The conspiracy against the human race: a contrivance of horror

Only by securing every good that could be gotten in life, Mainlander figured, could we know that they were not as good as nonexistence.

Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture—one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce—rather than an articulated body of thought. It is the default condition of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains.

The possibility must be considered, then, that there is a genetic marker for philosophical pessimism that nature has all but deselected from our race so that we may keep on living as we have all these years. Allowing for the theory that pessimism is weakly hereditary, and is getting weaker all the time because it is maladaptive, the genes that make up the fiber of ordinary folk may someday celebrate an everlasting triumph over those of the congenitally pessimistic, ridding nature of all worry that its protocol of survival and reproduction for its most conscious species will be challenged[.]