Essay: "The Virtues of Misanthropy"

In my younger days I was really into Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine. As we all know that kind of music is troublesome to adults because it is so loud, angry and despairing (not to mention profane and nihilistic) and it is sometimes blamed, in the media at least, for leading kids astray, into crime or suicide. I've always had a problem with that kind of thinking, and I used to argue (around the time of the Columbine killings) that Britney Spears probably caused more depression than Marilyn Manson, because when kids look at Britney, with her (then) perfect hair and body and peppy attitude, they feel like outsiders and losers. But when they look at Marilyn Manson, with his bizarre appearance and clothing and (allegedly) missing ribs, they think they're not such freaks after all.



Also, it can be kind of soothing to listen to music that matches your mood. I know that in some ways it's intuitive to think that when you're depressed you need to listen to cheerful music to cheer up, but that's not always how it works. Many times angsty music can help you with your angst, because it makes you feel less alone, while happy music just seems to magnify the difference between you and the rest of the world.

A misanthrope is someone who hates humanity. I think we can probably agree that misanthropy is not only an unpleasant philsophy, but also somehow fundamentally wrong. If you look at the whole human project and give it the thumbs down, I just can't help but feel that you messed up your arithmetic somewhere. If you want to choose to focus on the things we do wrong (and there are plenty) or to compare us to how things should be, ideally, it's quite easy to get the idea that this world is deeply flawed. But you shouldn't compare this world to one that only exists in theory, and you shouldn't only focus on the war, fast food, reality television and child molestation.

People are more good than bad. The undeniable proof of this (in my opinion) is the existence of children. What is easier to do, to kill a child or raise it? Obviously, the former. To end a life only takes a second; to properly raise it for years and years takes an endless amount of time, energy and money. You'd think if the impulse in us to create and destroy was equal there wouldn't be a child left alive on the face of the earth, and yet there they are, running around, crying from their strollers in Starbucks, and purchasing Pokemon cards with their parents' money.

Televisions are similarly easier to break than to build, yet you see them everywhere too.

Despite the inherent wrongness of misanthropy, however, I can't help feel that there is a certain purpose to misanthropic art. Take, for example, the Internet video "I Guess You'll Do." In this video, which is a series of stick-figure drawings, a woman in her "mid to late" twenties speaks to a man who is "about two years older than her." Since they have comparable educations and levels of attractiveness, the woman proposed that they "have a life together." The video, which is monstrously cynical but pretty funny, takes the two characters through their courtship, engagement, marriage, working years, parenting, retirement and death. At every stage the video hammers home the sameness and pointlessness of an ordinary existence .

Another misanthropic work of art is the scandalous French novel by Michel Houellebecq, "The Elementary Particles", which tells the story of two miserable half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, who are the children of a glamourous hippie. The novel is a saveage attack on modern society, essentially arguing that people have become "atomized" as the liberation of the sixties and seventies led to people focusing entirely upon their own lives, and has left people single, bitter and alone. Nothing is safe from Houellebecq's criticism, not parents, children, music, magazines, television, the right and the left, science and ignorance, nothing. At the end of the novel, Michel (the characters) invents a new species in order to replace humanity, as everyone eventually becomes so miserable that they accepts extinction.

As I said before, both of these works are flawed, in the sense that they somehow miss the picture. The bottom line is that people aren't as unhappy as we sometimes find it flattering to think we are. To satirize family life as profoundly as "I Guess You'll Do" does obviously overlooks the joy of having a family. Similarly, "The Elementary Particles" relentlessly ignores all of the ordinary happines people are able to find in their ordinary lives. Are these works therefore hopelessly flawed?

I don't think so, and this brings us back (finally) to where we came in. Misanthropic art can act as a tonic against the enormous stress that society places on all of us to meet certain expectations. To be thin, to be famous, to have a house, to be married by a certain time, to have 2.4 kids. How much unhappines in our lives comes from a failure to live up to some sort of disembodied standard on how you're supposed to live your life? Virtually all of it? Very few of us are starving or homeless, after all.

And what misanthropy does, by attacking humanity at large, is let off the pressure a little bit. After all, if the world and the people in it are base and stupid, you don't have to feel that bad for failing to meet their standards. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, he who makes a beast of everyone else gets rid of the pain of being a man. And so even if we don't agree with the basic conclusions of misanthropic art, I think it's wise to take a dose, once in a while.