On Misanthropy and Aspiration.

I’m one of those people who fit the occasionally heard statement: ‘I dislike people, but I love humanity.’ It sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it, since humanity is made up entirely of people, but actually it isn’t. What we love about humanity is its potential; what we dislike about people is their constant failure to aspire to that potential.

Too many people are consumed with a selfish disregard for the rights and needs of others. They start wars for stupid, selfish, arrogant and misguided reasons. They foster systems which reward the psychopath. They’re too prone to abusing one another, and often take pride in so doing. They abuse animals as a matter of course because they allow themselves to believe that animals have no emotions, don’t feel pain, and generally don’t matter anyway. They slavishly follow religious traditions which encourage this view, claiming that it is sanctioned by their version of God; and those whose God has a different name too often get slaughtered or abused themselves for being out of step with some small minded notion of rightness. They give to the rich and tread the poor into the ground, and the rich hoard greedily beyond their capacity to spend while the less fortunate struggle to subsist and often fail. And all over the world there persists the notion that women are inherently inferior to men, there only to serve the will, the desires, the needs and the criminally carnal drives of the physically stronger sex. I could go on…

I saw a fragment of a TV programme tonight in which a Thai woman was greeting her draft elephant at the start of the working day. The degree of mutual affection and respect which passed between them seemed entirely genuine, and I trust my judgement in such matters because I’ve been studying the signs of artifice for a long time. And then the woman said:

When I was a child I saw a bull elephant in the jungle. He was wounded from his logging work, but they drove him on regardless. The look in his eyes changed my life forever.

Therein lies the aspiration to human potential, and there are more climbing the same ladder. The two groups I have a problem with, and which validate my tendency to misanthropy, are:

1. The other 90+%.

2. The ones who hold most of the power in the world.

And so my prayer to the God of Small Things is: ‘Please show me more of those who aspire to humanity’s potential, that I may walk the rest of my road in company with the cream.’