Darkness

The crypt of the Capuchin friars, by Oscar Parviainen

Once the disenchantment occurred there was a brief window of opportunity where the universe could wow us as a species. That probably peaked around the golden age of space exploration, between Gagarin and Armstrong. Afterwards, we realized more and more that the universe is itself pointless. It's no wonder we practically beg to return to a dark age. We seem to be readily open to give up all the comforts modern science and political institutions have given us in order to have the spiritual or existential comfort medieval peasants had. Their lives were brutal and short, but they had the assurance that God was looking out for them, and all their struggles had an ultimate meaning beyond this crap.

Given what we have found out about the universe being pointless, we yearn for darkness in some form. Many want the epistemological darkness that only a world dominated by magical-religious thinking can provide. They want to be reenchanted, they want the Enlightenment undone. Well, at the very least they want the nihilistic consequences of the Enlightenment to be undone whilst trying to preserve the technical benefits brought about by the same sciences that also gave us this nihilism. But, like I said before, if they had to choose, they'd most likely be glad to give up their modern comforts for a return to the blissful idiocy most people lived under.

However, some, realizing there's no real escape from the truth of futility, yearn for ontological darkness brought about by death, which is not what they really want. What they truly want is the nothingness previous to their birth. Death is only a poor substitute for this. Unlike their numerous brothers and sisters, they look around dazed, as if coming out of an accident. They're metaphysical exiles without any transcendence to go back to. Once, thousands of years ago, the first human-like apes capable of speech and language made up the first tale to keep the group from falling into despair so they could survive. Now that all of these lies are over, the exiles don't want a new lie, they just want out.

There are, of course, the ones that say they want neither type of darkness. Many of them are highly intelligent and accomplished individuals in different fields, from finance to the arts to the hard sciences. But intelligence and accomplishments aside, these individuals have no idea of how deep in shit humanity finds itself in at the present moment. They're delusional, forcefully finding poetry in the fact that they're the universe observing itself. Yes, we are. So what? That doesn't change the fact that it is pointless, like the late great Steven Weinberg wrote. And it's not only pointless, but malignantly so, since it has produced innumerable sentient creatures for millions of years. There's only dark poetry to be found in this. Everything else counts as delusion.

Now, H.P. Lovecraft is famous for having starting the Cthulhu mythos in literature, based off of his own creativity and his readings of contemporary science. He lived at a time were Einsteinian relativity was revolutionizing physics and astronomy was making discoveries that put us, mankind, in an even greater position of irrelevancy before the cosmos. He was also heavily influenced by the horror and strange fiction literature that preceded him, with names such as Edgar Allan Poe, Robert W. Chambers and Arthur Machen coming to mind. Perhaps Lovecraft's most famous quotation comes from his story, The Call of Cthulhu:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

However, there's another one of his stories that shares a similar sentiment and starts with a paragraph that resembles the more famous one that I think is even more appropriate and straight to the point when it comes to describing what I mean regarding humanity's despair after the disenchantment that followed the Enlightenment. It is from a story titled Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family:

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species — if separate species we be — for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.

For it's not just a question of our insignificance before the cosmos that is the matter. The disenchantment made more evident life's inherent grotesqueries. Anyone who wished to see could realize that there's no space for magic in the world. Not even in human conception. Biology and medical science understands pretty well the phenomenon of life to know that we are sacks of meat, bones and fluids, products of natural phenomena just like everything else. Our struggles are in defense of selfish genes that want to perpetuate themselves without any real aim. We're automatons. Puppets. That's what the knowing world as it truly is, without lies and illusions, has offered us.

In a way, although I despise the retrograde ideas offered up by the pseudo-intellectuals behind the Dark Enlightenment, I can't ignore the existential uneasiness that catapults these types of ideas to the mainstream. Knowing the world hasn't liberated us, it made us scared, and rightly so. Inventing a personal or a collective intra-worldly meaning doesn't carry the same weight as knowing we're part of something greater than physical reality itself. By losing the supernatural stage we believed we were a part of, we lost ourselves in the process.

But deluding ourselves over again with a new dark age isn't the answer, at least in my view. It will only delay the inevitable. Let's say we go back to being a backwards God-fearing humanity. We would question everything and this questioning would lead to this entire process of disenchantment over again. Despair would return. The only way to not feel this way is to return to animality. But animals suffer, too, only they don't know it at a deeper level that forces them to invent myths in order to cope with it without going mad. The best course of action isn't to delude ourselves, but face the consequences of our discoveries.

So, we found out that we are nothing, worse yet, that we are puppets of biological and chemical desires, bound by the laws of physics? The best rebellion is to give up, not participate in this rat chase. Leave the world behind, in a real sense, forever. Our refusal to participate in existence is the most straight forward answer when this existence is defined by constant attrition and the subsequent need of made-up meaning. We should spare the next generation of potential people from this reality, not make up new lies in order to justify creating them. They will suffer, too, no matter what we do, and their sufferings won't mean anything, same as ours. Returning to a new age of darkness voluntarily is postponing the end, which will come regardless of what we do.

Nietzsche would say this kind of life rejecting pessimism is born out of resentment. Others thinkers with different perspectives would too. My answer to this accusation is: so what? If our resentment is warranted and not based on fabrications, I don't see where the problem is. And our resentment is not based on lies, but on a clear understanding of our predicament as physical and finite beings that exist under a condition of continuous friction. And what do those philosophers who oppose our resenting life propose? The forging of new myths such as the übermensch or the deification of human history. However, changing gods won't make a difference, just as returning to medieval or ancient times won't make a difference. Eventually, these new myths will die, too, because some of us are intelligent enough to see through them.

New mythologies would have to transform themselves in order to remain alive longer, like Christianity did in the West, but they'll collapse like nonetheless, like the old mythologies did. The very adaptation is a sign of this collapse. There comes a point in time when no one is believes in them anymore. Even the ones who claim to profess them only pay lip service to the ideals these mythologies once stood for. It's precisely the point we are now, so why beat around the bush and start this entire process all over again when we know the end result? It's very simple. Look at the dinosaurs. That's us in a few million years, extinct. Don't look away, don't pretend dinosaurs didn't exist or that their fossils were buried by the devil in order to confound believers and make them leave the true faith.

The sooner we come to the realization that the preferable kind of darkness is the one from which we were all taken away from by being created the better. We are going to return to that darkness regardless of what we do, so why bother building empires and mythologies to keep our world tribe going for a little longer? The fetishization of consciousness that drives contemporary philosophies such as longtermism is a based on childish belief that human consciousness is something to be celebrated, instead of mourned. This is something that could only have come out of cultures that emphasize a certain strain of analytical thinking over an actual analysis of reality. They want to bring human consciousness to different planets, delaying the inevitable, like I have been stressing.

What these longtermist imbeciles who want us to become a multiplanetary species don't understand is that our inevitable extinction isn't going to be mostly preceded by harmless fun and games, but by a great deal of suffering, which is inherent to sentient and conscious life. The fact that they themselves do not notice this makes them vastly more ignorant of how everything works than even those who long for a return to the middle ages. Their sterile cult of consciousness might yet be a million times more harmful than anything we have previously encountered in our mad journey as a species.

We should not voyage too far for the sake of keeping suffering as contained as possible. We came, we saw, and what we saw sickened us to the core. The time has come for us to grow up and stop fantasizing about best possible worlds that will never come. We should leave existence behind in protest against this reality, not make plans for resetting history and start anew with a another dark age, or worse yet, deify human consciousness and try to expand it to the darkness that surrounds the stars. There's nothing for it. If we should return to a dark age, let us then be all monks and nuns, or better yet, Cathars or Bogomils, so as to not leave any descendants.

by Fernando Olszewski