Against Anti-Humanism and the Conspiracy?

[Evans]

*Before anyone jumps to the conclusion I am attacking Ligotti or pessimistic philosophy read the whole message*


Hello Everyone,

What follows is a point I've been pondering on and off since before the Conspiracy was released, though the depressing enormity of which was pushed to the forefront as result of a couple of recent web-searches.

To start I think we can safely assume the majority of humanity do not agree with the conclusions put forward by Ligotti or such other pessimistic philosophers, yet aside from making more or less vulgar speculations about the individual's sex life or going 'wow I don't agree with this at all - we should enjoy life and watch drive-in movies after work' very few people seem to have made an effort to disagree.

The web searches I undertook here simply 'Against Speculative Realism', which resulted in about half a dozen results one of which, if I am not mistaken, was from a member of this site who claimed - I quote from memory - that ' those who are object most to Speculative Realism tend to be the happy go lucky, enjoy life live for the day types' (to which we seem forced to concur). 'Against Anti-Humanism' yields far more results but on closer inspection the vast majority of them are concerned with defending Secular Humanism against criticism.

So why have so few people taken it upon themselves to specifically rebut and offer refutations? It can't be said that these matter are not of the most vital importance to humanity, far more so than meagre economic differences between political systems, spurious mathematic abstractions, technological fashions or 'cosmic horror'. Are people nowadays that indifferent?

Much of Nietzsche’s oeuvre was intended as a struggle against the ascetic fatalism of Schopenhauer and Søren Kierkegaard wrote his Either/Or in protest against the dialectical determinism of Hegel: now men defer to defend life and remain content with warning us of the dire secular Manichaean consequences which may result from Obama not winning the next U.S. election.

If anything these observations disturb me more than reading the Conspiracy did.

[Gray House]

"For all practical purposes, almost no one is concerned with the big news"...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAa9wKKyvSY

[DoktorH]

I think the absence of rebuttals to "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" may have a lot to do with the fact that most if not all the people who've read it were already LIgotti fans familiar with and fond of that flavor of pessimism.

Given such a small audience, the likelihood of TCATHR attracting the attention of someone in a position to write a rebuttal of the sort you're after is pretty slim. Maybe they need an invitation to a diner in the middle of a boarded-up town where they will be served coffee and pastries of dubious provenance... ;)

[Nemonymous]

I am surprised that there haven't been suicide cults worldwide as a result - but that may also explain the lack of buzz about the book: its very success. Everyone has slinked back into themselves. And the cataclysmic nature of the world's growing debt crisis is just one symptom of that. An awareness of the truth. And preparation for channeling it into quiet real-time page-turning creativity rather than sock-it-to-them ebooks...

[DoktorH]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

And preparation for channeling it into quiet real-time page-turning creativity rather than sock-it-to-them ebooks...

an ebook can have the same quiet page-turning creativity as a hardcopy book often, they even have the same content as printed books - I downloaded The Croning just this morning, and am gonna go get into that now. having already enjoyed The Imago Sequence and Occultation in the same format.

[Sand]

I think a certain slice of the world is soldiering on despite the Conspiracy owing to a daily snort of the random Wodehouse quotation generator, here:

http://www.drones.com/pgw.cgi

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by DoktorH

an ebook can have the same quiet page-turning creativity as a hardcopy book often, they even have the same content as printed books - I downloaded The Croning just this morning, and am gonna go get into that now. having already enjoyed The Imago Sequence and Occultation in the same format.

Sorry, I didn't intend to turn this thread into a discussion of ebooks/traditional books - and here I make no value judgement between the two other than to say they have quite different effects/resonances etc (a phenomenon I hope I have demonstrated in my real-time reviews including that of 'Conspiracy'), i.e. effects that make ebooks and traditional books quite different (often with quite different meanings) even if the strict textual contents are identical.

To make this post relevant to the thread, it is arguable that ebooks are not only an outcome of technological advances but of factors described in 'Conspiracy'.

[tonalized]

All I can say is that upon voicing such ideas to friends and confidants, I was greeted by laughter and derision. All anyone could be bothered to say was, "Stop whining/You've got it good." I don't think many give philosophic pessimism the time of day or feel any need to take the time to refute it.I think they think it's something that's understood.CHG

[A. Northman]

Quote Originally Posted by DoktorH

I think the absence of rebuttals to "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" may have a lot to do with the fact that most if not all the people who've read it were already LIgotti fans familiar with and fond of that flavor of pessimism.

It would be interesting to see/hear the reactions if every people on the planet earth read the book for some reason.

Quote Originally Posted by tonalized

All I can say is that upon voicing such ideas to friends and confidants, I was greeted by laughter and derision. All anyone could be bothered to say was, "Stop whining/You've got it good."

Yeah. "Don't you understand, it's all about you making your world ####ty! Think optimistic!" It seems that most of my friends (and probably people in general) don't understand the difference between philosophical pessimism and the thing we could call "attitudinal pessimism." Philosophical pessimism deals with the existential phenomena, the human condition etc. "Attitudinal pessimism" is more like "No, I won't even try because I'm a loser and I'm gonna fail miserably!" Because of this lack of understanding I rarely tell about my views aloud when I'm with my friends. So, when one of them tells me how beautiful the starry sky is, I'll probably say "Yeah" instead of "One of those stars may be dying right now and never ignite again. The blackness becomes vaster all the time, and one day there will be nothing else."

Nevertheless, I'm not actively trying to look for the dark side of things (except when writing a horror story), if not the bright one either. "Attitudinal pessimists" are actively trying to live their lives in the most pessimistic way possible. I just let it flow.

Edit: For the actual question of the thread: a minority must always have strong arguments to be heard at all. A majority takes its own opinions as a self-clarity. Optimism of some sort is deeply rooted in the mankind (partially because of the wide-spread philanthropic religions, I guess). Most people are closing themselves inside this conventional, ready-made philanthropic thinking, which is conventional because people have to justify the glory of their existence (pleasantly without having to bother their minds very much). So, it's most likely just about the neglect - and not just about the neglect of pessimism, but of active thinking in general. Because neglecting makes things more comfortable.

[Evans]

I will try to reply at greater length later but it strikes me I could have avoided any possible confusion over the title of this thread by calling it 'Why strive against absurdity when you can read watch B movies' or some of the kind.

The increasing ‘conspiratorial aspect’ seen throughout society, industry and, yes, maybe even Ebooks; the corporate horror as expressed in fiction through My Work Is Not Yet Done, ‘The Nightmare Network’, ‘The Red Tower’, Quentin Crisp's 'Unimaginable Joys', some of Mark Samuels stories and those of countless others, can be traced back through hundreds of years of Western Civilisation to the quantification of Descartes.

Quote Originally Posted by DoktorH

I think the absence of rebuttals to "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" may have a lot to do with the fact that most if not all the people who've read it were already LIgotti fans familiar with and fond of that flavor of pessimism.

Yes, as I said that in itself - no offense to anyone here - is almost just as worrying. It's probably not a secret that I don't agree with Ligotti's philosophy myself yet the Conspiracy is certainly still a book of importance above and beyond the aesthetic enjoyment one might derive from it. It's almost a paradox: if the Conspiracy is wrong it still has definite value but if it's right and there is no meaning it has no value at all (I say almost a paradox because there's a slight confusion between Ligotti's view as expressed in some of his fiction and in TCATHR where he affirms meaning in that minimising suffering by the extinction of life implies the value of eliminating suffering even if it is in a purely negative way).