he unironically thinks everyone on earth should kill themselves and that it is a failure of will that they have not done so, that the primary motivation for human existence is cowardice. he is not “based”. this ideology when taken to it’s logical extreme would demand that any moral person do all they could to cause nuclear Armageddon
basically New Schopenhauer, who had the same opinions but like better (Schopenhauer did not think everyone should kill themselves or wait for death afaik, just that the primary purpose of life is avoidance of suffering and therefore human birth should not happen)
Certainly he could have written good books but so did Lovecraft and we know how Lovecraft was.
I don’t like how much we abide by and tolerate actual suicidal ideation in our movement, especially with how many people are physically hurt by that kind of rhetoric. And before you quote Revolutionary Suicide at me, I am aligning myself closer with that than against it:
Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death.
Some have tried to discover politics in his short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done which deals with corporate America and the horror of office jobs, but as Ligotti told one interviewer: “While My Work Is Not Yet Done uses the corporate system as a starting point, this is only so that the story can go on to depict the all-encompassing system of human existence-in fact, all organic existence-as something fundamentally and inescapably evil.” (Interview: Thomas Wagner)
This fits pretty fundamentally with my belief about all “philosophical pessimism”: it’s just Christians who refuse to call themselves Christians lamenting the death of God and the fact that reality does not meet their unrealistic expectations.
This is not what Ligotti says. In fact, in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race he has a whole section about why philosophical pessimists are not obliged to kill themselves, and that he thinks there’s a very large difference between “everybody needs to kill themselves and everybody else to end humanity and therefore suffering right now” and “maybe we should stop having kids and let our species die so we don’t bring anybody else into this world built solely for suffering.” He even has a whole little thought experiment how the “last humans” could live in a kind of utopia with mass material abundance as humanity winds down.
The reason he believes this is because he thinks it’s simply too hard to get everyone to kill themselves. If a button could be pressed that did it without any issue he would do it in a heartbeat. This is not logically consistent, because he is simply a coward too afraid to outright state what he believes because he knows what people would do to his reputation.
Also, the position of anti-natalism isn’t really logically consistent in and of itself, because it presumes a kind of objective morality that doesn’t exist. There is no reason or incentive for people to not just have kids.
And, life is not malignantly useless at all. We do not fully understand the fundamentals of life but it is not an impossibility as of yet for life to exist that does not existentially suffer. The idea that that is impossible is merely assumed (waved away; mocked despite the multitude of times human beings themselves live, if even for a moment, without suffering) to make one’s own ideas more important seeming than they are.
I will not tolerate people defending those who fetishize suicide and mental health issues. Go fuck yourself.
Edit: Also his idea that pleasure is illusory but pain isn’t is silly and absurd. Both are either equally illusory or equally real. I am not talking about their abstract moral values because the thing I do not think Ligotti nor the majority of people get is that those moral values are not real and do not actually exist in and of themselves under any circumstance.
It makes me so angry that people will like and nod along to this horrific garbage. I wish people had actual conception of others’ feelings and just didn’t boost concepts that actually hurt people. Your abstract Jack-off Shadow the Hedgehog shit matters infinitely less than the depressed people and families who have likely lived through mourning suicide because of concepts like this.
cw self harm
he unironically thinks everyone on earth should kill themselves and that it is a failure of will that they have not done so, that the primary motivation for human existence is cowardice. he is not “based”. this ideology when taken to it’s logical extreme would demand that any moral person do all they could to cause nuclear Armageddon
basically New Schopenhauer, who had the same opinions but like better (Schopenhauer did not think everyone should kill themselves or wait for death afaik, just that the primary purpose of life is avoidance of suffering and therefore human birth should not happen)
Certainly he could have written good books but so did Lovecraft and we know how Lovecraft was.
I don’t like how much we abide by and tolerate actual suicidal ideation in our movement, especially with how many people are physically hurt by that kind of rhetoric. And before you quote Revolutionary Suicide at me, I am aligning myself closer with that than against it:
This fits pretty fundamentally with my belief about all “philosophical pessimism”: it’s just Christians who refuse to call themselves Christians lamenting the death of God and the fact that reality does not meet their unrealistic expectations.
This is not what Ligotti says. In fact, in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race he has a whole section about why philosophical pessimists are not obliged to kill themselves, and that he thinks there’s a very large difference between “everybody needs to kill themselves and everybody else to end humanity and therefore suffering right now” and “maybe we should stop having kids and let our species die so we don’t bring anybody else into this world built solely for suffering.” He even has a whole little thought experiment how the “last humans” could live in a kind of utopia with mass material abundance as humanity winds down.
sorry, I’m being very hostile but this is obviously not something I am able to talk about for my mental health. I am sorry for attacking you
The reason he believes this is because he thinks it’s simply too hard to get everyone to kill themselves. If a button could be pressed that did it without any issue he would do it in a heartbeat. This is not logically consistent, because he is simply a coward too afraid to outright state what he believes because he knows what people would do to his reputation.
Also, the position of anti-natalism isn’t really logically consistent in and of itself, because it presumes a kind of objective morality that doesn’t exist. There is no reason or incentive for people to not just have kids.
And, life is not malignantly useless at all. We do not fully understand the fundamentals of life but it is not an impossibility as of yet for life to exist that does not existentially suffer. The idea that that is impossible is merely assumed (waved away; mocked despite the multitude of times human beings themselves live, if even for a moment, without suffering) to make one’s own ideas more important seeming than they are.
I will not tolerate people defending those who fetishize suicide and mental health issues. Go fuck yourself.
Edit: Also his idea that pleasure is illusory but pain isn’t is silly and absurd. Both are either equally illusory or equally real. I am not talking about their abstract moral values because the thing I do not think Ligotti nor the majority of people get is that those moral values are not real and do not actually exist in and of themselves under any circumstance.
It makes me so angry that people will like and nod along to this horrific garbage. I wish people had actual conception of others’ feelings and just didn’t boost concepts that actually hurt people. Your abstract Jack-off Shadow the Hedgehog shit matters infinitely less than the depressed people and families who have likely lived through mourning suicide because of concepts like this.
Debatable
Well, yeah, but there are plenty of good or somewhat good things made by people with bad ideas
Yes that is true