mhuzzell | Secret Ancient Horror Knowledge

This year, all of H.P. Lovecraft's work came into the public domain, eliciting a flurry of geekery among, well, the geeks. Harry took the opportunity to stage the first-ever play of 'Call of Cthulhu', and filled the house with Lovecraft paraphernelia, including various radio plays which he aired for our general enjoyment. I hadn't read much Lovecraft before, but it wasn't long before the themes common to most of his stories became glaringly apparant. In almost all of the ones I read or listened to, some curious person delves just a little too deeply into some secret knowledge of the ancient horrors of the world, and concludes that it were better they were never known.

It seems a bit cowardly to me, this approach. To say that just because something is horrible, it is better that it never be known; surely the opposite is true? It is like taking up the floorboards in your house, to find them damp and festering with rot and maggots underneath -- and then rushing to lay them back down again because the sight is too horrible to contemplate. Or high-risk investment banking running the global financial system down to the wires, then the public governments rushing to use public money to bail them out, because the sight of their failure is too terrible to look upon, and the idea of a fundamental change to the system is forbidden to even contemplate. Cowards.

And yet, in 'Call of Cthulhu', we hear of a sailor going mad -- instantly mad -- at the mere sight of the full spectre of the great sea monster in his ancient underwater city. I feel similarly when trying to contemplate the systems that capitalism has constructed for itself, this great imaginary city of justifications, a R'lyeh of contorted philosophies, where the geometry is all wrong. These capitalists, the CEOs, the ruling classes at the top, traded back and forth between corporations and the IMF, cannot possibly see the damage their actions are creating. They just can't. I don't believe that any person, much less a whole class of people, could be so coldly evil. No, I think they must simply be deluding themselves with the justifications -- socialised into us all from birth, after all -- that prop up capitalist modes of production. The idea that, somehow, the private greed and massive prosperity of a few can bring happiness and prosperity to all. The rising tide that lifts all boats. The 'trickle-down' effect. "Reaganomics." They must genuinely believe it all, somehow.

'Call of Cthulhu' begins by stating that "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Surely, surely, it is only through such mechanisms that those with power can keep up such actions. Unfortunately, unlike Lovecraft's secret ancient horror knowledge, in this case it would certainly be better if all involved could see just what is going on.