As Ajit Varki and Danny Brower in their book Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind suggests somewhere along the way humans were became aware of their own mortality, and the anxiety, terror, and dread of physical death shaped their psyches to the point of madness. Eliot once suggested: “Human cannot bare too much reality!” That’s an understatement. Consciousness gave rise to certain repressive and defensive measures against our natural existence, a “denial of reality” syndrome if you will. But that’s only to say that his is a vision very few will ever accept, for the central core of his vision is that 99% of humanity is in denial of this horror reality within which we are all situated.Īs he surmise from Zapffe and others it’s not actually our fault either, we have since the origins of consciousness been the victims of our own success. His vision is definitely not for everyone, it’s probably the darkest vision of existence I’ve seen in my sixty-eight years. To say the least it is an explosive and somber view of life and cosmos, a view that leaves us in no doubt as to what underpins his corpus of tales.

His vision pushes Schopenhauer’s vision of extreme menace and hooks it with the early rather than late Lovecraftian horror reality. With this reading I honed in on his stance of pessimism and anti-natalism. This is sixth reading of Ligotti’s Conspiracy book, and every time something new pops out or a new perspective on various angles of vision suddenly rise up while others fall back into the background.

The conspiracy against the human