Rants

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I am so fed up with people taking the p*ss out of my brother.

He can hardly walk. He can't talk but he can still think and do things. He's still like you and me, he's a person. I don't know why people have to be so cruel to people with a disability! Whether it's Autism or Down Syndrome, we're all still people, not ret*ds or monsters. Just people trying to enjoy our lives.

Now why's that so hard to understand?

It’s bcuz they are low and degrading their own personality not his
I hope someone punches them

We actually went to an airport restaurant even though we weren't hungry ... just to avoid all the food smells at the gate!
The restaurant smell was better than the gate, because it was only one type of fare / scent rather than being a mixed bag.
I did nearly have meltdown from all the stimuli. Plane trips themselves don't bother me because most people settle down, but the gates .... wow. I swear that some people have no idea of how to behave in public.

I did. Although violence isn't the answer, I lost my temper and sorted them out. They don't bully him anymore.

They insulted my brother multiple times but when I heard they pushed his wheelchair over I went nuts... Like I told the police after, they deserved what they got.

Violence is definitely the answer fr those fools as nothing else will get in their brains
What the hell.
They literally instigated physical aggression along with verbal to someone who is vulnerable n inoffensive (unlike them)

Good for you!

I did. Although violence isn't the answer, I lost my temper and sorted them out. They don't bully him anymore.

They insulted my brother multiple times but when I heard they pushed his wheelchair over I went nuts... Like I told the police after, they deserved what they got.

Lighten up, Francis.

I was very tempted to leave it at that, but I do have more to say.

I should be the perfect audience for this book. I love Lovecraft's work, my worldview could best be summed up as "life is mostly pain, punctuated by moments of joy," and I'm congenitally pessimistic as was my father before me. At least, by the standard definition, but that's not far enough for Ligotti, who restricts the ranks of the true pessimist to those who believe that life is fundamentally not worth living.

His main argument for this is that consciousness is a kind of cosmic mistake--MALIGNANTLY USELESS, in his repeated words--because it makes us aware that we will inevitably suffer and die, causing us to come up with any number of delusions to escape this knowledge. The young's sense that they will live forever. The very young's non-understanding of death. Religion. That kind of thing. As well, consciousness seems to demand meaning to life, but life itself merely is and has no greater purpose, thus requiring us to place a layer of false meaning over life to find a reason to go on. Because life thus requires delusion to live, and because of the suffering all of us will inevitably experience at the end of life, Ligotti concludes that "being alive is not alright."

Furthermore, our humanity is inextricably bound up in our biology. The urge to procreate, to satisfy hunger, thirst, tiredness and sexual desire, and the fact that our reason is contaminated with constant hormonal buffetings all combine to mean that the "us" we imagine as being in control of our lives is merely an illusion. We cannot choose our choices, because that implies some kind of Cartesian homunculous with all the problems that leads to, but as another example of the failure of consciousness to deal with reality, we feel like we have free will, so any kind of deterministic argument gets short shrift with most people.

Due to all this, he determines that having children is a fundamentally...hmm. Not evil, because "good" and "evil" are just more delusions placed on the uncaring universe by a humanity who is unable to survive without imbuing worthless things with unnecessary meaning, but perhaps it could be phrased as being fundamentally MALIGNANTLY USELESS. Ligotti makes the point that very few of us would be willing to be born in the past because of conditions there, but none of us take the viewpoint of the future and spare our child from being born now rather than, say, in a hundred years when suffering might be less. Since all people will suffer and die, creating a new human life is dooming them to suffering and death, which is hardly the compassionate act that raising a child is usually considered to be. It might even be thought of as incredibly selfish--creating new life just because of one's own desires when the child will inevitably suffer and die.

And if you think all this repetition in my review is bad, you should read the book.

Okay, sure. Those are reasonable arguments, but I have problems with the central point here because Ligotti is just as prey to the innate failings of the human mind as anyone else. He repeatedly makes the point that the suffering at the end of one's life is one of the major reasons why being alive is not alright, but that's just the Peak End Rule, where he's judging the entirety of someone's life by what happens at the end rather than a reasoned examination of the totality of their existence. And indeed, the fundamental flaws of human consciousness might make that nearly impossible, but Ligotti doesn't even make a pretense of trying. He just assumes a priori that the suffering at the end of life outweighs anything good that could possibly happen.

He reasonably points out that we can't say that nonexistence is worse than existence since we don't have any nonexistent people to ask, but then assumes that nonexistence is better than existence when suffering is involved. But if joy were involved, would a nonexistent person say that existence is better? That's just as reasonable a question to ask, and just as unanswerable, but unlike Ligotti I'm not going to base a part of my argument on it.

And finally, and most fundamental of my complaints, is that he assumes some kind of perfected human template that we deviate from in his arguments. Consciousness damaging and deluded and MALIGNANTLY USELESS...compared to what? When talking about transhumanism, he correctly points out that it's mostly ridiculous pipe dreaming because transhumanists talk about overcoming the limits of the human form and mind when all of their ideas are defined by those same limits and nothing they create can escape them, but when talking about how terrible consciousness is he's implicitly comparing us to some kind of purely rational and truthful Übermensch who is able to face reality without flinching and isn't just a human puppet strung up by their own biology. There's a part of the book where he implies that people in the grip of extreme depression approach this perfect being, since they understand that life is MALIGNANTLY USELESS and there's no point to anything, but aren't they just as driven by hormones as everyone else? Casting hormones as some kind of separate factor influencing our behavior is just another homunculus argument, since it implies a part of us that would make perfectly rational decisions without those emotions, instead of the truth that decision without emotion is simply impossible.

If you think that a perfectly rational human is the end goal, that is pretty depressing news, but it's not something The Conspiracy Against the Human Race touches on.

Perhaps that's my main problem with it. It's a somewhat-rambling treatise on philosophy, horror fiction, and neuroscience, but I think that focusing on the neuroscience would have been a much better way to make the point. Talk about depressive realism, for example, which is an actual psychological term but is never mentioned at all in the book. Mention all the various cognitive fallacies that humans fall prey to--in this regard, Thinking Fast and Slow is a far better explanation of why consciousness is MALIGNANTLY USELESS than this book is. How about mentioning that the biggest determinant of whether a prisoner will be paroled is how long it's been since the judge's last meal, thus showing that "justice" is a lie we tell ourselves to feel good about making others suffer? What about examining how we retreat into delusion when confronted with evidence against our deeply-held beliefs, showing the futility of so-called "rationality"? What about how hindsight bias means that victim-blaming and the attendant cruelty in the case of crime is an innate part of human psychology?

All of that would have been a lot more convincing than endless talking about how life is not alright. As it is, the book is mostly a non-fiction philosopher's version of Blindsight. But Blindsight is more entertaining and Thinking, Fast and Slow is more convincing, leaving The Conspiracy Against the Human Race stuck in the MALIGNANTLY USELESS middle. I had high hopes for it, but left with the taste of ashes in my mouth. Perhaps that's a triumph, in a way. All is vanity, and especially this book.