ABSTRACT
This bulk of chapter is in a sense a disingenuous appeal to the utility of depressive realism. We might say that it breaks off sharply from the dark radical honesty of Ligottian DR and offers instead a somewhat fainthearted, wistful version of DR. Anyone who agrees that humanity faces massive and systemic problems must choose between some form of personal exit, radical solution, passive nihilism or piecemeal reforms. For the anarcho-primitivist Zerzan there is no possible compromise: only a return to pre-agricultural conditions will do (or would do , since it can never happen). Implied in and sometimes practised from the depths of DR analysis are radical honesty, silence, stillness, antinatalism and hikikomori . These are all in themselves fairly harmless behaviours presenting no significant threat to mainstream society, yet most of them are taken as signs of rudeness or mental illness and, were they to spread, they would in fact become a threat to functional society. They are refusals to conform. Ligottian nihilism (Ligotti himself eschews the term nihilism) has an integrity that offers no solutions. Going further than Zerzan, Ligotti and his ilk identify existence itself as malignantly useless and make it plain that nothing can ameliorate it. Benatar, Ligotti and Zapffe must all be considered advocates of voluntary human extinction (if not also Beckett, Cioran and others). By contrast Zerzan calls for action and implies a romantic vision of (a reduced number of ) good humans returning home to the bountiful earth. Zerzan has an agenda; Ligotti does not, unless it is passively wishful antinatalism and annihilation.
