The Mystics of Muelenburg by Thomas Ligotti
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Parasites of Chaos

Leibniz was wrong. It is not God’s thought that keeps the world in existence. It is, according to this short story by Ligotti, the concerted delusions of human beings that create and maintain order out of the chaotic primal sea of reality. So the greatest threat to our existence is not that of God forgetting the world but that of humanity, or a substantial part of it, creating competing delusions. As Ligotti puts it in the mouth of his anti-hero:

“These brooding psyches, all the busy minds everywhere. I hear them buzzing like flies in the blackness. I see them as glow worms flitting in the blackness. They are struggling, straining every second to keep the sky above them, to keep the sun in the sky, to keep the dead in the earth-to keep all things, so to speak, where they belong. What an undertaking! What a crushing task! Is it any wonder that they are all tempted by a universal vice, that in some dark street of the mind a single voice whispers to one and all, softly hissing, and says: 'Lay down your burden.”

Such competition among alternative delusions is possible because it takes enormous psychic effort to maintain a delusion, but very little to create and disseminate one. Delusions dissolve rapidly in an innovative delusional space as it were. Uncertainty erodes the certainties laboriously constructed, sometimes over centuries, so that the underlying chaos is exposed: “The worst fear of the race yes, the world suddenly transformed into a senseless nightmare, horrible dissolution of things.” People will latch on to anything - religion, philosophy, aliens from a distant star - that promises to reduce that uncertainty and restore the mask of orderliness.

Seeing is believing, we say. Or the proof is in the eating. Dr. Johnson kicked a stone to demonstrate reality resisting the touch of his foot. Perception is reality. But even the strangest perception will not be remembered as we move from one delusion to another for the very reason that it is so captivatingly strange only when we’re appropriately deluded. As a result, "… nothing can be verified, nothing established as fact,” says a certain Klingman who is “ a parasite of chaos, maggot of vice.”

Klingman has tremendous power in his ability to manipulate perceptions. The people of Muelenburg saw some different reality under his influence; they tasted felt and smelled substances that only exist there. As a consequence they may have done outrageous things. But there is no ‘hard evidence’ that such actions or the underlying perceptions ever took place. So they can remain guilt-free of whatever they have done in an alternative delusion. Klingman rules by obliterating conscience.

Ligotti’s little story is a profound epistemological commentary. But it is also an apt and timely political warning. I ran across this piece about ten minutes after I had read Ligotti: https://apple.news/AQm1Pba7JStuctNM4D... It recounts Steve Bannon’s latest admission about the insurrection of 6 January. I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to identify Bannon with Klingman - both are consummate delusion-sellers, parasites and maggots, who appeal to those who want certainty at any cost because of the uncertainty they themselves peddle.

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