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

stopgap world, or even a novel solution, but it is one that would end all human suffering, should we ever care to do so. The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and that conscious existence hurts everyone. Consciousness is an existential liability, as every pessimist agrees. It is also a mistake that has taken humankind down a black hole of logic, according to Zapffe’s Paradox. To correct this mistake, we should desist from procreating. What could be more judicious or more urgent? At the very least, we might give some regard to this theory of the mistake as a “thought experiment.” All galaxies grow cold and ghostly with the dying of their suns. All species die out. All civilizations become defunct. There is even an expiration date on the universe itself. We have already spoken of individuals, who are born with a ticking clock within them.
    Human beings would certainly not be the first phenomenon to go belly up. But we could be the first to spot our design-flaw, that absent-minded engineering of nature called consciousness, and do something about it. And if we are mistaken about consciousness being a mistake, our self-removal from this planet would still be a magnificent move on our part, the most laudable masterstroke of our existence . . . and the only one.
    “Fluke” or “mutation,” rather than “mistake,” would be more accurate designations, since it is not in the nature of Nature to make mistakes—it just makes what it makes. “Mistake”
    has been used for its pejorative connotation in Zapffe’s “The Last Messiah” and in the works of other writers discussed herein. The American writer H. P. Lovecraft attributed the existence of humanity to a mistake or a joke on the part of the Old Ones, the prehistoric parents of our species.12 Schopenhauer, once he drafted his theory that everything in the universe is energized by a Will-to-live, paints a picture of a humanity inattentive to the possibility that its life is a concatenation of snafus: “Many millions, united into nations, strive for the common good, each individual for his own sake; but many thousands fall sacrifice to it. Now senseless delusion, now intriguing politics, incite them to wars with one another; then the sweat and blood of the multitude must flow, to carry through the ideas of individuals, or to atone for their shortcomings. In peace, industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from all the ends of the earth; the waves engulf thousands. All push and drive, some plotting and planning, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But what is the ultimate aim of it all? To sustain ephemeral and harassed individuals through a short span of time, in the most fortunate cases with endurable want and comparative painlessness (though boredom is at once on the lookout for this), and then the propagation of this race and of its activities. With this evident want of proportion between the effort and the reward, the will-to-live, taken objectively, appears to us from this point of view as a folly, or taken subjectively, as a delusion. Seized by this, every living thing works with the utmost exertion of its strength for something that has no value. But on closer consideration, we shall find here also that it is rather a blind urge, an impulse wholly without ground and motive.” After toiling to explain in circuitous and abstract terms why the universe is the way it is, Schopenhauer is straightforward here in limning his awareness that, for human beings, being alive is an exercise in “folly” and “delusion.” He 24

    also noted elsewhere in his work that consciousness is “an accident of life,” an epiphenomenon of a world composed chiefly of inanimate things and not of organisms.
    Just as important, Schopenhauer anticipated Zapffe when he wrote: “Let us for a moment imagine that the act of procreation were not a necessity or accompanied by