The only point that matters is the only point you refuse to acknowledge, which is, nihilism isn’t deep, or cool, or logical. It’s dull and self-indulgent.
Virtually every single response to your endless moaning about suffering has been that life is worth living nonetheless. Billions of people find a reason to go on regardless of circumstance. Most even experience actual joy now and then. Yet you have the arrogance and temerity to insist that you are right and everyone else is wrong. Worse still, you make assertions about things not in evidence and stubbornly insist your opinions carry valuable insight into the human condition. I’ve got disappointing news for you - you don’t know what you’re talking about.
You need to stop moaning and projecting your mental illness on others. Get off the computer, get off your ass, and go get the professional help you so obviously and desperately need.
Mental illness seems to be the cop out response when people can’t answer this. You’re saying you would allow people to continue to reproduce and create more humans that have the potential to suffer in a meaningless universe full of pain?
Allow? Meaning you want to disallow it? In the name of preventing pain? The urge to procreate is biological. Whoever you find sexually attractive, you only do so because your animal brain wants to procreate. Whoever you desire to shack up with, you only do so for the same reason. Yes we have ways to satisfy these desires without the actual baby part, but some also desire the end result too. Through no choice of their own. Suppressing these urges is not possible, and plenty of people have tried. There is plenty of evidence through history that “disallowing” procreation is just introducing pain to peoples lives. Which runs counter to your intentions.
Another question is, if you believe all life is suffering, and preventing suffering is a moral good, if you could find a painless way to wipe out humanity, would that be a moral good? If you could just pop something into the water supply that sends people off to a painless death, it sounds like that would be the highest moral act. Which should be enough to point out that there is a flaw in your line of thinking somewhere.
That’s a false statement. It just means that it’s a lot to cover and trying to summarize it wouldn’t do it justice. I read through it all, I don’t see why others cannot.
Look, I’m sorry. I simply cannot pretend to take you seriously any longer. I better leave you to your obsessive nihilism before I say something that gets me a mod warning.
Anyone can make any statement like that. You need to restate the arguments that were used to make that conclusion sound convincing. Presenting a book as a cite does not make for a good message board discussion.
Talk about pessimistic! Got it because of its connection to the first season of True Detective, basically the basis for the philosophy espoused by Matthew McConaughey’s character early in the first season. Philosophically speaking, its refreshing to see someone unafraid to draw negative conclusions from what we know scientifically about the nature of our existence, when so much of the time we see philosophers twisting themselves into knots trying to make what is patently not-good seem to be in line with our optimistic, socially-default, layperson understanding of the world and our place in it. That being said the case made here is for a nihilism which is merely the starting point for most of existentialism. We could just as easily take the author’s conclusions and follow early Camus to be a happy Sisyphus, or Kierkegaard to take a leap of faith into a groundless ideology. Just because our existence is brutish, short, pointless, meaningless, fraught with the irreconcilability of our desires and our abilities, (not to mention we aren’t even people at all, just meat puppets repeating lies to our non-selves) doesn’t mean we can’t live rich, fulfilling lives… LOL.
So what is the conspiracy against the human race? Ligotti never actually straight up defines it; yet, that’s the strength of it. Sometimes it’s used to refer to how nature conspires against the human race by punishing us with consciousness, and other times it refers to this idea that society is this clique in which everyone pats each other on the back and keeps telling each other that everything is alright and we should keep on keepin’ on – don’t ask the question “is being alive a good thing?” because the clique will just answer and say “of course” without any critical thought. On top of these two major ones that I picked up on, I think it also suggests that there are many conspiracies against the human race.
Professor Nobody in “Pessimism and Supernatural Horror - Lecture Two.” In a cogent, straightforward elucidation that pulls no punches, reclusive author lets us in on what feeds the atmosphere of lurking perniciousness pervading his short stories of the metaphysical horror kind. The root cause of human suffering is identified as consciousness being a double-edged sword, which has greatly facilitated humanity’s evolutionary premiership, yet at the same time allows more than just a glimpse at the ‘malignant uselessness’ of being via its (self-) reflexive mode: “Our minds now began dredging up horrors, joyless possibilities, enough of them to make us drop to the ground in paroxysm of self-soiling consternation should they go untrammeled” (p. 27).
Persistent companions in Ligotti’s dreary exploration are “an analyst of disaster” (p. 176), the little-known Norwegian thinker Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990), German philosopher Schopenhauer (compare his will-to-live to lust for life born out of karmic ignorance), and literary predecessor Lovecraft (pp. 53, 57-61, 184-5, 192-3, 203-5). The four strategies of “cognitive double-dealing” (p. 42), albeit it’s questionable how cognizant we are of their presence, that conspire to keep mankind in the dark regarding their ontological predicament, are: isolation - disturbing realizations/impressions, if any, are exiled into the subconscious whence they may reemerge to haunt us; anchoring - institutional/societal constructions (religion, moral, country and family); distraction - hobbies and disinfotainment mediaplex; sublimation - science, art, philosophy. This set of self-defensive and -deceptive mechanisms to survive in reduced awareness (“minimize consciousness”) are compared to the theory of psychoanalytic repression (pp. 67-72) and Russian writer Tolstoy’s four categories of escapism, including voluntary death by suicide (pp. 148-50).
Some of the topics of the resultant puppet show of “unrealit[ies] on legs” (p. 42) include: ‘heroic pessimists’ (Miguel de Unamuno, Joshua Foa Dienstag, William R. Brashear, Albert Camus); uncanniness that presupposes a tension between the ideal of an objective quality and a subjective experience of a perceiver - “No one wants to be other than they are, or think they are [:] idealized beings, integral and undivided, and not mechanisms - human puppets who do not know themselves as such” (p. 91, 92); free will vs. determinism; the futility of transhumanism; an illuminating view on depression (pp. 113-7); death-anxiety/thanatophobia and pain as being an indicator of end’s approaching and paradoxically, we might add, that of life as well - we are in pain, hence alive; musings of literary criticism concerning Gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe (1764-1824) and Poe, a comparison of Luigi Pirandello and Roland Topor (pp. 194-201), in addition to that of the supernatural element (pp. 202-4) in “Hamlet” (extraneous) and “Macbeth” (integral).
“[T]he supernatural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. This mind does not keep a chronicle of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ [Robert Burns] but instead tracks a dysphoria symptomatic of our life as transients in a creation that is natural for all else that lives, but for us is anything but” (p. 211).
Throughout the corpus, and especially in his discussion touching upon consciousness, self and ego (pp. 101-13), the author fails to make any distinction between the latter two, although I believe it’s more than merely a semantic game, as demonstrated by Jung and Co. In light of my limited readings in Tibetan Buddhism, Ligotti seems to be mistaken in positing NDE resulting in ego-death to be “a state corresponding to that of Buddhist enlightenment” (p. 135). Granted, ego is a major stumbling block to liberation through full awareness, but eliminating it won’t make you a buddha or bodhisattva who is released from the relentlessly spinning karmic wheel of conditioned existence. If it were so, Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) would be hailed as an enlightened being, wouldn’t he? Ego could be viewed as a parasite that hijacked and made itself the captain on the ship of awareness exploring the ocean of consciousness.
Desperation and hopelessness reach their nadir in utterances like the following: “There is nothing more futile than consciously look for something to save you, [particularly in] a world that is not worth the emptiness it is written on” (p. 133, 134). No more uplifting is the solution he offers, namely that of antinatalism: “non-coital existence as the surest path to redemption from the sin of being congregants of this world” (p. 34). In closing, Horace Walpole (1717-97) once said, “Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think,” - therefore tragicomic?!
These are a few snips of the relevant points being made. Like I said, too complex to summarize.
Importantly, for Ligotti, this “alienating” wedge between our ordinary experience and its “reality” is neither a matter of reductionism (that experience is explicable by means of an underlying reality), nor eliminativism of the “real” (that experience should be replaced by concepts drawn from our understanding of an underlying reality). Rather, the relationship between the structure of experience and the “real” is enmeshed in Ligotti’s work. There, what we have is not any kind of replacement of that which is experienced as “real”; ‘but a sort of turning the real world inside out to show that it was unreal all along’ [1]. Primarily, this is achieved by an upturning of the notion of the non-objectivity of subjectivity. In this sense, Ligotti closely follows Thomas Metzinger’s work on the science of consciousness, wherein; ‘the conscious self is an illusion which is no-one’s illusion’ [2]. For Metzinger, humans are not “selves”, rather they are simply organisms that possess “self-models” that are not recognizable as such (internally to the system). That is to say, we are merely information systems where: ‘the phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process – and the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information processing system operates under a transparent self-model’ [3].
This is the “trap” of existence according to Ligotti, which allows for a novel reading of Plato’s cave in which the cave itself is the organism, and the wall the phenomenal projection of the self-model: ‘the cave in which we live our conscious life is formed by our global, phenomenal model of reality’ [4]. The shadows that play on the walls of the cave are low-dimensional renderings of the world, filtered through the specific dynamics of information that is actually presented to the self-model. Consciousness is simply the ‘puppet shadow [that] dances on the wall of the neurophenomenological caveman’s phenomenal state space […] The cave shadow is there. The cave itself is empty’ [5].
According to Metzinger, all of this is, practically speaking, incommensurable with the register of human perception. To experience ourselves as self-models, or to experience whatever is “beyond” the self-model (whatever that may mean) is just not the sort of thing that is within the domain of human capacity. Indeed, as may be well exemplified in Rust, even acknowledging that this is the case ‘may be damaging to our mental well-being’ [6]. Yet, as in much of Ligotti’s fiction, Rust seems to hover on the brink of this experience – one foot in and out – at once he is restricted by his “programming”, and yet he is also capable of sensing the “psychosphere”. The latter is akin to Ligotti’s notion of the “fictional diversion”. This is a Borgesian fiction within a fiction, but also one which structures our experience of the world into something that is comforting, homely; something liveable (otherwise, as Rust’s partner, Marty Hart puts it, ‘why get out of bed in the morning?’).
When some people decide they don’t like eating meat they become a vegetarian, others decide that everyone should be a vegetarian. Perhaps it is better if you try to be in the first group and let the rest of us live our pointless, suffering intensive lives with our children.
OP, human life isn’t inherently awful or pointless. Check every perspective carefully. Biologically, we are made to reproduce, that is our primary purpose, so just follow that if nothing else. As stated, Billions of people who have situations much worse than all of us bantering on here, have it so much worse, yet they still get up in the morning and make the best of it. We only get one life, it’s temporary, so just make the best of it instead of dwelling on the negative aspects of it, just focus on the fun stuff that happens. Instead of thinking that life is a series of bad moments connected by good ones, think the opposite. Dwelling on how “bad” or “awful” life is does nothing. It does absolutely nothing, and contributes nothing. Think positive, move on and live your life so it actually means something, make it mean something. If you hate life so much and refuse to take part in it, at least contribute to it and maybe help those that want to live a fruitful life. It seems like you are bowing out, or giving up even trying because of the negative, or speculating as such. Giving up on life and only noticing the negative is selfish and affects you and those around you.