The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror by Thomas Ligotti & Ray Brassier

Author:Thomas Ligotti & Ray Brassier [Ligotti, Thomas & Brassier, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Gnostic Dementia, Conspiracy Theories, Philosophy, 21st Century, v.5, Amazon.com, Retail
ISBN: 9780984480272
Amazon: 0984480277
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2011-04-28T15:00:00+00:00

As the ego-dead, so we might imagine, we would continue to know pain in its various forms—that is the essence of existence—but we would not be cozened by our egos to take it personally, an attitude that converts an individual’s pain into conscious suffering. Naturally, we would still have to feed, but we would not be omnivorous gourmands who eat for amusement, gorging down everything in nature and turning to the laboratory for more. As for reproduction, who can say? Animals are driven to copulate, and even as the ego-dead we would not be severed from biology, although we would not be unintelligently ruled by it, as we are now. As a corollary of not being unintelligently ruled by biology, neither would we sulk over our extinction, as we do now. Why raise another generation destined to climb aboard the evolutionary treadmill? But then, why not raise another generation of the ego-dead? For those who do not perceive either their pleasures or their pains as belonging to them, neither life nor death would be objectionable or not objectionable, desirable or not desirable, all right or not all right. We would be the ego-dead, the self-less, and, dare we say, the enlightened.

A depiction of what our lives might be like in such a state would seem to have been recorded in the eightieth section of the Tao Te Ching, perhaps to show up humankind’s modus vivendi by daydreaming about one not of this earth.

Let all lands be small

and their people few,

so they have no need

for time-saving machines.

Let them keep their minds

On the coming of death

And never stray far

From where they were born.

Should they have boats

Or carts to go traveling,

Let there be nothing

They would want to see.

Should they have weapons,

Let them be put someplace

Out of everyone’s sight

To rust and grow useless.

Let each person’s duties

Be no more than may be

Kept track of by tying knots

On a short piece of string.

Let their food be enough

And their clothes drab,

Their homes decent shelter

And their lives unremarkable.

If the next land is so close

That they can hear its

Dogs barking at night and its

Roosters crowing at dawn …

Let them get old and die

Rather than be troubled

By the least curiosity

To have a look over there.

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