

Jerky » 04 Apr 2014 19:17 wrote:

FourthBase » 04 Apr 2014 22:47 wrote:Sounds like an absolute waste of time, written by someone who has pathologically misinterpreted life, but instead of offing himself like that unfortunate (but authentic, at least) Mitchell Heisman schmuck, this pompous twat gets to make a living serving vulnerable minds soul-poison. Fuck this guy. Fuck antinatalism. Fuck pessimism. Fuck True Detective. Fuck horror as a genre.

We all walk down different paths, 4th Base. For some people - people who suffer more than most, perhaps - this kind of thinking can be liberating. I know that the horror genre has saved my life on more than one occasion, personally.

MT

Like many who have tried their hand at metaphysics, Bahnsen declared that, appearances to the contrary, all reality is the expression of a unified, unchanging force - a cosmic movement that various philosophers have characterized in various ways. To Bahnsen, this force and its movement were monstrous in nature, resulting in a universe of indiscriminate butchery and mutual slaughter among its individual parts. Additionally, the "universe according to Bahnsen" has never had a hint of design or direction. From the beginning it was a play with no plot and no players that were anything more than portions of a master drive of purposeless self-mutilation. In Bahnsen's philosophy, everything is engaged in a disordered fantasia of carnage. Everything tears at everything else...forever. Yet all this commotion in nothingness goes unnoticed by nearly everything involved in it.

As with all pessimistic philosophies, Bahnsen's rendering of existence as something strange and awful was unwelcome by the self conscious nothings whose validation he sought. For better or worse, pessimism without compromise lacks public appeal.In all, the few who have gone to the pains of arguing for a sullen appraisal of life might as well never have been born. As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgements, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident that they are not a collection of self conscious nothings.

Disdaining[15] 19th-century notions that character development in novels should obey and reveal psychological law, La Nausée treats such notions as bourgeois bad faith, ignoring the contingency and inexplicability of life.

From the psychological point of view Antoine Roquentin could be seen[16] as an individual suffering from depression, and the nausea itself as one of the symptoms of his condition. Unemployed, living in deprived conditions, lacking human contact, being trapped in fantasies about the 18th century secret agent he is writing the book about, shows Sartre's oeuvre as a follow-up of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in search of the precise description of schizophrenia.[17] Rilke's character anticipates[18] Sartre's.

Roquentin's problem is not simply depression or mental illness, although his experience has pushed him to that point. Sartre presents Roquentin's difficulties as arising from man's inherent existential condition. His seemingly special circumstances (returning from travel, reclusiveness), which goes beyond the mere indication of his very real depression, are supposed to induce in him (and in the reader) a state that makes one more receptive to noticing an existential situation that everyone has, but may not be sensitive enough to let become noticeable. Roquentin undergoes a strange metaphysical experience that estranges him from the world. His problems are not merely a result of personal insanity, without larger significance. Rather, like the characters in the Dostoevsky and Rilke novels, they are victims of larger ideological, social, and existential forces that have brought them to the brink of insanity. Sartre's point in Nausea is to comment on our universal reaction to these common external problems.[17]
Chestnut tree: Castanea sativa

Hayden Carruth wrote[6] in 1959 of the way that "Roquentin has become a familiar of our world, one of those men who, like Hamlet or Julien Sorel, live outside the pages of the books in which they assumed their characters. . . . It is scarcely possible to read seriously in contemporary literature, philosophy, or psychology without encountering references to Roquentin's confrontation with the chestnut tree, for example, which is one of the sharpest pictures ever drawn of self-doubt and metaphysical anguish."

Certainly, Nausea gives us a few of the clearest and hence most useful images of man in our time that we possess; and this, as Allen Tate has said, is the supreme function of art.
—Hayden Carruth[6]

Belligerent Savant » Tue Jan 26, 2010 6:04 pm wrote:Credit to W.Rex for the subject heading...


Excerpt from God & The New Physics, by Paul Davies [initially published in 1983] --

Although the entropy of a general gravitating system is not known,
work by Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking, in which the
quantum theory is applied to black holes, has yielded a formula for the
entropy of these objects. As expected, it is enormously greater than the
entropy of, for instance, a star of the same mass. Assuming that the
relationship between entropy and probability extends to the gravitating
case, this result may be expressed in an interesting way. Given a
random distribution of (gravitating) matter, it is overwhelmingly
more probable that it will form a black hole than a star or a cloud of
dispersed gas. These considerations give a new slant, therefore, to the
question of whether the universe was created in an ordered or disordered
state. If the initial state were chosen at random, it seems
exceedingly probable that the big bang would have coughed out black
holes rather than dispersed gases. The present arrangement of matter
and energy, with matter spread thinly at relatively low density, in the
form of stars and gas clouds would, apparently, only result from a very
special choice of initial conditions. Roger Penrose has computed the
odds against the observed universe appearing by accident, given that a
black-hole cosmos is so much more likely on a priori grounds. He
estimates a figure of 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 30 to one.

The absence (or at least lack of predominance) of black holes is not
the only issue. The large scale structure and motion of the universe is
equally remarkable. The accumulated gravity of the universe operates
to restrain the expansion, causing it to decelerate with time. In the
primeval phase the expansion was much faster than it is today. The
universe IS thus the product of a competition between the explosive'
vigour of the big bang, and the force of gravity which tries to pull the
pieces back together again. In recent years, astrophysicists have come
to realize just how delicately this competition has been balanced. Had
the big bang been weaker, the cosmos would have soon fallen back on
itself in a big crunch. On the other hand, had it been stronger, the
cosmic material would have dispersed so rapidly that galaxies would
not have formed. Either way, the observed structure of the universe
seems to depend very sensitively on the precise matching of explosive
vigour to gravitating power.

Just how sensitively is revealed by calculation. At the so-called
Planck time (10 to the power of -43 seconds) (which is the earliest moment at which
the concept of space and time has meaning) the matching was accurate
to a staggering one part in 10 to the power of 60. That is to say, had the explosion
differed in strength at the outset by only one part in 10 to the power of 60,
the universe we now perceive would not exist. To give some meaning to these
numbers, suppose you wanted to fire a bullet at a one-inch target on the
other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away
Your aim would have to be accurate to that same part in 10 to the power of 60.
Quite apart from the accuracy of this overall matching, there is the
mystery of why the universe is so extraordinarily uniform, both in the
distribution of matter, and the rate of expansion. Most explosions are
chaotic affairs, and one might expect the big bang to have varied in its
degree of vigour from place to place. This was not so. The expansion
of the universe in our own cosmic neighbourhood is indistinguishable
in rate from that on the far side of the universe.
This coherence of behaviour over the whole cosmos seems all the
more remarkable when account is taken of what are known as light
horizons. When light spreads out across the universe it has to chase the
retreating galaxies which are being swept apart by the expansion. The
rate of recession of a galaxy depends on its distance from the observer.
Distant galaxies recede faster. Imagine a flash of light emitted from a
particular place at the instant of the creation.. The light will have
traveled about twenty billion light years across space by now.

Regions of the universe farther away than this will not yet have
received the light. Observers there would not be able to see the light
source. Conversely, observers near the light source would not be able
to see those regions. It follows that no observer in the universe can see
beyond twenty billion light years at this time. There is a sort of horizon
in space, which conceals everything that lies beyond. And because no
signal or influence can travel faster than light, it follows that no
physical connection at all can exist between regions of the universe
that lie beyond each other's horizon.
When telescopes are turned on the outer limits of the observable
universe, they probe regions that have apparently never been in causal
contact with each other. The reason is that distant regions which lie on
opposite sides of the sky as viewed from Earth are so far apart from
each other that they are beyond each other's horizon. The situation is
closely analogous to ordinary horizons. A lookout on a ship at sea may
just be able to discern two other ships - one ahead, one astern - near
his horizon, but these other ships will be invisible from each other
because of their greater separation. Similarly, the remote galaxies
which lie on opposite sides of the sky are located beyond each other's
light horizon. Because all physical influences or communications are
limited by the speed of light, it is not possible that these galaxies can
have coordinated their behavior.

The mystery is, why are those regions of the universe that are
causally disconnected so similar in structure and behavior? Why do
they contain galaxies of the same average size and form, retreating
from each other at the same rate? The mystery becomes all the more
profound when we realize that this behavior is a remnant of long ago
when the galaxies first formed. But in the past light had traveled less
far since the creation, so the horizons were closer. At one million years
they were a million light years across, at one hundred years a hundred
light years, and so on. If we go back to the Planck time again, the
horizons were a mere 10 to the power of -33 cm in size. Even allowing
for the expansion of the universe, regions as small as this would not, according
to the standard theory, have swelled to a visible size by now. It seems that the
entire observable universe was, at that time, separated into at least 10 to the
power of 80 causally disconnected regions. How is it possible to explain this
cooperation without communication?

A related problem is the extreme degree of cosmic isotropy: uniformity
with orientation. Looking outwards from Earth, the universe presents the
same aspect on the large scale in whichever direction we choose to look.
Careful measurements of the relic cosmic background heat radiation show
that the incoming flux is accurately matched from all sides to better than one
part in a thousand . Had the big bang been a random event, such exceptional
uniformity would be almost impossibly unlikely.