Misguided Misanthropy

Misanthropy is a fashionable term among anarcho-punks. A couple of my old friends would often say, "I'm feeling misanthropic today." I always loved that because it seemed so honest and because it was framed in the sentence structure of healthy psycho-babble. If you state a feeling it's open it's not blameful. It's not as binding and shallow as "I think" or "I am". To describe a feeling gives you space to observe and interpret that feeling without losing yourself in it. You can recognize that the feeling is the outgrowth of something deeper, not just the pure truth of your existence.

I liked it when my friends said "I feel misanthropic today" because it pre-supposed that it was a temporary place, and one that with or without known cause, was just one of many states to be in. Perhaps tomorrow they'd feel "philanthropic."

Unfortunately, over the years I've rarely heard this word used in such a playful way. Usually it's used to reinforce the psychic rice-paper prison of nihilism: the philosophical belief in and care for nothing. Nihilism is the ultimate rationale for apathy, the flood gate for depressive chemical imbalance, and the ultimate cause of physical dis-ease.

The conclusive self-defeating concept of misanthropy is a caustic substance that I feel must be carefully quarantined and examined. To me it really embodies the spirit of the industrial death culture. It is a tool of hegemony, which is a term coined to describe the process whereby an oppressed population adopts the beliefs and values of the ruling elite thus ensuring their compliance with total subjugation. In other words, we do the system's work for it without its need to apply direct force when we propagate its beliefs voluntarily. By promoting the concept of misanthropy, we empower the misanthropic psychology of the system. The system is in fact the misanthrope, and we are the victims of misanthropy.

It is fundamentally disempowering to construct a world-view based on the hatred of humanity but it's hard to move away from this when our music and art so emphasize the vile atrocities committed by the human species. I don't think there's any need to give up the dark and gloomy aesthetic and start painting rainbows, we just have to make distinctions that implicate the real culprits.

Humanity is not to blame for the state of the world, humanity is not a singular sentient decision making personality that's cruel and wicked and deserving of collective suicide or mass die off. So often you hear statements regarding humanity as follows, "WE destroy the environment, WE'RE like a virus, WE don't belong on this planet." This is just about the most arrogant and ethnocentric logic that has ever emerged to insult the innocent nature of almost every human being and culture that has ever lived.

Let's scale the human story down to a comprehensible level. Let's say that the story of humanity is the story of a village. Everyone is living relatively happily and harmoniously for a couple hundred thousand years. Then all of the sudden a villager in one hut becomes insane and decides to dominate his family, then uses violent forces never before imagined to enslave all the people, animals, and land in the village. The cancerous aberration of greed that emerged in one mind spreads and colonizes most all other minds very rapidly. All villagers resisted and some still resist while some have escaped to the high mountains and barren deserts to continue their peaceful traditional ways.

10,000 years later. The village is now a towering menacing city-state and in it emerges a rebel movement called anarcho-punk. It sprouts a consciousness of liberation and hatred of the order of atrocity. It rightly wants to find the roots of the cursed system and sever them while simultaneously creating new alternative encampments in and outside of the citadel.

However many among its neo-tribe are weakened and immobilized by the false assumption and fear that humanity itself is hopelessly corrupt. How else, they ask, could such a horrid state come about? Mustn't it be a fatal flaw of human nature?

It took the discovery of the "true story" of the origin of the death culture to develop the understanding it was not WE who chose this way. It was only a corrupt few who perversely developed technologies of dominion to subsume all into their grip.

Unfortunately that story-book mythology of civilization and the corruption of humanity is an over-simplification the "true story" is much more complicated and theoretical. Here's a digest of the more technical scientific theories on the matter.

The shift from partnership to dominator societies (crudely scaled down above into the idea of one crazy man) in fact was a slow process that took thousands of years and happened independently in many locations throughout the world at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago. All modern humans and their pre-modern ancestors alive from three million to 10,000 years ago were foragers (a.k.a. hunter/gatherers). There were no domesticated plants or animals, all life was wild. Humans competed for resources in balance with all other life. They lived in small nomadic groups of about 25-50 and never stayed in one place long enough to seriously disrupt the environment. Under these conditions sharing and equality were the norm.

Around 8,000 B.C. the world climate drastically changed and certain populations got backed into an ecological corner. They had to tame, domesticate and in some cases ultimately enslave the earth to survive. However it was not a conscious process by anyone involved. People just did what they had to do in each passing moment, life-time, generation, millennium. etc. Luckily, not all domesticated societies lost their reverence for women, animals, and the earth. Many were able to find a new balance and harmony. For some though a fatal corruption occurred. Female centered creation stories were slowly replaced by angry male god stories. Societies centered on women became dominated by men. An unprecedented artificial abundance of resources was created; a surplus never before possible or desirable for our light traveling egalitarian foraging ancestors.

This surplus gave once free and equal societies something to fight over. Private material wealth accumulation began. Women and animals became property along with land and other natural resources, all to be controlled by the men who consciously shaped cultures of conquest to pillage ever-expanding territory. After a few thousand years of this aberrant behavior, the need to build walls to protect the agrarian patriarchal domains arose, hence civilization: the culture of cities. Empires grew out of cities. In cities mass slavery and grinding exploitation of the peasant classes generated yet a new abundance of human and material resources for the elite to channel into scientific, philosophical, and military classes. These classes were to create ever more treacherous physical technologies for conquest and control, and ever more hideous psychological technologies to entrap minds into fear and worship of divined rulers. All that's changed from the last few thousand years to the present has been the scale of death, enslavement, and destruction. (for a much more detailed study of the origin and history of civilization please read "Freedom and Civilization: A Comparative Analysis" by Ben Axiom.

Basic judicial logic can be used to assign guilt and innocence. If most humans now alive are the enslaved victims of a few corrupt patriarchal aberrations, how could it be just to blame all humanity?

Another scaled model is simply cancer. Cancer is the process by which cells fail to develop properly, they lose their purpose to the organism and they grow and divide without respect to normal limits, invade and destroy adjacent tissues, and may spread throughout the body. They create an imbalance and threaten and often ultimately kill the whole organism. The average human generates one cancer cell a day. It's the diligent job of our immune system to hunt down and kill these cells. The modern diagnosis of cancer is misleading because in fact all of us at all times have cancer. The real disease shouldn't be called cancer at all it should be called immune failure, because a weak immune system loses its ability to effectively resist the cancer cells and thus a debilitating disease state results from their unchecked propagation.

Back to the analogy of blaming the whole for the ills of the part, if you had cancer would you hate your entire being, all the healthy cells in your body? Or would you know that this is just an aberration, something that should be understood as uncharacteristic of the true nature of your being and all its cells? You've lived your whole life with all of your trillions of cells working in a harmony of infinite intelligence. At one point, the link to that intelligence breaks down and an imbalance occurs, if not stopped and restored to balance, the bizarre disease can run rampant and wreak havoc (Sound like technology and civilization? Growth without intelligence? ).

Countless clinical studies have proven beyond a doubt that one of the most powerful healing tools for cancer patients (in addition to an immediate raw food/green juice centered diet) is to apply meditative self-love to their whole being and particularly to their immune system thus empowering it to channel inner intelligence to restore balance.

If we extrapolate this healing logic to the world and its cancerous cultures of civilization, should we not expect similar effects? If we love and trust the underlying intelligence of humans to live by their nature of peace and balance, would not this true consciousness penetrate the toxic haze of the death culture?

Hating humanity is suicide, psychologically, spiritually, and physically. It only weakens the strength of our cultural immune system and transmits the message of defeat to whatever healthy populations still exist.

Every culture on earth, every individual has a complex relationship to the culture of death, the cancer of corruption, civilization, industrialism, capitalism, etc. Some are more deeply infected than others. Some are more conscious perpetrators of it than others. Some are collaborators. Many are still virtually untouched.

If we take a moment to scan the earth in the minds eye, try to feel, not just think about the distribution of moral responsibility for the state of the world. Is it really humanity as a whole that's starving millions of children, leveling forests, dumping toxic waste, building nuclear weapons, burning brides, and torturing animals? Humanity is comprised mostly of victims of the techno-industrial death culture. The death culture is very recent on the face of the earth and in humanity's long tribal history and it's really consciously managed by a tiny minority of the world's human population. Most of us are tools or raw materials not owners or engineers.

I love humanity, it's taken a lot of re-wiring for me to overcome my misguided misanthropy and really mean that. Many old friends will be laughing to read this knowing how cynical and callous I've always been. Many of them would say to my misanthropic old self, "You know, have you ever stopped to think that you're hatred of the external world and of humanity may just be a projection of your own issues, your lack of self-love?" I now know they were right, all healing starts from within.

How can I not be brought to tears of awe when I think about the universe of cellular magnificence that is my body, the ever self-organizing, repairing and replacing river of my physical existence? How could I not be embarrassed for my years of depression and self-denial that negated the wonder and beauty of my gift of life? How could I not love myself, and by extension all life and all of its epic struggles to express itself in pure health and harmony through each and every one of us?

I love humanity and what I love most about it, us, we, is that like all of our individual cells, all members of humanity have the capacity to channel infinite intelligence gathered across billions of years of the evolution of life. We can, under conditions of openness, creativity, compassion, and love, generate solutions for any problem.

Micro and macro scale healing operate according to the same principle: love. Hatred is fuel for disease. If you hate your body, it becomes sick and dies, if you hate your ethnicity its collective self-esteem will wither, if you hate humanity it won't resist its predicament. It won't align with the earth to recognize and push out the sliver of human corruption that's lodged in this sliver of time.

Philanthropy, the antonym to misanthropy, need not simply be a word reserved for morally burdened industrialists who try to "give back" to the cancer foundations trying to cure the diseases the industrialists created in the first place. We can be philanthropists without donating millions to charities. It may not be as 'brutal' and 'black metal' a sentiment as misanthropy, but it is quite powerful, and that should be precious to anyone serious about effective resistance.