{This is admittedly grim, but so is life; not for nothing was the Stoics’ motto “Grim and bear it.”}
“We humans have descended and degenerated, from some far ancestor (some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance) insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirch-less innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development, nameable as the Human Being. Below us, nothing.” (Mark Twain, from “The Damned Human Race”)
Thomas Ligotti (from The Conspiracy Against the Human Race):
What is man? “A diseased and suffering thing / With a head full of false imaginings.” (The Dhammapada)
As humans, we are preoccupied with the good life, always working step by step towards a better life. We set marker for ourselves; once we reach one marker, we advance to the next—as if we were playing a board game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. If you are too conscious of not liking it, you may conceive of yourself as a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live it without it. In so living and not living, you take your place with the undead and the human puppet.
For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, and death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with that: surviving, reproducing, and dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive, and we know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives, including suffering, slowly or quickly, as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we enjoy as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature; and being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us but to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or, at least, we want to think there is. This is the tragedy: consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.
Nonhuman occupants of this planet are unaware of death; but we are susceptible to startling and dreadful thoughts, and we need some fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. For us, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void.
In short, consciousness has overreached the point of being a sufferable property of our species; to minimize this problem we must minimize our consciousness. We must keep ourselves from scrutinizing too assiduously the startling and dreadful mishaps that may befall us. Best to immunize your consciousness from any startling and dreadful thoughts; at worst, keep such thoughts to yourself. Hearken well: None of us wants to hear spoken the exact anxieties we keep locked up inside ourselves. Smother the urge to go spreading news of your pain and nightmares around town. Bury your dead but don’t leave a trace. And be sure to get on with things, or we will get on without you.
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