The Conspiracy Against the Human Race Read Free Page A

philosophers who earn a living thinking about these things. Judging by the number of works they have produced, they know plenty about life and death, although not everything about them and perhaps not what is most interesting about them. The rest of us, or most us, only know that being alive is all right—“What a feast, and those potatoes”—especially when you consider the alternative.
    PHILOSOPHY
    If the brainiest among us are sometimes dubious about the value of existence, when push comes to shove they respond in the same way as the man in the street, declaiming, in more erudite terms, “Being alive is all right, etc.” The butcher, the baker, and the crushing majority of philosophers all agree on one thing: human life is splendidly justified, and its continuance by means of biological reproduction should be forever in vogue. To tout the opposing side is asking for trouble vis-à-vis a world in which all commerce depends on handshakes and smiles. But some people are born to bellyache that being alive is not all right. Should they vent this unpopular view in philosophical or literary works, they may do so without apprehension that their efforts will have an excess of admirers. Among such efforts is a treatise whose title has been rendered into English as On the Tragic (1941). Written by the Norwegian philosopher and man of letters Peter 16

    Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990), On the Tragic has not appeared in any major language at the time of this writing. By some fluke or fortune, however, Zapffe’s essay “The Last Messiah” (1933), which broadly sketches the principles of his masterwork, has been twice been translated into English.3
    The aforementioned translations of “The Last Messiah” have been received as a belated gift by English-language readers who treasure philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence, hyperbolically speaking. A good number of such readers naturally died before this gift could be placed in their hands, and more will die before On the Tragic is translated into their language. But these readers know better than to think that something indispensable to their existence, hyperbolically or literally speaking, must be received by them before their demise. They do not think that anything indispensable to one’s existence is a natural birthright. Strictly speaking, nothing may be claimed as a natural birthright, since—to digress for a moment—every birthright is a fiction, something we dreamed after straying from a factual world into one fabricated by our heads. For those keeping track, the only rights we have are these: to seek the survival of our individual bodies, to create more bodies like our own, and to know that everyone’s body will perish through a process of corruption or mortal trauma. (This is presuming that one has been brought to term and has survived to a certain age, neither being a natural birthright. Rigorously considered, our only natural birthright is to die.) No other rights have been allocated to us except, to repeat with emphasis, as fabrications.4 The divine right of kings may now be acknowledged as such a fabrication—a falsified permit for prideful dementia and arbitrary mayhem. The unalienable rights of certain people, however, seemingly remain current: whether observed or violated, somehow we believe they are not fabrications because an old document says they are real. Miserly or munificent as a given right may appear, it denotes no more than the right of way warranted by a traffic light, which does not mean you have the right to drive free of vehicular mishaps. Ask any paramedic.
    The want of any natural rights on earth is not a matter of tragedy but one of truth. In Zapffe’s estimation, tragedy entered the human scene only after our wayward heads began to gyrate with consciousness and self-consciousness: “I think, therefore I am and will one day die,” as René Descartes’ formulation