The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

Because of consciousness, parent of all horrors, we became susceptible to thoughts that were startling and dreadful to us, thoughts that have never been equitably balanced by those that are collected and reassuring.

As consciousness gives us the sense of being persons, our psychophysiology is responsible for making us into personalities who believe the existential game to be worth playing.

normal individuals do not kill themselves but until their dying day think that being alive is all right and that happiness will stand out in the existence of life’s newcomers, who, it is always assumed, will be as normal as they are

The farther you progress toward a vision of our species without limiting conditions on your consciousness, the farther you drift away from what makes you a person among persons in the human community

What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next—as if we were playing a board game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead and the human puppet

Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living—because cognition gives them more than they can carry?” Zapffe’s answer: “Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.”

we keep hidden what we do not want to let into our heads, as if we will betray to ourselves a secret too terrible to know

“he who hasn’t experienced a full depression alone and over a long period of time—he is a child.”

We have already weathered torrents of knowledge we were not meant to know yet were doomed to know. But how much more can we take? How will the human race feel about knowing that there is no human race—that there is no one? Would this be the end of the greatest horror tale ever told

In the recumbence of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is nowhere to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know.