There have been times in the past that I wished I were born homosexual or gay. The problem with that is I don't like men any more than I like women. I guess it would be easy to surmise that I don't like people in general very much. There is a name for people like me, along with dire warnings from various wisdom books for people in general not to let themselves cop to that attitude.
Misanthropy means a hatred of mankind, but even that word doesn't describe my attitude, because i don't really love or hate anybody. Why would i bother? I want to like people. I'm always in the market for a friend, but people are incapable of friendship because they each have their own idea of what friendship amounts to, and they expect me to kowtow to their expectations. No blame.
There was a big cyclone in Asia recently. Probably as big and as devastating as the hurricane that wiped out New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The reporters that sneaked in there took pictures of dead people laying scattered helter skelter over the rice fields, and nobody knew who they were. Nobody seemed to care. Is that an example of misanthropy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misanthropy
It's interesting to me that when I read this article in Wikipedia, I was familiar with the work of most of the people mentioned there. I was especially impressed with the statement of Schopenhauer about the uselessness of suicide, because killing oneself doesn't get rid of will or volition. Will and/or volition is part of the monad that can be-co-me with any species or any other form of life, not just homo sapiens.
It's for sure I wasn't surprised to find Jean-Paul Sartre among the philosophers counted as a misanthropist. I was/am totally fascinated by his masterwork Being And Nothingness. At first it caught me off-guard and surprised me that more people haven't found his work inspiring, but the people I've met that even attempted to read his material felt like it was over their head. Maybe that requires a misanthropist to see what he's saying. I hadn't thought of that.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
