The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An All-New Context

Salvation is the pervasive neurosis of the Western world - that everything will work out just fine. It’s religious genesis from Judaism to Christianity and hence to Islam is obvious enough. But its secularised versions - from the political ideologies and terrorisms of the right and the left to the self-help and self-improvement programmes of entrepreneurial intellectuals - have become even more pervasive, and destructive, as global society has tried to shed its religious roots. The slogans have changed from those involving redemption from sin and the alleviation of spiritual misery to the functionally equivalent clichés of being the best you can be and improving the world. All rely on the fallacious presumption of human perfectibility which is thought to be achievable either through concerted effort or with divine assistance.

That such salvation is the most obvious aim of the 20th century’s most popularly embraced form of neurosis - psychotherapy - is not something one typically discusses in polite company. Which of course is precisely the reason Ligotti writes about it. Being a human being makes us defective as such. The industry that has emerged in response to this recognition has one central function, that is, to convince us that our defects are reparable, that we are able, if we work very hard and pay a great deal of money, to become whole, truly human, productive, loveable, and valued as much as we think we ought to be. In other words, we will achieve “the condition of being ‘saved’—that is, of having no need to fret over the plight of human existence.”

Salvation means in short that all our problems will be solved. Worry will disappear as the purely mental construct it is. We can either presume there is light at the end of the metaphysical tunnel and work our way toward it, or we can be demoralised by the misery, squalor and pain that surrounds us. Most of us don’t want to think through our position at all and so settle for someone telling us where to go next. We let someone else think the big thoughts. That’s why they get paid the big bucks. We are merely along for the ride. This way we avoid “terminal demoralisation,” the modern firm of eternal damnation.

Just occasionally, metaphysical mutants like Ligotti show up, however. They create a sort of metaphysical upheaval, an all-new context, by pointing out that salvation in all its historical forms is utter bunk (as if we needed more than Donald Trump to make the case decisively). “Question: How could we know we were keeping certain truths from ourselves regarding how things truly are in this world at its deepest level? Answer: Because we have done it before.” This is, of course, unpalatable. But it might be considered a form of redemptive demoralisation, an unofficial license to end it all... or at least to stop spending money on shrinks. There are things worse than doom.

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