At the end of 2024 I read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, by Thomas Ligotti. Not exactly a book brimming with Christmas Spirit, I fear. One of its central theses can be stated simply: consciousness was a mistake. For all the benefits the evolution of human consciousness has granted us, it is consciousness that makes horror and suffering possible. In fact it would best if no one ever lived to experience it.
There’s an issue at the intersections of empiricism, the philosophy of technology, and sociology that has been on my mind having recently read Propaganda and only becomes more urgent as the Israel-Hamas War and subsequent competing propaganda campaigns continue to unfold. It provides space for contemporary propaganda to operate, from mainstream climate denialism to fringe Flat Earth theory. And it is simply that many problems occupying the minds of people in technological societies are too big to be perceived.