Why it's definitively better never to be born
Monday, 29. September 2008, 11:15:53
Some time back I wrote a few bits and pieces online about Thomas Ligotti's extended essay, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. There was, for instance, a thread I started on Thomas Ligotti Online, and one or two blog posts. The essay is, ostensibly, one dealing with the origins and development of the horror genre. It also carries in it, quite explicitly, an argument, or plea for, the voluntary extinction of the human race, not for the sake of the planet, or anything like that, but simply in order to reduce human suffering. I suppose it could be called something like the case for genocidal euthanasia, but that would be misleading, since the main solution to the problem of human suffering that is put forward is simply not to perpetuate that suffering by procreation.
At the time I was ambivalent towards such a conclusion and the arguments upon which it was built, and I suppose I still am. However, I feel like making a certain qualification now to the remarks I made then.
In as far as anything ever is right or wrong, I think that Ligotti is probably right here. Or to put it another way, unless there is such a thing as mass-enlightenment, there will always be a sense of intolerable suffering to human existence, and the only way to end this will be through extinction. Some means of extinction will be gentler than and preferable to others.
To state that even more simply: Yes, I agree; it's always better not to be born.
That wasn't the qualification I wished to make, actually. But before I make my qualification, I should perhaps qualify my qualification by saying, I think I am far less consistent in my views than Ligotti, and likely to vacillate wildly.
At one point in the thread - I believe at more than one point - a poster calling himself 'The Yellow Jester', who is, in fact, Thomas Ligotti, if, in fact, such an entity exists, makes a distinction between emotional pessimism and cerebral pessimism, claiming as his own the latter:
At the time I noted, but did not quite appreciate this point. I'm not sure that any thinking can ever be free of emotion, or at least, of something like 'personality'. My own pessimism (not that I especially want to own it) I have always thought of as emotional, of consisting in a sensation that no one else would ever understand, because I could never put it into words. It was an almost physical entity, as reasonless as any object on Earth, like a ball of fear and loneliness inside me.
Now, however, I appreciate this point much better.
At the time that the essay came out, my strong reaction to it was probably due to the fact that it was 'too close to home'. Now my reaction to it is less powerful. It seems little different to any other accumulation of letters that I may read or ignore at will. For the past few months I have not had the intense depression that I suffered for many years before. I feel relatively detached now, and it seems to me that, no, you do not need to be depressed to think that it's better not to be born. You might even be enjoying an ice cream - as I believe Ligotti himself remarked - and still think that to be born is a curse that should not be visited upon anyone. I agree.
What, after all, is everybody looking forward to? What have they been looking foward to throughout history? Why has it taken so long without finding that thing - which cannot even be conceived - and people still go on and on reproducing? I do not understand.
In the meantime, Thomas Ligotti has joined H.P. Lovecraft, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis in their riotous and strangely touching adventures with Korean sex symbols Jeon Ji-Hyun and Kim Hee Sun, iiiiin, Thomas Ligotti and the Strange Case of the Orange-Flavored Lifesavers.
At the time I was ambivalent towards such a conclusion and the arguments upon which it was built, and I suppose I still am. However, I feel like making a certain qualification now to the remarks I made then.
In as far as anything ever is right or wrong, I think that Ligotti is probably right here. Or to put it another way, unless there is such a thing as mass-enlightenment, there will always be a sense of intolerable suffering to human existence, and the only way to end this will be through extinction. Some means of extinction will be gentler than and preferable to others.
To state that even more simply: Yes, I agree; it's always better not to be born.
That wasn't the qualification I wished to make, actually. But before I make my qualification, I should perhaps qualify my qualification by saying, I think I am far less consistent in my views than Ligotti, and likely to vacillate wildly.
At one point in the thread - I believe at more than one point - a poster calling himself 'The Yellow Jester', who is, in fact, Thomas Ligotti, if, in fact, such an entity exists, makes a distinction between emotional pessimism and cerebral pessimism, claiming as his own the latter:
In my own case, I can say that my pessimistic outlook is a matter of cerebral introspection and not "emotional thinking." No matter how I felt on an emotional level, I would still say, "It would be better not to be born." That is a constant which could only change should I become the victim of a brain tumor or something of the sort that would derange my thought processes.
At the time I noted, but did not quite appreciate this point. I'm not sure that any thinking can ever be free of emotion, or at least, of something like 'personality'. My own pessimism (not that I especially want to own it) I have always thought of as emotional, of consisting in a sensation that no one else would ever understand, because I could never put it into words. It was an almost physical entity, as reasonless as any object on Earth, like a ball of fear and loneliness inside me.
Now, however, I appreciate this point much better.
At the time that the essay came out, my strong reaction to it was probably due to the fact that it was 'too close to home'. Now my reaction to it is less powerful. It seems little different to any other accumulation of letters that I may read or ignore at will. For the past few months I have not had the intense depression that I suffered for many years before. I feel relatively detached now, and it seems to me that, no, you do not need to be depressed to think that it's better not to be born. You might even be enjoying an ice cream - as I believe Ligotti himself remarked - and still think that to be born is a curse that should not be visited upon anyone. I agree.
What, after all, is everybody looking forward to? What have they been looking foward to throughout history? Why has it taken so long without finding that thing - which cannot even be conceived - and people still go on and on reproducing? I do not understand.
In the meantime, Thomas Ligotti has joined H.P. Lovecraft, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis in their riotous and strangely touching adventures with Korean sex symbols Jeon Ji-Hyun and Kim Hee Sun, iiiiin, Thomas Ligotti and the Strange Case of the Orange-Flavored Lifesavers.
WIDGETIZE