Julius Bahnsen and I Have A Special Plan For This World: No Escape.

When everyone you have ever loved is finally gone
When everything you have ever wanted is finally done with
When all of your nightmares are for a time obscured
As by a shining brainless beacon
Or a blinding eclipse of the many terrible shapes of this world
When you are calm and joyful
And finally entirely alone
Then in a great new darkness
You will finally execute your special plan

I have recently finished reading two of the shorter works by one Julius Bahnsen, one of the three main representatives of German Idealist Pessimism during the 19th century, the other two being Edward Von Hartmann and Philipp Mainlander, Bahnsen being by far the most obscure of these three thinkers. In these readings, I have found several similarities to Thomas Ligotti's disturbing poem I Have A Special Plan For This World.

In Bahsen's thought, which could be accurately described as absolute, unrelenting pessimism, there is no possible redemption or salvation from this world (as opposed to Schopenhauer, who advised either asceticism or a calm contemplation of art, or Mainlander, who thought universal redemption was inevitable because of entropy through some very clever readings of his contemporary physicians, namely Boltzmann). Likewise, he thought that any attempts at reaching redemption from existence are doomed and delusional from the beginning. "Redemption from existence" is exactly the "plan" of the narrator:

Imagine he said all the flesh that is eaten

Man is a self-conscious nothing.

The teeth tearing into it
The tongue tasting it's flavor
And the hunger for that taste
Now take away that flesh he said
Take away the teeth and the tongue
The taste and the hunger
Take away everything as it is
That was my plan
My own special plan for this world
I listened to these words and yet I did not wonder
If this creature whom I had thought sleeping or dead would ever approach his vision
Even in his deepest dreams
Or his most lasting death
Because I had heard of such plans such visions
And I knew they did not see far enough
But what was demanded in a way of a plan
Needed to go beyond tongue and teeth and hunger and flesh
Beyond the bones and the very dust of bones and the wind that would come to blow the dust away
And so I began to envision a darkness that was long before the dark of night
And a strangely shining light
That owed nothing to the light of day

The narrator seems to think that all existence is a grind, from the line: "Once more we are mangled by a great grinding fear". The wording here, grinding, is particularly reminiscent of Bahnsen's epitaph "Vita mea irritus labor", latin for "My life was pointless work". 

Likewise, the following verse has several Bahnsean elements in it:

There are no means for escaping this world

It penetrates even into your sleep

And is his substance

You are caught in your own dreaming

Where there is no space

And a hell forever where there is no time

You can't do nothing you aren't told to do

There is no hope for escape from this dream

"There are no means to escaping this world / It penetrates into your sleep" Is a very Bahnsean notion. There is no means to escape the horrible suffering of existence because of the principle of contradiction, which is to say, Bahnsen says that there was not one single, "cosmic" Will like Schopenhauer thought, but rather, every individual had several Wills in himself, the Will to do something, and these Wills contradicted each other, thus making the individual forever miserable since his desires are always contradicting each other. Thus, even in sleep, there is no escape from existence. Likewise, it's interesting that Bahsen thought that there would never be a sort of escape from existence, and it would just continue on forever. Life is just a nightmare for him, and this imagery seems quite like his ideas. One would be remiss to not mention Alfred Kubin's novel The Other Side, which took influence from Bahnsen as well as Mainlander.

The entire verse about "designs upon this world" applies as well: Just like Mainlander, Bahnsen disagreed with the leftists who thought that existence was fundamentally good, it was just made into suffering by this or that entity. For Bahnsen, no revolution, no utopia would relieve us from suffering, not because revolutions or utopias are impossible, but because the problem relies on existence itself. Reality itself is ontologically painful, and thus, neither right-wing nor left-wing "solutions" would fix Humanity's suffering.

he verse about "the funny man" might as well be about Bahnsen too, thought it is likely a reference to John Doe from Ligotti's story The Frolic: Bahnsen believed that it was humor that it was "in possession of the correct ethical metric" because it was only humor that could simultaneously relieve tension and suffering and acknowledge existence (which is to say, the "being" of whatever grotesque thing is the subject of the comedy) as being nightmarish. Referring to the man, his walk and his plan seems to coincide with this. 

Finally, at the very end, the first verse is repeated, only broken, somewhat depressed, melancholically... This repetition, for me, always indicated that the "special plan" would never come to fruition, it's just a fantasy that the narrator holds to endure the constant grinding, and at the end, perhaps he realizes this, somewhat like how the narrator from The Bungalow House knows his maxim in a way he never did before. All hopes of fixing this universe are ultimately doomed, for the narrator dreams of an utopia of non-being, but he dreams of an utopia all the same, a place where there are no more contradictions, and like Bahnsen said: "The world is an inextricable tangle of contradictions of the most tragic negativity."

Spengler, Zapffe, Ligotti and the "Nerd Fandom".

Communism and psychoanalysis, however incommensurable otherwise, both attempt (as Communism also has a spiritual reflection) by novel means to vary the old escape anew; applying, respectively, violence and guile to make humans biologically fit by ensnaring their critical surplus of cognition.

-Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

According to philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, in his essay The Last Messiah, human beings have naturally evolved an intrinsic need for meaning and purpose in their lives while the environment where they evolved in lacks both.

We have gotten a surplus of consciousness, says Zapffe, for we are the only animals in nature that can realize the tragic meaningless of our existence in which we are brutally thrust without a choice. To cope with this, Zapffe notes, we have come up with four remedies for life, which Thomas Ligotti, in his Conspiracy Against The Human Race cites as being the following:

(1) ISOLATION. So that we may live without going into a free-fall of trepidation, we isolate the dire facts of being alive by relegating them to a remote compartment of our minds. They are the lunatic family members in the attic whose existence we deny in a conspiracy of silence.

(2) ANCHORING. To stabilize our lives in the tempestuous waters of chaos, we conspire to anchor them in metaphysical and institutional “verities”—God, Morality, Natural Law, Country, Family—that inebriate us with a sense of being official, authentic, and safe in our beds.

(3)DISTRACTION. To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors, we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous trash. The most operant method for furthering the conspiracy, it is in continuous employ and demands only that people keep their eyes on the ball—or their television sets, their government’s foreign policy, their science projects, their careers, their place in society or the universe, etc.

(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing stage fright at what may happen to even the soundest bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by making an open display of them.

Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

In his philosophical masterpiece of pessimism The Conspiracy Against The Human Race, Thomas Ligotti comments on these four strategies as they evolve over time: 

[...] with the passing of generations the more profligate will become humanity’s means of hiding its disillusionments from itself: the more brainless and delusive its isolation from the actualities of existence; the more stupefying and uncouth its distractions from the startling and dreadful; the more heavy-handed and madcap its anchorings in unreality; and the more callous, self-mocking, and detached from life its sublimations in art. These developments will not make us any more paradoxical in our being, but they could make all manifestations of our paradoxical nature less effective and more aberrant.

This "passing of generations" is, of course, nothing more than the evolution of a civilization. Which is where Spengler comes in. If we are to believe Spengler, major civilizations go through a series of steps: Creation - Myth - Stories - Art - Realization - Rationalization - Technologization - Destruction.
A culture declines over time, after it has gotten all of its myths, all of its realizations out of the way, whereas the "age of enlightenment" arrives and, in proper Socratic fashion, everything is questioned, every God overthrown, every authority figure scrutinized, every status quo analyzed. After this, there follows a quick technologization, and the society, eventually, after getting all of its own essence out, dies, whereas the cycle begins again (Such as Western Medieval society arriving out of the ashes of Classical society.)

Well, what's new about this? Nothing at all. And to further degrade the borderline nonexistent structure of this post, I want to argue about a comic. This comic, to be specific:

Looking at the man in the comic and how he represents it's author, as well as the culture, the society he represents, one can see two things:

1): A man who is trying to escape our ghosts, who cannot anchor himself to his ghosts, as I explained in my last post.
2): Because the anchors associated with the Ghosts of our past, he has instead preferred to enter the world of distractions, to such an extent that, indeed, they become anchorings, and in the case of our artist and many others, inspiration for sublimation, to "let it out".

One look at Twitter or any such website will show you that these people are frustrated, bewildered, anxious. Despite being catered to more than ever, they are extremely unhappy and always getting worse. They're always protesting, boycotting, screaming into the void (a scream borne of a nightmare that no one hears) because Superman did the wrong thing in a movie or Wonder Woman's clothes were too suggestive or anything of that kind. Life has become a living nightmare for these people (as most of them are veterans of this kind of shlock), and when the novelty wears off, it threatens to encroach on the core of their distraction itself, so they will borough themselves deeper in it in hopes of escaping this metaphysical dread, and thus they refuse life as life presents itself.

Going back to Spengler and Zapffe, this is an example of post-rationalization anchoring. After the realization and Enlightenment age has killed God by snuffing out any rational belief in God or Gods, we are only left with secular anchors, secular religions. Like a fandom.

Look at what the comic is saying: what he depicts as insufferable horror is simply living. He imagines himself leaving this horror (the horror of existence) behind, transitioning instead into a pleasant world of children's cartoons (a distortion of the world-in-itself and of life-in-itself). The thing to understand here, above all else, is that this escape never actually happens, it's a marketing trick, a capitalist hoot, just like car companies marketing themselves to men during a middle-life crisis, and just like buying a sports car won't make a middle-aged man more virile, consuming nerd entertainment won't free you of the hardships of life and existence, so that comic strip has never happened, is not happening and will never happen. You don't escape life just because you're watching a cartoon. Life's horror is much life a horde of ants, they can stop biting you momentarily, and you feel relieved for a while, but no matter how hard you deny these horrors, they will still be there, crawling over you, tingling and making sure you never completely forget about them.

So, just like Ligotti wrote about our remedies for life becoming increasingly more absurd, so did Spengler predict this. By losing God, we have resorted to all sorts of religious anchors, in which we worship "the brand", in a glorious declaration of our decline as a civilization. As more and more generations become disillusioned with their previous anchors, so will the next generations scramble for more and more absurd ones.

Do not think I am religious for a moment because of my statements: All of these historical steps develop dialectically and are... basically inevitable. When I talk of "decline", I do not speak of it as a reactionary who wishes for a "better" previous age, but of it as simple stages in our history.

This bizarre and "madcap", as Ligotti writes, anchors are nowhere better exemplified in nerd culture. Nerd culture is a bizarre form of crypto-capitalist religion. It's an entire class of adults who take their pop culture consumer brands more seriously than anything in real life, regardless of practical on non-practical usage. 'Fandoms' are pagan sects worshipping the One True Commodity in its many different forms.

"Nerds" (not in the sense of people who enjoy traditionally "nerdy" things, rather, people who subscribe to fandoms inside nerd culture) are really easy to manipulate for political ends, with the military recruiting gamers being the latest and most blatant example. Idpol liberals, as well as nerd reactionaries, live in the make believe bullshit world of the Brand.

Absurd anchors in the age of decline. With age, they get more and more ridiculous. One can only wonder how much more nonsense is there left for us to endure until the planet is finally quiet and there is no more nonsense ever again. And I have no doubt that end of nonsense will itself be a form of nonsense.