“Pearls Before Swine” is my morning Holy Scripture. Recently, this spring of wisdom touched a very dear topic for me – misanthropy. And now I am really provoked…
Let’s get things straight first – Misanthropy is a general dislike, distrust, or hatred of the human species or a disposition to dislike and/or distrust other people’s silent consensus about reality.
Misanthropy is commonly misinterpreted and distorted as a widespread and individualized hatred of humans. Because of this, the term often associates a great number of false negative tie-ins with the term. An extreme misanthrope may indeed hate the human species generally, but it does not necessarily entail psychopathy. Misanthropes can hold normal and intimate relationships with people, but they will often be very few and far between. They will typically be very selective with whom they choose to associate. This is also where their aversion is most prevalent, because their perspective shows an overriding contempt towards common human faults and weaknesses in others and, in some cases, themselves.
It is because of that aversion that most misanthropes will often be categorized as loners, living in seclusion. They generally will not find solace or effective functioning in society as a result of their perspective. However, effectively functioning in society has little or no value to the misanthrope, and the prospect of fitting into their culture seems to them like idiocy.
Let me tell you a story. In my early child hood, beginning of ’80 in still communistic Bulgaria, I had a friend. Those were the times back there, propaganda was still quite strong – even small kids were subject to it – we had to memorise rhymes with values, things like you should help weaker and smaller than you, you should respect and support elderly people, be a good friend, never lie and other things like this. Of course those values were only for the good citizens of the communistic countries, the kids from the western ones were born rotten and evil.
My friend lived on the third floor, with her grandparents. She was several years older than me, very warm, always smiling, she was literally a big clumsy bear. Valeri. She was retarded.
Val was my best friend – we were together all the time, just two of us, sitting on the bench in the big garden of the neighbourhood, usually looking at the pictures of books we had, playing with colourful cubes, or just collecting leaves from the plants around. She wasn’t able to actually play the games with the other girls around, but they didn’t want to play with her too.
There was another girl from the neighbourhood, I was playing from time to time with, usually when Val had to go to the hospital. Sue was nice girl after all, but she would have never play with me and Val together.
One day, I was in the garden, when Sue came to me, asking me to go the the next garden with the playground, to show me something. We were walking towards the place, when I saw them. The others. 8-10 little girls, my age, armed with sticks and brunches. Ready to educate, ready to punish. I didn’t get beaten bad, because Sue got scared and ran to my grandmother for help. I got some scratches and I’ve learnt a priceless lesson – people are lying bastards and gathered into a society, they are even worse. And if you try to live according to the values, this freak-show is pretending to be aiming at, you are going to be punished. Next year Val left with her parent and I never saw her again.
Today, I am a misanthrope, a very convinced and proud of being one. I do not trust people, I generally tend to think people are idiots, until they prove they aren’t. Society scares me – emotional waves of many people at one place, herd instincts, empty words of the lying bastards, trying to manipulate the masses, fake values, senseless jabbering, small talks – all of this disgusts me. I am carefully picking my causes, my friends, my surrounding. I can perfectly mingle with the crowd though, and if I am in a good mood, you will be surprised how charming and funny I can be. I have real friends, few, but dear. I have a wonderful husband. Being a misanthrope is not making me dysfunctional, nor aggressive psycho. I am just slightly a bit antisocial and alerted because society, my friends, is way too overrated.
There are many people like me. People, who would kindly ask for the reasoning behind society or individual attempts to make them do this or that. People who would question processes and procedures. They would deliberately neglect the recent hype of social networking or annoying communication only because continuous stating of the perfectly obvious doesn’t fill them with confidence. They won’t play empathy with you, won’t pretend to like you. They will mock – you, the world, god, themselves. They will tell you the truth if consider you intelligent enough the face it, or will just ignore you, because of having more interesting things to deal with. You can run around and act like being the sparrow with the broken wing, this would not either impress us, neither move our helping instincts.
Society’s main content is lazy nincompoops, greedy bastards without any ethics, empty-headed marionettes and low-price prostitutes of mind and soul. The others are too few to prevail, or just ordinary misanthropes.
If you have different opinion, fill my day with joy and enlighten me. Just come closer, to be in the range of my Grand Poobah Idiot Sceptre.
Comments are not allowed to this article, because sometimes the best gift is the gift of never seeing you again.
