The Conspiracy Against the Human Race Read Online Free PDF Page A

glove in a chain mail gauntlet. Another luminary of “civilization,” the British physicist Stephen Hawking, has also alleged that our vigorous exercise of conscious thought without a counterbalancing diminution of aggression is a formula for 21

    disaster. In the immemorial past, the cocktail of intelligence and ferocity gave us a leg up on the predatory competition, but it has since become a real powder keg of perils, not to mention being the nucleus of those psychological discontents popularized by Sigmund Freud.9
    In his 1910 doctoral dissertation, published in English as Persuasion and Rhetoric (2004), the twenty-three-year-old Italian philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter vehemently critiqued, very much in same terms as Zapffe, the maneuvers by which we falsify the realities of human existence in exchange for a speciously comforting view of our lives.
    Michelstaedter’s biographers and critics have speculated that his hopelessness regarding any person’s ability to break through their web of illusions was the cause of his suicide (two bullets from a gun) the day after he finished his dissertation. Other examples could be offered of serious philosophers and intellectuals who have observed that, while officially we crow about our brain-to-body ratio, much of our time is spent trying to keep that beast in our skulls well sedated. Few thinkers—by definition, one would have to say—have been untroubled by our self-awareness. Specialists in self-awareness revel in its mysteries as if they could crack this conundrum by immersing themselves in it (sublimation). Finaglers by profession, they are able to bail themselves out of any cognitive fix and sneak away with their old ideals and psychic infrastructure intact. They are also content with the stellar fact of human life that Michelstaedter could not accept: no one has control over how they will be in this world, a truth that eradicates all hope if how you want to be is immutably self-possessed (persuaded) and without subjection to a world that would fit you within the limits of its illusions and unrealities (rhetoric). But individuals are defined by their limitations; without them, they fall outside the barrier of identifiable units, functionaries in the big show of collective existence, attachés to the human species. The farther you proceed toward a vision of humankind under the aspect of eternity, the farther you drift from what makes you a person among persons in this world. In the observance of Zapffe, an overactive consciousness endangers the approving way in which we define ourselves and our lives. It does this by threatening our self-limited perception of who we are and what it means to know we are alive and will die. A person’s demarcations as a being, not how far he trespasses those limits, create his identity and preserve his illusion of being someone. Transcending all illusions and their emergent activities would untether us from ourselves and license the freedom to be no one. In that event, we would lose our allegiance to our species, stop reproducing, and quietly bring about our own end. The lesson: “Let us love our limitations, for without them nobody would be left to be somebody.”
    Concerning the doctrine that our species should refrain from reproduction, a familiar cast of characters comes to mind. The Gnostic sect of the Cathari in twelfth-century France were so tenacious in believing the world to be an evil place engendered by an evil deity that its members were offered a dual ultimatum: sexual abstinence or sodomy. (A similar sect in Bulgaria, the Bogomils, became the etymological source of the term “bugger” for their adherence to the latter practice.) While mandated abstinence for clerics was around the same time embedded in the doctrines of the Catholic Church, even though they betimes give in to sexual quickening, its raison d’être was said to be the attainment of grace (and in legend was a requisite for those in search of the Holy Grail)