The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (7 page)

4. While philosophers and other thinkers have often deliberated upon the fabricated nature of our lives (example: P. L. Berger and T. Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality, 1966), mass audiences are not often regaled with the practical import of this idea. But sometimes they are, if only momentarily and deceptively. In the 1976 film Network, a news anchorman, Howard Beale, breaks the following story to his viewers: “Today is Wednesday, September the 24th, and this is my last broadcast. Yesterday I announced on this program that I was going to commit public suicide, admittedly an act of madness.

Well, I'll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bullshit. Am I still on the air? I really don't know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit. Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can't think up any reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit. We don't know why we're going through all this pointless pain, humiliation, decays, so there better be someone somewhere who does know. That's the God bullshit. And then there's the noble man bullshit; that man is a noble creature that can order his own world; who needs God? Well, if there's anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me: That man is full of bullshit. I don't have anything going for me. I haven't got any kids. And I was married for forty-three years of shrill, shrieking fraud. So I don't have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see.” Later in the film, 35

Howard Beale excavates a new load of bullshit during the course of a rant in which he reinstates his previous denial that “man is a noble creature.” He does this by enjoining his viewers to seize upon the following words: “You've got to say, ‘I'm a HUMAN

BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!’” This leads into the signature quote from Network (“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore”), which refers to life in modern Western society, a jump backwards from the wider existential perspective that characterized the anchorman’s “bullshit” monologue. This newfound bullshit, fresh from the bottomless pit of fabrications, is then devoured by a large viewership that doltishly responds to Beale’s slogan and sends his ratings skyward, turning him into just another celebrity with a pathetic catch-phrase. Similarly, the film degenerates from a critique of life itself into a send-up of television, careerism, corporatism, and other narrow topics. The second instance in cinema where fabrication (bullshit) is admitted as the cornerstone of our lives occurs at the end of Hero (1992), when the character referred to in the title, Bernard LePlant, passes on some words of wisdom to his previously estranged son. "You remember where I said I was going to explain about life, buddy?” he says. “Well, the thing about life is, it gets weird. People are always talking to you about truth, everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or something and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn as you get older is, there ain't no truth. All there is, is bullshit. Pardon my vulgarity here. Layers of it. One layer of bullshit on top of another. And what you do in life, like when you get older, is—

you pick the layer of bullshit you prefer, and that's your bullshit, so to speak. You got that?" Despite the cynicism of LePlant’s words, the object of his fatherly lesson is to create a bond between him and his son. (Hollywood movies are heavily dependent on plotlines in which a broken family comes together again.) This bond is reliant on the exposure of life as bullshit and is itself bullshit—bullshit to the second power—which makes LePlant’s case without his being aware of his own bullshit, which is how bullshit works. But this is not the message the moviegoer is meant to take away from the mass-audience philosophizing of Hero. That would be to break a tacit social contract, which may be stated: “Leave me to my bullshit, and I will leave you to yours.” Like every other social contract, it is “more honoured in the breach than in the observance,” as one writer quipped, touching off a scholarly debate as to whether the meaning of this statement is (1) that rules of decency and civility are routinely broken or (2) it is morally incumbent upon us to break certain rules rather than observe them. This squabble depends on which word one believes should be emphasized, “honoured” or “breach.”

Emphasis on the first word turns the statement into praise for those whose actions display higher moral standards than those set by law or social custom; emphasis on the second word gives us a mordant observance that people flout whatever does not further their selfish aims, morality be damned. As often happens, the writer quoted here either expressed himself poorly or has been willfully misunderstood by those who emphasize the word “honoured” to further an optimistic view of human behavior. This gives us leave to choose our own bullshit, much in the way afforded by religious scriptures such as the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Koran, Buddhist texts, and all other works in this or any other genre (codes of law, for example).

5. The sense that one’s life has meaning and purpose is sometimes declared to be a necessary condition for acquiring or maintaining a state of good feeling. This is horrifying news considering the mind-boggling number of books and therapies for a market of discontented individuals who are short on a sense of meaning and purpose, either in a limited and localized variant (“I received an ‘A’ on my calculus exam”) or one that is macrocosmic in scope (“There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”). Those who are euphoric, or even moderately content, are not parched for 36

meaning and purpose. Relatively speaking, feeling good is its own justification. As long as such states last, why spoil a good thing with self-searching interrogations in re: meaning and purpose? But a high tone of elation could also be a sign of psychopathology, as it is for individuals who have been diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder. Such persons should be treated by mental health professionals, although their therapeutics often mires a patient in the ravings of therapists who are modern-day incarnations of “positive thinking” preachers such as Norman Vincent Peale. No one ever bought a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) who was not unsatisfied with his or her life. This dissatisfaction is precisely the quality that the great pessimists—Buddha, Schopenhauer, Freud—saw as definitive of the human packing plant. Millions of copies Peale’s book and its spawn, including Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (2002), have been sold . . . and they were not purchased by readers who were madly content with their lives. They may have attracted people who wished to potentiate their “subjective well being,” in the terminology of positive psychology researchers. But those who are on that road may nevertheless be considered at least relatively unsatisfied with how they feel and are playing a perilous game in trying to upgrade their emotional tone to a height from which they may have a very unhappy fall.

Ask any major drug user.

6. Zapffe’s solution to nature’s sportive minting of the human race may seem the last checkpoint of despair. In his Philosophy of The Unconscious (1869), the German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann thinks farther ahead: “What would it avail, e.g., if all mankind should die out by sexual continence? The world as such would continue to exist.” This endurance of the organic would allow the restive forces of life to set up “a new man or similar type, and the whole misery would begin over again” (emphasis not added). For Hartmann, the struggle for deliverance is not between humanity and nature, but between the affirmation of all phenomena by their continuance in any form and the negation of same by the evolution of a super-developed form of being that could exterminate every scintilla of existence at the very source of creation. While Hartmann’s vision is rather lunatic, its goal is actually more realistic than Zapffe’s. It is uproariously implausible that humankind will ever leave off breeding. But we can imagine that someday we will be able to suffocate every cell on earth with reasonable certainly using a destructive mechanism not yet devised, since nuclear or biological weapons would probably leave simpler organisms unharmed and spoiling for a new evolution. This planetary doomsday would not depend on the assent of billions (a huddle of holdouts could foil Zapffe’s solution for the disappearance of all humans and quasi-humans) but could occur either accidentally or by the initiative of a few messianic individuals.

7. In his study Suicide (1897), the French sociologist Emile Durkheim contended that "one does not advance when one proceeds toward no goal, or—which is the same thing—

when the goal is infinity. To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness." Who can gainsay that the goal of our race has no visible horizon and therefore, in Durkheim’s view, we are doomed to, as the French thinker rather euphemistically put it, “a state of perpetual unhappiness”? To counter this glum assessment of things, the world’s religions all offer goals that they say are very much attainable, if only in the afterlife or the next life. More down to earth, but no more realistically, Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) represents the unattainable goal of the title figure as an apologetic for going on with life rather than ending it. As Camus insisted in his discussion of this gruesome parable, “We must imagine Sisyphus as happy.” The credo of the Church Father Tertullian, “I believe 37

because it is absurd,” might as rightly be attributed to Camus. Caught between the fabrications of the latter and the rationalizations of the former, Zapffe’s proposal that we put out the light of the human race extends a solution to our troubles that is as satisfying as that of either Tertullian or his modern avatar Camus, who considered suicide as a philosophical issue for the individual but overlooked—not unreasonably for a writer seeking an audience at the start of his career—the advantages of an all-out attrition of the species. Aside from a repertoire of tricks we can do that other animals cannot, the truest indicator of a human being is unhappiness. The main fount of that unhappiness, as Zapffe and others have written, is our consciousness. And the more dilated consciousness becomes, the more unhappy the human. All other portrayals of what we are conceive of nothing but a troupe of puppets made to prance through our lives by forces beyond our control or comprehension. In the end, Camus’ injunction that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy is as typical as it is feculent. On the subject of whether or not life is worth the trouble, the answer must always be unambivalent . . . and positive. To teeter the least bit into the negative is tantamount to outright despair. If you value your values, no doubts about this matter can be raised, unless they occur as a lead-up to some ultimate affirmation. In the products of high or low culture, philosophical disquisitions, and arid chitchat, the anthem of life must forever roar above the squeaks of dissent. We were all born into a rollicking game that has been too long in progress to allow a substantive change in the rules. Should the incessant fanfare that meets your ears day in and day out sound out of tune and horribly inappropriate, you will be branded persona non grata. Welcome wagons will not stop at your door—not while world-renowned authorities are telling you from on high that Sisyphus must be imagined as happy or that you must love your fate, no matter how terrible and questionable it is (Nietzsche). If such dictatorial statements genuinely reflected the facts of life, they would not need to be repeated like a course of subliminal conditioning. And this is exactly how such “good news” is delivered to us—without pause and without appreciable contradiction. Ergo, we must recognize that Zapffe’s proposal for the salvation-by-extinction of the human race is not a solution to the absurdity of life.

8. “Worthless” rather than “useless” is the more familiar epithet in this context. The motive for using “useless” in place of “worthless” in this histrionically capitalized phrase is that the former term is linked to the concepts of desirability and value and by their depreciation introduces them into the mix. “Useless,” on the other hand, is not so inviting of these concepts. Elsewhere in this work, “worthless” and its associated forms serviceably connect with the language of pessimism and do their damage sufficiently.

But the devil of it is that “worthless” really does not go far enough when speaking of the overarching character of existence. Too many times the question “Is life worth living?”

has been asked. This usage of “worth” excites impressions of a fair lot of experiences that are arguably desirable and valuable and that follow upon one another in such a way as to suggest that human life is not worthless overall, or not so worthless that a case could not be made for its worth. With “useless,” the spirits of desirability and value do not readily rear their heads. What does arise is a note of futility. It is this condition of a vertiginous pointlessness untainted by implications of desirability or value that is brought to mind more quickly and emphatically by “useless” than by “worthless.”

Because of this direct line to what is futile, “useless” is more negative, outstripping a bellicose pessimism and entering the airless spaces of nothingness. Naturally, the uselessness of existence may be repudiated as well or badly as its worthlessness. For this reason, the adverb “malignantly” has been annexed to “useless” to give it a little more semantic stretch, although not enough to shoo away any rebutters among the opposition.

But to express with any adequacy the sucking emptiness within everything a 38

nonlinguistic modality would be requisite, some delirious effusion out of a dream that coalesced every nuance of the useless and wordlessly transmitted into our heads the vacuity of a clockwork universe. Indigent of such means of communication, the uselessness of all that breathes and breeds must be spoken with a poor potency.

9. One case of such discontent is that of the early nineteenth-century French Catholic writer Petrus Borel (a.k.a. “The Lycanthrope”), who asserted that he was a papist only because he could not be a cannibal. While Catholicism has since lost much of its bestial appeal in a literal sense, it continues to bleed whomever it can both psychologically and financially.