Don’t Wake Up. It’s Not Worth It.

By on January 8, 2011 in News 15

conspiracy-aganst-the-human-raceGrim Blogger reviews horror author Thomas Ligotti’s nonfiction The Conspiracy Against the Human Race:

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror is many things, but it is definitely well worth the wait. It emanates a black power longtime readers of Ligotti’s fiction will recognize, yet it is not an old comforting horror story. Instead, the book is a history, a philosophy, and a V.I.P. pass to the backstage of Ligotti’s many talented puppet shows. On the way to get behind the curtain, though, you find yourself trapped in a dimly lit elevator. Rather than the fireside chat with Thomas Ligotti you expected, you end up listening to his dark observations about this universe and about your existence–many of which make you want to scream and cry and laugh at once–as they pour in over a piercing intercom.

In Conspiracy, Thomas Ligotti successfully balances the multiple authorial roles integral to the book. There is Ligotti, the literary historian and tour guide, who provides a competent overview of pessimistic philosophers many readers without a formal philosophy education will not have heard of. Obscure figures like Zapffe, Michelstaedter, and Mainlander, to name a few, have their bleak and unusual ideas presented in clear terms almost anyone can understand, alongside the equally heady thoughts of more recognizable actors like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Each of these thinkers has relevant information extracted and pruned for supporting evidence in Ligotti’s case against life. Ligotti, the argumentative pessimist, does not relent from his overall belief that everything, particularly human existence, is MALIGNANTLY USELESS…

Read more here.

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  • Haystack

    That book sounds incredible…but I’m afraid that it will drive me to suicide if I read it. *grins*

  • Haystack

    That book sounds incredible…but I’m afraid that it will drive me to suicide if I read it. *grins*

  • Sad

    I don’t know about this book but this review is poorly written…

  • Sad

    I don’t know about this book but this review is poorly written…

  • Pert

    Glancing at this muddled review, this book seem a bit misguided, albeit close to the truth. While there IS a pretty diabolical conspiracy of inter-dimensional proportions against the human race, (as many researchers and writers have concluded over the years, like Carl C. Jung, Jacques Vallee, John Keel to name a few contemporaries), one also finds that there is something much bigger at work as well, that dwarfs this sort of pathological spell over humanity. It’s all a matter of whether or not people are willing or able to wake up from the distractions, and see the naked emperor as he truly is. This book paints the human situation as ultimately bleak and hopeless, which is not the case…it’s just that humanity has allowed itself to become this way. We’ve given into the psychological external influences, and handed power to ruling elites of psychopaths and sadists. But the Cosmos is a big, big, place, and open to infinite possibility and variability.

    • Rufusjdill82

      I don’t know. It seems that you’re trying to put forth the idea that there is a Good God somewhere in the mix to lighten things up and that is very much not the case as no evidence suggests that shadowy being is real and if you look at the texts written about him if he is real he is just another element of the darkness of creation. See the Gnostic Gospels and The Old Testament texts that demonstrate that Yahweh is no more than a bloodthirsty tyrant.

      • Teller

        The Gnostic Gospels also talk about the Pleroma is the realm above all things material. One which can’t be proven in our world of course, but in regards to your point, the darkness of creation is exactly what Gnosticism approaches and exclaims that we should seek the inner-self and transcend material reality (non-reality) to belong to the space between atoms. In other words, the only true peace is to become one with the real God according to Gnosticism or what I gathered from it.

        • Rufusjdill82

          I feel that ancient Gnosticism has to be tempered with Lovecraft’s works as the two mythologies parallel each other so closely and it can be deduced from Lovecraft’s writings that what the Gnostics called the One Real God is actually what Lovecraft refers to as Azathoth the blind, idiot God at the Heart of the Universe surrounded by Shub-Niggurath and Her Seven Piping Goats.

    • Rufusjdill82

      lest we forget the cosmos itself grows out of dark matter which stems from the tenebrous hearts of black holes with only either a God that is unknowable to any human concepts of good and evil at its heart or a seething and blind idiot God residing there according to Lovecraft.

  • Pert

    Glancing at this muddled review, this book seem a bit misguided, albeit close to the truth. While there IS a pretty diabolical conspiracy of inter-dimensional proportions against the human race, (as many researchers and writers have concluded over the years, like Carl C. Jung, Jacques Vallee, John Keel to name a few contemporaries), one also finds that there is something much bigger at work as well, that dwarfs this sort of pathological spell over humanity. It’s all a matter of whether or not people are willing or able to wake up from the distractions, and see the naked emperor as he truly is. This book paints the human situation as ultimately bleak and hopeless, which is not the case…it’s just that humanity has allowed itself to become this way. We’ve given into the psychological external influences, and handed power to ruling elites of psychopaths and sadists. But the Cosmos is a big, big, place, and open to infinite possibility and variability.

  • Rufusjdill82

    I don’t know. It seems that you’re trying to put forth the idea that there is a Good God somewhere in the mix to lighten things up and that is very much not the case as no evidence suggests that shadowy being is real and if you look at the texts written about him if he is real he is just another element of the darkness of creation. See the Gnostic Gospels and The Old Testament texts that demonstrate that Yahweh is no more than a bloodthirsty tyrant.

  • Rufusjdill82

    lest we forget the cosmos itself grows out of dark matter which stems from the tenebrous hearts of black holes with only either a God that is unknowable to any human concepts of good and evil at its heart or a seething and blind idiot God residing there according to Lovecraft.

  • Teller

    The Gnostic Gospels also talk about the Pleroma is the realm above all things material. One which can’t be proven in our world of course, but in regards to your point, the darkness of creation is exactly what Gnosticism approaches and exclaims that we should seek the inner-self and transcend material reality (non-reality) to belong to the space between atoms. In other words, the only true peace is to become one with the real God according to Gnosticism or what I gathered from it.

  • Rufusjdill82

    I feel that ancient Gnosticism has to be tempered with Lovecraft’s works as the two mythologies parallel each other so closely and it can be deduced from Lovecraft’s writings that what the Gnostics called the One Real God is actually what Lovecraft refers to as Azathoth the blind, idiot God at the Heart of the Universe surrounded by Shub-Niggurath and Her Seven Piping Goats.