21.05.2020 Boris Johnson: a hideous accident of mutation, inbreeding, weaponised misery and industrial nihilism

“Look at your body –

A painted puppet, a poor toy

Of jointed parts ready to collapse,

A diseased and suffering thing

With a head full of false imaginings”

-               The Dhammapada

A protoplasmic invertebrate jelly. That’s Boris Johnson's favourite insult. But what is he? A vertebrate jelly? Yes. A slab of decay hanging off an impossibly upright creaking bone scaffolding. A haunted marionette. He’s ten miles of entrails and a syphilitic liver in a saggy bag on stilts. He’s a hideous accident of mutating evolution and inbreeding. He is, like all of us, a conscious nothingness. A sentient butcher’s bin that's quickly going off. The true horror is that he’s awake, cursed with existence and knows it.

Swamp Thing

We are all what Swamp Thing, the ghost dressed in weeds, calls screaming meat.

The root of all supernatural horror is paradox. Things that shouldn’t be but are. Like Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Frankenstein’s monster and the undead. They are alive but they’re not, or they shouldn’t be. The existence of which shatters our whole conception of reality, so we do our best not to think about it.

Thomas Ligotti, in his amazing examination of philosophy via horror fiction, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, tells us this is why the idea of a haunted or living puppet is so frightening, they are “inanimate things guilty of infractions against their nature.” Have you ever noticed an antique doll in a grandparent’s downstairs toilet’s eye move almost imperceptibly, have you ever been aware that it is aware of you? Maybe in a malicious way? In that moment, the way your mind holds its sense of reality is under threat. You go through a moment of cognitive dissonance that can cause panic, and in extreme cases shatter sanity.

We can cope with physical suffering and pain, it’s somewhere else, but if it’s metaphysical, everything comes into question. That’s why ghosts and discorporate entities are inherently frightening, regardless of their intent. If you saw one, you suddenly wouldn’t know anything anymore.

If a puppet looks at you, it’s a puppet, but not a puppet. It is a paradox. It has a will, but it isn’t alive. But how does that puppet see you?

Is the puppet a puppet to itself? A human puppet could not conceive of itself in that way, if it was conscious, it would perceive itself as having free will even if it were attached to strings. As soon as it became aware, it would begin to think it was it’s own master even though it was just an effigy of itself.

This line of thinking brings up possibilities too terrible to conceive. This is all going through your eight-year-old mind as you gaze at that sinister doll in your grandmother’s bathroom. You just didn’t know it at the time. Your own consciousness is the greatest horror, a paradox at the centre of all of us, which we spend our entire lives trying to escape.

The Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe argued all human existence is tragedy. I might not go that far, but this is good, from his essay The Last Messiah, consciousness is –

A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had over shot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily-by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn one edge toward himself.

Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his vital processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in ain extending his arms to beg consiliation with his maker: nature answers no more; it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life’s embrace.

Shit, ok.

What does that mean to us at the moment? I think what he is saying is being conscious makes us aware of our suffering, aging, sickness and death. And I would argue, as I sort of did yesterday, that the old ‘normal’ exacerbated this condition. We were exploited in meaningless jobs, for pitiful pay and lost touch of our real nature. At the best of times conscious is intolerably painful, but living in a corporate battery farm requires heavy sedation. 

That numbing consumerism and misery creates the conditions for more of it. Someone needs to make me that burger and I don’t want to pay. And the boss who is scared himself, doesn’t want to end up flipping burgers, and thinks his big car might allow him to skip death, so he wants another one, and he’s going to pay the guy who does the flipping as little as possible to try and get it. 

Zapffe says we “save (our)selves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.” We can’t take the truth! So we numb ourselves. We’re vaguely aware that materialism doesn’t make us happy, but that George Clooney espresso machine gives you a twinge in your trousers, it just might make you happy for real, that could be the thing, you won’t know till you buy it. We keep ourselves disorientate with trash, junk food, we kid ourselves that we need to ‘keep our eye on the ball’, we need to succeed, we need to know what’s going on in the Big Brother House, what country our government is invading, our careers, our lives, our after-lives. Anything to keep our minds off the fact we will die.

We are an intolerable paradox. We are conscious beings that cannot bare to be conscious. We are human puppets.

This nasty little paradox feeds our ennui, alienation, and misery and is weaponised to keep the fictional grand capitalist superstructure standing. It's industrial nihilism. And it turns all of us into victims. 

I’ve wondered about writing a story on this thought, but I felt it was too clichéd. A high flying trader or business suit spends all his energy and time accumulating wealth at the cost of neglecting his relationships, not noticing that he is alive. Something happens that shakes his belief in the material. Maybe a friend’s death leads to a realisation. The day of his funeral arrives, but he needs to make one important call, close a deal. The client waffles on, and our protagonist watches the seconds tick by on his Rolex. He could still make it to the funeral if he’s quick. Ok, he’ll need to run now. Time ticks away and eventually he misses the funeral, the ostentatious wealth he is surrounded by suddenly goes from a source of comfort to one of horror.

We didn’t just suffer the misfortune of becoming conscious, we gained enough consciousness to write pieces like this, wondering what it’s all about.

A lot of these pessimistic philosophers’ solutions are that non-existence is preferable to existence. And when the material conditions improve enough for the human race to realise happiness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, we might realise we’d be better off not being. We won’t go extinct because of some natural disaster but will evolve our consciousness until we realise we’d be better off without it. Usually they shoot themselves at that point.

I think there’s a better way. I think people are worth something, and life can be shit, is shit, but it can be beautiful too. The best thing I can think of to do is accept reality as well as we can. Accept that we will die. If we spend our lives running away from that fact we will just cause our selves more misery, and carry on the path we are on, which will result in the destruction of the planet. If we’re honest with ourselves, maybe we can enjoy our time a bit, instead of running away the whole time, distracting ourselves. I think this is what is meant when mindfulness and yoga types talk about being present. It’s not easy. But the worst pain is caused by the distractions.

This is a big part of working in ad agencies was so painful for me. I knew it was wrong, harmful, or at least meaningless, but I didn't know what to do, what else I could do, what was possible that was any different. I think at some level everyone in ad agencies knows this, and do their best to shut that voice up with extra marital affairs, booze, meaningless awards, cocaine, money, some car, new headphones, Nike trainers. Who gives a shit. The horrific void of knowing your life is meaningless can't be filled with this trash.

The best thing to do, maybe, if you can't find meaning, is accept your meaninglessness. 

I watched an episode of the Netflix cartoon Midnight Gospel last night on this subject. It was surprisingly profound. It’s a good show, check it out.

I really hope a few people start to realise those pumpkin spiced lattés and fidget spinners never made them happy, in fact maybe did the opposite.

There’s a lesson in this for the way the government is handling the coronavirus crisis. The more they hide the truth, and lie, and worm out of things, the worse it gets. If they treated us like adults and said things are bad, here’s what we think we should do and why, things would be much less terrifying.

You would think Boris Johnson’s supposed brush with death would have taught him a thing or two, but it doesn’t seem like it.

Instead, the uncanny paradox of a government that says it’s testing when it isn’t, that it’s you shouldn’t go out because it’s not safe to, unless you have to go to work in which case it is safe, that face masks don’t do anything but everyone should wear them, that we were never aiming for herd immunity, even when we were, it wasn’t the goal. That we’re in huge danger but the best thing to do is nothing, or ‘take it on the chin’. That we are ending free movement to open up Britain. That war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. All that contradiction chips away at the nation’s sanity, it’s a spectre between all of us. It’s too painful to think about, so we keep trying to numb ourselves and run away, which just makes it all worse.

I’ve noticed a lot of talk of a spiritual awakening over the last few years, it feels to me like we might really be on the precipice. Until that happens I’m going to keep reading about goblins, ghouls, things that can’t, that shouldn’t be but are and other figments of frightful phantasmagoria.

Happy nightmares!  

PS, if this was interesting I really recommend reading Thomas Ligotti. I had a read of Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonimous Zone first, but it only took me a few pages to realise he was a terrible, annoying writer, who was twisting anarchist theory as a vehicle for apologism of his own paedophilia, so I moved on to Ligotti. Much much better.