Videodrome

If the extent of your religious background was Star Trek - that in itself could be the best background you could have, if you could accept this as Truth, if you could accept this as reality.

- Do

No major readjustments are up for a vote. And no melancholic head-case is going to bad-mouth our catastrophe. The universe was created by the Creator, damn it. We live in a country we love and that loves us back. We have families and friends and jobs that make it all worthwhile. We are somebodies, not a bunch of nobodies without names or numbers or retirement plans. None of this is going to be overhauled by a thought criminal who contends that the world is not doubleplusgood and never will be. Our lives may not be unflawed— that would deny us a better future to work toward— but if this charade is good enough for us, then it should be good enough for you. So if you cannot get your mind right, try walking away. You will find no place to go and no one who will have you. You will find only the same old trap the world over. Lighten up or leave us alone. You will never get us to give up our hopes. You will never get us to wake up from our dreams. We are not contradictory beings whose continuance only worsens our plight as mutants who embody the contorted logic of a paradox. Such opinions will not be accredited by institutions of authority or by the middling run of humanity. To lay it on the line, whatever thoughts may enter your chemically imbalanced brain are invalid, inauthentic, or whatever dismissive term we care to hang on you, who are only “one of those people.” So start pretending that you feel good enough for long enough, stop your complaining, and get back in line.

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

I have been reading this work of existential horror from Thomas Ligotti and would like to share some snippets with you. I could be wrong but this information seems like a secular milestone toward digesting the information delivered by Ti & Do.

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We did not make ourselves, nor did we fashion a world that could not work without pain, and great pain at that, with a little pleasure, very little, to string us along— a world where all organisms are inexorably pushed by pain throughout their lives to do that which will improve their chances to survive and create more of themselves.

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“At least in principle,” Metzinger writes, “one can wake up from one’s biological history. One can grow up, define one’s own goals, and become autonomous.”

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One of Metzinger’s fears is that some people will sink into what he contemns as “vulgar materialism” and will conclude there is nothing for them in this life but survival, reproduction, and death, with the wise guys of the world saying to themselves in Metzinger’s imagined soliloquy: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. … I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it.”

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This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live.

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Like believers in libertarian free will, transhumanists believe we can make ourselves. But this is impossible. Because of evolution, we got made. We did not bring ourselves out of the primeval ooze. And everything we have done since we became a species has been a consequence of being made. No matter what we do, it will be what we were made to do— and nothing else. We may try to make something of ourselves, but we cannot take over our own evolution. We made antibiotics because we were made to be the kind of beings who make such things as antibiotics. That changed our condition without changing us, being as we are the kind of creatures who do things and make things, yet are not in the business of getting ourselves made.

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To a believer, transhumanism would be a useless appendage to what they already believe, as well as an offense against Him who made us as He made us, with nature as the go-between, and long ago laid down the ways in which we can make ourselves better and better. Those ways may be hard to follow, but the alternative is the despair of living without hope of an unimaginably better future. For the believer’s alternative to despair, transhumanists have substituted their own.

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Ligotti, Thomas. The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror. Hippocampus Press. Kindle Edition.

slimetony:

slimetony:

I’m into Posadism now. Still not sure what it is but I’ll probably get around to figuring it out eventually.

Ok. Not so hyped about the “excited to die in a nuclear war” thing. Really into the aliens thouhg.

(via averyterrible)