The Color Out of Space: Review and Polemics
Dragonsphere Report
The Color Out of Space is good. It is appropriate to Lovecraftian themes.
It sets up a lot of familiar human meaning: a child's innocence, a father's protectionism, a mother's love, a brother's courage, a sister's willfulness, a mystic's temperance, and a sheriff's heroism. It then shows how an entirely indifferent and inhuman force brutally destroys each of these, leaving behind nothing.
The first time I felt the sort of nihilistic despair this film aims to engender was in the presence of what most would regard as quintessentially human: the religious and metaphysical meaning-making processes of the adults in my life, as they attempted to involve me in them as a child.
I was tortured for several years [citation unavailable] by various institutional authorities including psychologists, psychiatrists, teachers, and administrators. The most implacable and powerful destructive force to human meaning in a day to day context is actually inherited social systems of meaning. It represents destructive processes which have gone unstopped for thousands of years.
So to me, lovecraftian horror, the recognition that nature is broader than and corrosive to all real meaning and value, comes from within the human, and merges with the "Hell is other people" trope.
There are some noteworthy ways this happens at both the individual and political level. One of them is simply that human willfulness, and hence the manifestation of most activity on earth, is driven overwhelmingly by the most primal and simian urges of human beings. More people have killed over food, sex, and kin group than any abstract ideology. These instincts are also powerful enough to lead to murder even beyond cases of material necessity. It is not privation itself that leads to action, but the concept of privation. Since action is useful, we expect humans have evolved to have fundamental instincts much stronger than bare survival requires, simply because through sublimation the more powerful versions of the instincts compel secondary activities which also enhance reproductive fitness. In essence, when a person is hungry, it is not just due to the negative feedback loop of avoiding starvation that lives in their genes, but to positive feedback loops as well, and this generalizes to everything in humans.
Politically, this can be thrown into relief by asking a question. What are you, reader, willing to fight and die over? Now compare that to what those in power are willing to fight and die over. There is a lot of ideological scaffolding in societies, but when you look at what they go to war over, what they disenfranchise over, what they kill dissidents over, it becomes clear that the purpose of ideology in the minds of rulers is mostly to keep idiots busy. The Soviet Union emerged from a cloud of theory into an imperial project. The theory and ideology all died, and then territory was lost, but the imperial ambitions remained and now reassert themselves. At the root of every empire is just the desire to structure the world in a way that procedurally presses the monkey-buttons of ethnic narcissism. This desire is steady over generations in a way other things are not. If your ancestor hurt a racist a thousand years ago, their descendant is still holding a grudge and might plausibly kill you today. The terra firma of "civilization", that thing which is held up as a secular and universal source of meaning for the educated, is thus bestial psychosis. There are other passions which are steady, but this gives the general idea.
If you ever corner a person like this in private, they might tell you that these passions are reality, and that an attempt to treat ideology as foundational instead is a reification of nonsense into the position of truth. Some of these people are now active right wing theorists who proclaim that such reification is anti-human. But it is in this sense that I am anti-human, devoutly. Simply because an organizational schema is conceived and stored further down towards the brain stem doesn't mean it's more real, it just means it's more psychologically real. I, reader, will not rest until I have forced everyone into a permanent unreality worthy of their noblest lies, for these lies are the only part of their persons worthy of respect. I will become a force more implacable and horrible than life itself. I will do this to protect meaning. It would be nice if anyone joined me, but numerically, it hardly counts.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report