About "Humans Are Bastards" and misanthropy in general

I really wonder why misanthropes are so common nowadays and why Humans Are Bastards is present in so many works (especially those that show the point of view of other animal species. Many of there can be seen in the trope page's examples). What is everyone's opinion about this?

It bothers me because many people act like it's "cool" to hate humans. Just look at tropes like Darker Andedgier: it is considered more "adult" and "realistic" to be generally negative. In fact, it seems like our society encourages it nowadays. People think you are weird if you say anything good about humanity in general. Just search for "Misanthropy" on google or You Tube and you will see how popular it is (Check the comments on this delightful video). In general, people (especially of my age) I know are misanthropes or very cynical to a certain extent.

Many people also generalize based on the actions of few. If someone did a horrible thing, someone will use this isolated event as an excuse to say that all humans are evil or something. Am I the only one who thinks that it is illogical that someone, as a human, can recognize the flaws in someone else's actions, be bothered by them and still believe that all humans are inherently evil?

It also bothers me because of how hypocritical this stance is. If you hate humanity, you certainly hate yourself, which means that you are aware of your flaws, but either don't care or don't believe you can improve. I've also heard misanthropes say that they don't care about doing anything about improving the humanity they hate and that they'd just rather see the end of mankind. If they see so many flaws in mankind, wouldn't it make more sense to avoid doing the things they despise in others and advocating those changes instead?

The question is: why is it so prevalent? I see this in every popular website like You Tube or 9Gag: Why is any misanthropic comment automatically regarded as mature and insightful by the vast majority of people?

edited 10th Mar '12 12:24:04 PM by Teraus

"You cannot judge a system if your judgement is determined by the system."

This thread is about the prevalence and popularity of the idea that humanity sucks. It's not a place for you to drop a list of complaints about humanity, so stick strictly to the topic.

We're keeping a close eye on this. If this becomes a bitching thread, nukes will fly.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

The following is just personal opinion. But as a law student I have seen many injutsices and many horrible things. We al have been victims one time or anohter about someone's actions and we too even the less evil among us harmed with intent of harming others (not "accidentantly" or "uninformed".

We would be kidding ourselves if we thought every human is "good" (opinion). Not denying the fact that some people do good things and some people are admirable misantrophes. The truth is that everyone has made and will made evil things. Even those "good" people aren't completely devoid of evil.

Romans 3:10 as it is written, "THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE

Now as a christian that's my stance. That bible verse is not a proof but an enunciative stance

Now that doesn't mean it's ok to hate humanity. On the contrary accepting it's flaws is accepting there is a chance to redemption: to be born a new.

1 Thessalonians 5:11 Therefore encourage one another and build up one another, just as you also are doing.

Matthew 5:43-48 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you

Again those verse are enunciative not prescriptive or "proof"

Accepting that you are not ok, is the first step to help people be better. I won't accept that a person that rapes, murders bullies (willingly) etc... is "inherently good". But If I accept his evil I can accept too that he can change for the better.

As metaphor it would be like:

Denying people are sick just becuase some people seem healthy.You don't pretend they are "healthy too" nor you hate them becuase they are sick. You go to the doctor and tell him you are sick and your symptons for him to to help you get better.

edited 18th Mar '12 9:24:59 AM by FallenLegend

Make your hearth shine through the darkest night; let it transform hate into kindness, evil into justice, and loneliness into love.

Well, not religious, but more psycho babble reason for me.

Its a bit of "Negative" Bias.

Humans tend to foccus on the bad parts, the worst case scenarios, the "What could possibly go wrong?" line of thought.

When we pay attention to ourselves (and lets face it, we are a self centered bunch aren't we? ) we tend to see the flaws first.

This is an evolutionary advantage (not kidding) because if something did NOT pay attention to trouble, it would go the way of the Dodo. (a now extinct bird that supposedly had no survival instinct)

Since its now easier for people to observe a heck of a lot more (other) people thanks to TV, internet and mass media in general, our limited attention/time is thus drawn towards the tragic stories about humanity.

After all, no news is good news, so news agencies work hard to bring bad news because that's what hooks attention and keeps them in business.

This ends up with Misanthrophy being common and "cool" because its what seems to be true and everyone can agree to it.

BTW, I'm a bastard.

Ah, the usual complaints about Darker and Edgier. Ugh, the backlash against that is IMO way more annoying than the concept itself. Because, in itself there is IMO nothing wrong with slightly adjusting a setting on the utopia/dystopia scale, and since many shows do ignore some of the worse parts of reality (which is quite fine, too! A grimdark MLP would make no damn sense, for example), yes, Darker and Edgier actually often means more realistic.

So, I would be careful about citing that trope as example for misanthropy in media. Often times, it just is to be more realistic, or to include a broader spectrum of themes, or to readjust a show's setting if it has gotten too light and fluffy. This general assumption that Darker and Edgier means "haha, look, they try so bad to be cool" really, really bothers me, because that's just making stupid assumptions about other people!

That being said, of course a certain sort of nihilism and cynicism is en vogue in certain social circles - but that has basically always been so. Teenagers especially have always tended towards that. That's nothing new, and it's something most grow out again.

In general I would say there is some truth to Humans Are Bastards. Which is the reason why Darker and Edgier often means more realism (and as I've said, IMO it does). You get light and fluffy by ignoring some themes and circumstances that can be found in reality. If you look at the whole picture, then things look very much darker. Of course, IMO, basing own misanthropy on that makes no sense - it means you're no better than the things you're complaining about/pointing out/criticizing. From the point of view of social impact (ignoring entertainment value for the moment) those works are best which do point out how fucked up the world is but then basically say "And now go and do something about it!"-

I've realized that Knight in Sour Armour has become such a popular trope on here that it's basically trite and stereotypical to bring it up. And I think most of us, definitely including me, could not pull it off at all. However, the idea behind it is the right one: The world is often a bad place, humans are greedy and cruel, but it's all we have, so it's worth fighting for. Do good because it's, well, good, and not because it might be effective or expected of you or whatever.

So, yes, that's my opinion: Darker and Edgier is fine, misanthropism is something every generation of teenagers had so far, I don't think we as a society have a widespread problem of misanthropism, and while humans may indeed be bastards it would be totally counter-logical to become cruel and non-caring yourself because of that.

Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken. Unrelated ME1 Fanfic

People have seen a lot of disappointment, both recently and throughout history. Reading through history you often find people making the worst of a good situation, tossing away huge amounts of potential for shortsighted greed, and cases where people guilty of terrible things. The Triangle Factory Fire is one of my all time favorite cases of that: the bosses locked the door during the day to prevent thefts or unauthorized breaks, (for women as young as 14 who generally worked over 60 hours a week) plus they didn't bother to build anything like a proper fire escape. So when the inevitable happened and there was a fire in all those paper dry lengths of cloth that were being work on caught fire, about 150 people either burned to death or jumped from the building to their deaths.

Locking the doors as such was illegal, but the bosses hired the best legal defense they could get, who agued that the lock recovered from the doors was planted there by unions. The owners got off for it. 2 years later one of them was again caught locking the doors that way and was fined $20 for it. Families of the dead sued and got around $75 apiece.

The owners of the factory collected $60,000 in fire insurance money. So, in short, they profited massively from the whole scenario.

And stuff like that is far from the exception when you look at history. Slavery, genocide, torture, war, and prejudice have been part of the human makeup since the start. If you spend enough time looking at it and how it continues it's not hard to see why plenty of people become convinced that tropes like Humans Are Bastards, Crapsack World, etc. are true.

That's still wrong, however.

Humans may be flawed, but there's still a tremendous amount of good in our species. In the case I used of the Triangle Factory Fire, there were people trying frantically to help the victims, including elevator operators who kept going back up to help more people onto the elevators so they would have some shot at escape despite knowing what tremendous danger they were placing their own lives in. And art, love, kindness and compassion have been around as long as the negative things I talked about above.

It's just that with the biological tendency to focus on the bad and downsides (which has already been posted) that often gets overlooked in favor of the bad, especially since it frequently seems to end up with the bad guys winning and in charge. But nothing says that'll happen forever, and even if human progress is an eternal "3 steps forward, 2 steps back" game, that doesn't men that it doesn't happen.

| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |

In one of my law courses, the lecturer asked what we thought of human beings in general (as part of series of other questions about the purpose of law). Most people were either in line with the Humans Are Bastards or Humans Are Flawed, though they said it in fancier terms. I was pretty much the only one who actually thought that Rousseau Was Right.

I'm pretty much someone who wants a rebirth of Enlightenment and modernist values.

"It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few."

I like to think of it as a reverse Nostalgia Filter. People focus on "bad" things because "good" is supposed to be the "normal" state of existence.

I'm guessing that's why Ambition is Evil, as you're upsetting the "normal"/"good" status quo.

I am actually not quite sold on the idea that Humans Are Bastards occur as often in reality as portrayed as often as the media does, and the world is as Darker and Edgier as portrayed. There are always people who are jerks, just like everything else there's always a bottom 5%. However, if you think about it that doesn't make sense: using the factory owner example how many factory owners lock up their employees? In a Darker and Edgier setting that would be almost like every factory owner and that is a standard practice. How many of you have met workers that are locked up by their employers? I certainly haven't personally, and according to Darker and Edgier settings that should be happening 90-99% of the time, which means that almost every worker that I've met should be locked up by their employers. And as somebody mentioned above, our brains are geared towards noticing those 5% of the worst, and therefore those 5% feels like 99% of the time.

I'm not saying that those 5% situations should be ignored. In fact, I think we should deal with them to improve the overall average, always, and strive to be the top 5%. However, to say that the average is always bad (ie Humans Are Bastards as I understand it) is, IMO, ignoring what we actually see.

edited 18th Mar '12 4:31:22 PM by IraTheSquire

Well, incidents like the Triangly Shirt Factory fire and people unionizing long and hard because of it have led to people gaining the right to sue the shit out of any company in this country that pulls shit like that. The point is, that when tragedies like this happen, the general trend of the last two hundred years has been to demand that people raise things like safety standards in order to avoid such horrible tragedies.

And even if, as a company CEO, you're doing it to avoid a lawsuit, this doesn't exactly have "humans are bastards" stamped all over it. It has "humans expect better" and "humans are pragmatic" as the rising trend.

And yeah, there's terrible things happening all over the world. But now they can point to a standard and say "hey, that's what exactly what we want and deserve, as human beings. And it's working over there, so why not here?" The trend is slow, but it's edging more towards people generally treating others better.

I like everything that we are as a race. When people say us being bastards is a bad thing, or that it's their way of expressing that humanity sucks, I just scoff. Everything that encompasses humanity and what we are capable of is the greatest natural wonder in existence that I can think of, barring life itself.

Think about it, we're a race that is capable of everything! If we didn't have the dissenting opinions about things, or the qualities that we can consider bad, then it wouldn't be everything, we would lose that title.

How fucking awesome are we? There is nothing that we won't do, good or bad, we can do anything and everything, and no other species we know of even comes close.

Humanity rocks. It's awesome that we can be saints, and it's awesome that we can be sinners, because we can all choose.

That last part there sounds like it should be in a cheery Power Pop song or something.

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

It's also a good cop out. Why do anything to improve things when humanity is irrepairable?

The cure to this point of course is to point out the motto of the Knight in Sour Armour: Just because things are fucked doesn't mean you have to make them worse. But it's an easy way of thinking to fall into if you're depressed and unmotivated.

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

That's a point I think is very valid. On a certain level people really do want cynicism to be right, and evil to be more efficient and better than good, because then it means that they don't have to bother trying to live up to the standards of being good, and it's ok to just be selfish, self-centered jerkasses whose goal is to have the most toys and money before they die.

People endlessly like to quote the phrase "Nice guys finish last" for example, not knowing the source of the quote. (A jerkass baseball manager who won one World Series, and he was referring to a rival who won multiple World Series but was having a bad season. Said manager also later tried to say that he wasn't implying correlation, just making an observation.) How many people quote it as if it proves that all their problems would be solved by becoming an asshole?

How many people have the mistaken idea that countries like Nazi Germany were more efficient and effective than democracies? When a dictator pushed for it they could focus on and resolve a particular issue faster perhaps, but certain people talk about it being the most efficient state ever, which it most certainly wasn't. It was a bureaucracy choked morass with redundant departments/divisions whose sole purpose became getting ahead by sabotaging each other and getting favor not by being more productive, but by flattering the ego of a lunatic.

Being a selfish dick isn't more efficient or effective than being charitable and compassionate, but it sure is a hell of a lot easier. So a lot of people like to pretend it is better, that way they don't have to both living up to any kind of moral standard.

| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |

I don't understand. The only kinda maybe counter-logical thing I can see is if you yourself weren't human (admittedly i've been called inhuman plenty of times, but I refuse to think of humans other than as the human species) otherwise it seems to be the logical result.

Isn't that the guy who said that society is what fucks people up into an evil person?

I'm pretty sure that when people are thinking of efficient/effective in this case is when they are referring to individuals rather than society, in which case something easier should be more efficient if it is what they consider to be good enough.

I highly doubt that misanthrophy has gotten worse now than it was before, given the modern world's general better living conditions.

Larger communities usually = more stupid in general from what i've observed. And You Tube has quite a large community. I don't know anything about 9Gag though.

DISCLAIMER : I do not think I am smarter than them.

I can't really see how that makes sense, unless the misanthrope isn't an actual human, as misanthrophy is to apply to every human which tends to include the misanthrope themselves, unless they simply haven't realized they are also human/deny it.

So, anyway, done quoting. Here's what I think: Humans kinda suck. Yeah.

The good ones are going to die anyway, unless we find the elixir of immortality or something. The bad ones are having kindness wasted on them, even to the extent that criminals are getting more help than victims and all that jazz. There's also the matter of what someone thinks makes people evil. I keep seeing people state that people on the internet that are complete fucktards are decent people IRL but that to me only means they are hiding/restricting their bad nature out of fear of physical bodies around them being able to get more direct with you. What I think is the best argument I can think of as to why humans rather suck is that innocence has to be removed in order to adjust to society. In a good world it wouldn't need to happen because then no one would have to get used to the badness that is littered everywhere in the world.

I am probably going to stop here because i've been called evil/inhuman/monstrous/fucked up/trolling/attention whoring/etc. too many times when I actually mention my extreme hypothetical preferences on this world and I don't like that. And because someone linked me here anyway (I don't really go to OTC anymore)

If people learned from their mistakes, there wouldn't be this thing called bad habits.

I don't see why people care so much about this sort of thing. It's not necessarily pre-destined, but I just see it as normal. Some people are dicks, some people aren't, that's just how it is. Why obsess over something that is just a fact of life? You can't do anything to make it so that everybody in the world is nice to each other and nobody acts like a dick sometimes.

So I embrace our nature, much more productive that way.

...

Edited by fanty on Sep 28th 2019 at 2:11:35 PM

If there are people who are dicks to each other because of "REASONS", then I dare say we have to remove these "REASONS", or at least reduce the amount and intensity of these "REASONS" until they're as close to null as possible.

"REASONS".

edited 22nd Mar '12 5:04:20 PM by Ekuran

But what if it's an utterly pointless reason, like "you wear pretty clothes, and I don't like pretty things"?

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

Well, reasons are only pointless if you disagree with them dontchaknow. There's also a fair amount of "people don't hold this value I consider to be true, and thus humanity doesn't deserve to survive" which is a rather silly view. If you're going to wish death on humanity, do it for hatred not because nobody listens to you.

Fight smart, not fair.

Oh, no, by pointless I mean outright inconsequential.

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

No. That's not how it works. That's what this uninformed backlash against Darker and Edgier makes out of it. People will complain if stuff like this happens in media at all (unless the guy is the villain defeated at the end). No, it doesn't happen all the time, it's already considered Darker and Edgier if it happens at all. However, in fact IRL it does happen at all, so hence why I said: You get light and fluffy by omitting parts of reality, which in turn means Darker and Edgier actually is more realistic.

Plus, I think you underestimate how crappy life can be at times. And I'm not even talk about personal experiences. I'm pretty much from a white (or more to the point here, non-immigrant), suburban middle class background. Such backgrounds do tend to build up bubbles around one, especially as the media is geared towards that demographic, too. But go outside the bubble for a moment, and life can be pretty rough. Maybe not always due to clear-cut villain; mostly it's just "the system". But it's there, and in the end logically humans as a whole (as in Humans Are Bastards) are to blame for everything that happens in society.

But why are humans bastards? It's not like it's some inherent quality, not some attribute or something. It's because of the bad stuff they do. So the logic is - what? "Humanity sucks because of the bad things it does, so I'll do bad things"? Or, if you don't actually do something "Humans Are Bastards because people disadain other people, so I'll disdain people"?

edited 25th Mar '12 4:15:08 AM by Octo

Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken. Unrelated ME1 Fanfic

@ Octo: Well, if they do that than they're just being idiots. My interpretation of Darker and Edgier is more like the World Of Darkness way that everything bad have been increased in intensity and quantity, not just simply something bad happens.

And as you say, "can be". Of course life can be tough. Anybody can be tortured and murdered and suppressed and beaten and driven to poverty and suicide. But what I am saying is that this "can be" isn't 99.99% of the time. It is there, yes, and can be very bad and even worse than what we can imagine. But does that mean that every time I go out in the streets I'll get shot. If I contact the police they will be corrupt and not do their job, or owned by a major tycoon who is rich enough to get away with anything. And every day every hour I get driven out of my house jus because some rich tycoon thinks it's funny? How would that society even function, much less anything get done, at all?

That's my problem with some of those so-called Darker and Edgier shows. If the protagonist meets a cop, he (it's almost always a "he") must be corrupt. If there's somebody rich, he must have earned all that money by means that disregards other people's well being. If he goes out in the streets, there's always someone getting mugged or shot. No one is decent. No one follows the rules. Good people die or arrested and jailed within 30 seconds from doing the right thing. No one ever wonders where the factories get their workers replaced when they die every second from work, especially when everybody in the management in factories are all jousting for power instead of actually organizing anything useful, or how can anyone even go to work when people just get shot or stabbed when they step out of the house, or how can that tycoon manage to control everything when he only has 24 hours everyday.

edited 25th Mar '12 5:17:58 AM by IraTheSquire

I would love to see what those morons would do if the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement finally got it's wish.

I'd laugh at their hypocrisy.

A single phrase renders Christianity a delusional cult

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Edited by fanty on Sep 28th 2019 at 2:12:51 PM