The Last Messiah

In our daily social life, isolation manifests itself through universal, unwritten agreements to conceal our existential condition from one another.

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I stumbled over philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe recently during a late-night session of going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. The Last Messiah is the first of his texts that I've read now.

In this essay, Zapffe presents his position that humanity is suffering under its overdeveloped consciousness by making us too aware of the suffering and demise around us. He claims that modern life of humans has become a net of defense mechanisms because of that and pinpoints a few specific ways of how our society has established those in everyday life.
Zapffe was also a big proponent of antinatalism and so the final conclusion to his essay is that the titular metaphorical last messiah might come and urge people to stop procreation to prevent the cycle.

It's a really interesting point of view on life and a fascinating strain of fatalist philosophy to discuss. Parts of it remind me of my misanthropic teenage years when I was convinced of the same things, and that consciousness and intellectuality are the reason for most of humanity's suffering. I don't agree with the purely pessimistic, immature, and unchangeable attitude with which my younger self proposed those thoughts anymore, but there are still parts of that mindset that I do subscribe to, to a certain degree, and Zapffe manages to talk about them without putting all the fault into the corruption of mankind or anything like that. It doesn't seem like what he is writing has a hateful or malicious basis, and that is a bit of a fresh breeze considering the subject.
It makes it interesting to take apart.

Zapffe's essay is well written and even has a poetic sense to it at points which I liked. Many points he makes about certain “defense mechanisms” against misery are grounded in reality. I liked how he even is self-aware at a point when he describes how humans tend to work our sorrow in writings as one way to distance yourself from them, and so this very essay he writes could be an example of that as well.
He talks about isolation and how it became common courtesy to hide our personal sorrows from one another, and how the life of the high society is mostly made up of distractions because those became the things we value. Things like that. There is definitely a truth in many of these observations.

Whether or not the final conclusion to that should be antinatalism is a different conversation though, but, in a philosophical setting, it is an interesting one to have.

I really wish there were more of Zapff's texts that got translated. I'd love to read more.