Violence is our way: The great delusion of civilization
Beneath the pretense of benevolence lurks savage conquest.
Naïve positivity — the unilateral proclamation that ‘everything is alright with the world’ — forms the foundation upon which our understanding as individuals and society of individuals, i.e. civilization, stands. To be a pessimist, to be a realist, is to be shunned from said society, referred to the perilous métier of the mental health professionals. If you can’t be positive and hopeful about life, humanity, the future, then remain silent and suffer in solitude. Do not pester the normal ones. Be the burden on society you so obviously wish to be.
Many philosophers throughout the ages have concluded that life, in general, is not the great thing made out to be. But even more so: humanity, society, particularly its modern capitalist-imperialist interpretation, are, all in all, a net negative to our short stint in conscious existence. For one reason or another, we have decided to spend our lives as rats participating in a race that knows no winners and ends only in death. The theatre’s directors are the only ones enjoying the whole farce, and even they know of the futility, experiencing a permanent, conclusive dread that can only be stilled by material and sensory distractions.
The rich are not happy, but they are happier than you.
Monstrous in nature
The 19th-century German philosopher Julius Bahnsen saw reality as the expression of a unified, unchanging force, utterly monstrous in nature. The consequence is a world of indiscriminate butchery and slaughter; chaos interspersed with illusory moments of calm. “Man is a self-conscious Nothing,” he proclaimed when he was seventeen years old. One can only imagine his parents’ distress — were he alive today, he would be fed anti-depressants as if they were M&M’s.
There is no design, no purpose, no goal say the nihilists, existentialists, absurdists; the anti-natalists, the misanthropists, the defeated leftists. Life — not merely the human one, but life in the general sense — is a carnage, a primal massacre. From this hellscape arose one species of many, quickly emerging as rulers of chaos. A terror regime that knows no bounds, and, among other things, resulted in the annihilation of 69% of all wildlife since 1970 alone. Nature itself can merely gawp at such numbers. We have turned mass extinction into a sport.
This reality, which they see as negativity, this anti-paradigmatic contrarianism, is unwelcome among civilized circles. Pessimism, even the philosophical and existential kind, lacks public appeal. No one wants to hear you ramble about starving children, bombed civilians, billions of slaughtered animals (every single day), the slow collapse of socioeconomic systems and civil structures, climate change, catastrophes, wars, futility, sorrow and pain — in short: the normal, everyday human experience. No, they want the meaningless small talk and the assurance, the illusion, that, yes, everything is alright with the world and being alive is not so bad, all in all. It’s pretty easy to come to such conclusions, living among the richest nations of the earth.
An evolutionary need for self-assurance and deception fuels this quest for meaning and comfort. By design, each of us is our own center of the universe, unable to break free from the prison of our ego. Gods may change, ideologies rise and fall, but the belief that we are something rather than nothing — a collection of atoms that inflict pain on other similar collections — and that something is a good thing to be remains unchangeable. Those who do or did argue for realization — Albert Camus, Peter Wessel Zapffe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Ligotti, the aforementioned Julius Bahnsen, H. P. Lovecraft, etc. — are seen as deviations from the norm, confirming rather than denying the paradigm (see the phenomenon of capitalist realism).
Monstrous in deed
For better or worse, we became conscious beings. This undefinable, fleeting, perhaps illusory state — ‘parent of all horrors,’ as Thomas Ligotti would have it — makes us think and evaluate. It gives rise to rationalism and forms the basis of our self-aggrandizement. We are not of the natural world, our political leaders say and we echo, we are above the natural world. Logic and evidence of biological evolution cannot affect this sentiment. It is ingrained, unquestioned, supreme. What apes? What bacteria? We are humans!
Yet instead of styling ourselves as ‘protectors of the earth’ — we were given this thing we call consciousness, so why not use it to protect the unconscious? — we chose to become destroyers; to squeeze this planet of resources until all is dry. We did think and evaluate, even ponder, and still made the decision to burn fossil matter until we choke the atmosphere and, eventually, ourselves. All rationality and knowledge apparently cannot halt our evolutionary, primal greed and egotism. Can we stop pretending to be anything but animals now? Naked apes, not fallen angels, is what we are, what we will ever be. The self-deception can only last so long until it becomes laughable.
Every time we turn on the news, we are faced with the unspeakable, the horror, the paradox, that which should not be. To truly face this darkness is to collapse before the perversion. Better to turn away. File away the facts.
Puppets freed from the strings of the primal unconscious — the unified, unchanging force, utterly monstrous in nature, Bahnsen discerned. That is how we see ourselves. We pull our own strings, make our own decisions, make the world a better place. Yet reality begs to differ. Our strings are still being pulled by that which should not be. If we are conscious, consciousness is a joke. We rush from dopamine hit to dopamine hit and think ourselves profound. We take pleasure in dominance and recognition of our dominance, in being part of a society no matter how perverted, being productive and useful so we can extract and grow faster and faster until all that is left, again, is that which should not be: pure nothingness.
The liberal-conservative capitalist that rules this world is two things at once: the benevolent rational, the humanitarian and the murderer, the slaughterhouse enthusiast, the war criminal. This is but the culmination of a deeper, more profound conflict in ourselves, yet the one which most affects our lives — and those we deem unconscious. Moving beyond the cognitive dissonance would mean a total dissolution of stability and structure, a plunge into the unknown.
When the last flower blooms, we will take the plunge, whether we want it or not.
Antonio Melonio
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Please ‘enjoy’ my other works of dark realism:
You mirrored so many of my thoughts and much more in a more cohesive way. Thank you so much because I feel many times I am an alien in a strange world.
I always remember the Krishnamurti quote which I am going to paraphrase. "It is no great thing to be seen as well adjusted in a profoundly sick society"
To exist is to suffer and humans have a unique capacity for suffering. To remain in the moment of what is and to take joy in the brief moments provided by life and nature without wanting to be somewhere else or some other time is difficult, naturally. But to put the past and future away and allow your senses to slow down and take in the present where ever that may be can offer some bit of joy if you can quiet your mind and keenly observe. My Buddhism is my pathway to peace.
For some the realization of the utter indifference of the universe to human existence is terrifying violence and chaos. That is the nature of the universe and being part of the universe that is the nature of man. The tension between what we are and what we could be, what we think we ought to be, what we think we should aspire to be is the human condition.
To me the reflections of Ligotti, Nietzsche, Jaspers etc are delightful points of view of the human condition and helps us understand the world and ourselves. What is more important?
Of all the writers that you mention, Julius Bahnsen has to be the most obscure, neglected, and forgotten. Thank you for keeping his memory alive as extremely few others, except perhaps in footnotes to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, are inclined to do so. It has been almost 150 years since his death and his works will probably never be translated into English. There are two reasons for this that I can see: his absolute and subversive pessimism along with his difficult and impenetrable style. There seems to be more interest in him in the Spanish-speaking world.
I have to give Thomas Ligotti a lot of credit for mentioning him in his great book,The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror. That section can be found here.
There is no entry for Bahnsen in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. By far the best discussion and analysis of his life and work is to be found in the final chapter of Frederick C. Beiser’s highly regarded book, Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900. For those not wanting to purchase it, a summary can be found here.
For some inexplicable reason, Bahnsen is not even mentioned in Joshua Foa Dienstag’s otherwise excellent work, Pessimism: philosophy, ethic, spirit. But as if to compound this omission, neither is the better known Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Peter Wessel Zapffe, who is treated by Ligotti at length. I would love to hear your views on Zapffe and especially his marvelous essay, “The Last Messiah.” However, I certainly would not wish to unduly burden you, taking into consideration Bahnsen’s self-chosen epitaph: Vita mea irritus labor.