Often, when we intellectuals become frustrated with all the myriad aspects of human society that our highly developed abstract reasoning minds and comparably underdeveloped social minds make incomprehensible or inaccessible to us, we rail against the perceived irrationality, unpredictability, and general stupidity of our fellow human beings, which is a lot like a hammer complaining about screws.

Just because your tool doesn’t work on something does not, necessarily, mean there is something wrong with it. Perhaps you need more tools.

First, the whole railing against the human race aspect of intellectuals rage is entirely wrongheaded. For one, of course, everything you say about human beings you are saying about yourself. Misanthropy, therefore, has a strong self-defeating aspect to it. If we humans are so terrible, how can you be so sure that your judgment is accurate? After all, you are not an alien. You’re just as much a crazy, irrational, illogical beach ape as I am, cousin.

For that matter, how do you judge an entire species anyhow? What criterion can you possible use to judge all of humanity? We’re the only sentient species we know of. We have no basis for comparison. As often as science fiction likes to cast humanity as, in galactic terms, the inbred raging hick cousin you keep in the basement of the Galaxy compared to all other alien races, we haven’t the slightest proof that this is true. For all we know, in that glorious future where we leave our solar system and explore our neighborhood and meet many alien races, we will find we’re actually the smartest, strongest, and most enlightened sentient race we can find, and it’s the others who will seem like poo-flinging savages to us.

So humanity sucks…. compared to what? Some say “compared to its potential”. So now you know exactly what humanity’s potential is, and know it so well that you can confidently giving a failing grade to every single human being living, dead, or potential? Nobody can back up that kind of sweeping generalization. An even cursory glance at the full diversity of human thought, culture, attitude, behaviour, civilization, and philosophy should banish any thoughts that you know enough to judge the entire species. In this sense, misanthropy is the ultimate bigotry.

Especially given the well established fact that our ideas of what constitutes “human nature” are almost always hopelessly limited and provincial, and based entirely on our culture, our upbringing, and our life experiences. We based our opinions of our entire species on the five hundred or so we will meet in our lifetime, and then pretend we know enough to confidently state that humanity sucks rocks.

As for our supposedly illogical natures (thanks, Mister Spock, like you’re any better), again, compared to what? We are the most logical species we have ever met. Compared to even our clever cousins the chimpanzees, we are the most cool headed, rational, sensible species in existence, as far as we know. Sure, potentially, we could be a lot better. But isn’t that true of everything? What person every lives up to their entire potential? Even top students don’t get 100 percent on every test. And yet misanthropes feel they can declare humanity a failure simply for not scoring full marks on their exam.

What is really going on is that the misanthrope has simply not gotten over that troubled time when we are late teens and young adults and get our first real sense of the world as it is, and find out it’s a much more complicated and unpleasant world than the safe and stable one in which we grew up. There is war, starvation, crime, injustice, and all other manner of ills in this imperfect world, and learning the truth of this is hard for every person.

But instead of accepting it and getting past it, the misanthrope stays there. They continue to judge the world, humanity, and life itself with the simplistic, uncompromising, and inflexible mind of a child.

The mature individual learns the truth of the ills of the world, and loses their innocence/ignorance and becomes sadder… but wiser. They learn that there is both much good and much bad in the world, and all we can do as human beings is try to increase the good and decrease the bad.

But the immature person becomes a misanthrope, and decides that if humanity isn’t perfect, it’s awful.

What a tellingly human mistake to make!