Antlers
Philosophy for a rainy afternoon. When I learned Peter Wessel Zapffe was Norwegian, I wasn’t at all surprised. In his 1933 essay “The Last Messiah,” Zapffe suggests that human consciousness has become grotesquely overdeveloped. We are animals made intolerably aware of death, suffering, and meaninglessness.
He uses the image of an elk gone extinct because its antlers grew too large. We avoid a similar fate by cutting ours off. We isolate by collectively suppressing talk of death and the absurdity of existence. We anchor with religion and convoluted systems. We distract with work, media, and shit like this very blog. And we sublimate, turning the horror into something a e s t h e t i c like philosophy or art.
He proposes a Last Messiah who doesn’t preach another flawed ideology or religion as metaphysical opiate, but rather reveals to us the biological mistake itself. He teaches the suffering-producing organism not to perpetuate itself.
The takeaway? Cut your balls off and let the human animal fade into the dark.