The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

I’ve been retracing steps lately. I reread Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, the third time I’ve read it, and I think I’m ready to talk about it, maybe a little. I found this book because I watched HBO’s True Detective, the first season with Woody Harrelson cast as Marty Hart and Matthew McConaughey cast as Rust Cohle. McConaughey is so good in this. So good. Rust Cohle is one of my favorite characters in all of television, I’ve discovered. Harrelson is good, too, but damn he irritates me with the peanut-butter-in-his-mouth thing he does in this. These two play Louisiana state detectives investigating a weird ritualistic murder.

I haven’t thought about this show in years, so after the reread of Ligotti I rewatched that first season of True Detective because I remembered that it had pointed me to Ligotti in the first place. Specifically, it was McConaughey’s convincing recitation of some of the most unexpected lines I’d ever heard on a TV show, and back then I had to then dig a little to find out where they came from. Turns out, Cohle gives a tight, if incomplete, summary of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race during the first fifteen minutes of the show.

Rust: I’d consider myself a realist, but in philosophical terms I’m what’s called a pessimist.

Marty: Okay, what’s that mean?

Rust: Means I’m bad at parties.

Marty: Let me tell you, you ain’t great outside of parties, either.

Rust: I think human consciousness is a tragic mis-step in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law.

Marty: That sounds god-fucking awful, Rust.

Rust: We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling. Programmed with total assurance that we are each some-body, when in fact everybody’s nobody.

Marty: I wouldn’t go around spouting that shit if I was you. People around here don’t think that way. I don’t think that way.

Rust: I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand-in-hand into extinction. One last midnight. Brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

I’m pretty sure the first time I saw and heard that scene my jaw hit the floor. I mean, come on. Where do I even begin to talk about that?

What I like most, though, is Woody’s pitch-perfect reaction to it. He repulsed by that talk. The first rule of fight club. If one has thoughts like these, he isn’t supposed to talk about them. He isn’t supposed to upset the herd. When someone asks, how you doing? The only answer is fine. People like Woody exist, for sure. They go through life with a self-assuredness that everything is going to be all right. That life is good. That tomorrow will be better than today. They are natural optimists. According to Ligotti, the conspiracy against the human race is just that this optimism is foisted upon everyone. It is the de facto way of living as a human being. We have entire systems in place to reinforce it, and I’m not just talking about religion. I’m talking about how everyone defines success by how much money one has stored in his or her bank account, or in how many children he has sired, or how many motorboats he maintains, or his bourbon collection, or his cigars, or his automobiles.

I began to feel an oddness about it all, but I’m not really sure how or when that happened. I think about the 75-year-old doctor I met who had an extensive collection of automobiles, because of course he did. He really enjoyed talking about his automobiles, and I just nod along, yeah, that’s great, but all the while I’m thinking how weird and kind of pathetic it is that a 75-year-old, so close to death, has lived all this time and still cares about automobiles, as if automobiles are some kind of reason to live.

What do I expect, though? What is a good reason to live? Isn’t cars just as good as anything else?

I don’t know, but if you pin me down right now I’d say the only reason to live that even makes sense to me is to get okay with with death. Life, you see, doesn’t go anywhere but there. That’s the final destination. You can’t drive there, either.

Now I’m Rust Cohle and you’re Marty going wtf? That! That right there is the conspiracy. Can you see it? What I’ve said is plainly true, and everyone knows it. Life’s destination is death. It goes nowhere, and everything you’re doing and worried about just doesn’t matter. Human are very good at pretending things matter, though. Life is good! Tomorrow will be better than today. Everything happens for a reason.

Ligotti blames consciousness, which, he claims, makes it seem like:

1. There is something to do.
2. There is somewhere to go.
3. There is something to be.
4. There is someone to know. (p. 133)

The stoics would say that a good man is one who fulfills his purpose. A good hammer drives nails. A good car drives. A good squirrel reproduces itself, feeds itself, survives the winter, and otherwise does squirrel things like run across power lines like its nothing. What about people? People are really good at reproducing themselves, and they’re really good at food, and they’re really good at tool-making and restructuring the surface of the Earth to suit themselves, but what about consciousness? What function does it serve? The stoics recognized that it is this capacity to think things through that make us different from squirrels, yet why is being conscious of it required? Why am I cursed or gifted with the capacity to understand my own impending death, and why are there all these elaborate systems in place to help me forget about it? Why is it that I can’t talk to anyone about it to boot?

I recommend Ligotti to people sometimes, just if I think that person can probably handle the curtain pulled back on the conspiracy, because he does that very well, but then you can’t unsee it, and it will settle into your body, all these people doing people things, following their programming, and what are they supposed to do otherwise? There’s no answers. There’s no gods or aliens providing those answers. It just is.