misanthropy - why is it so bad?

john eden

male pale and stale
Misanthropy became fashionable for a while thanks to Boyd Rice and Death In June banging on about it.

A moot point is whether people who adopt it for a pose then become genuinely misanthropic, or whether people are just drawn to stuff like that because they already hate everyone.

It's quite a big thing to hate, I think, and must be quite time-consuming and tiring.

:)
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Yeah hating is bad and self-defeating I suppose, but I feel like I'm being a proper mush-head hippy if I don't retain a good awareness of certain realities regarding many people. We're all bozos and I don't tend to blame but you know - there is much stoopidity and selfishness. Maybe I should get over it.
 

dogger

Sweet Virginia
It's quite a big thing to hate, I think, and must be quite time-consuming and tiring.

:)

but i think that's the whole point for certain types of misanthropes: the strength of their (negative) feeling becomes a raison d'etre...:slanted: returning to gek-opel's first post on the thread: yes, of course misanthropy is the hatred of people /in general/, of humanity, and as such is inevitably associated with a tendency to withdrawal and isolation. or excessive identification with another species, cf: swift's houhyhnhnhms.

turning it around, the do-goody christian/university union "i'm friends with everyone" types are ball-achingly irritating, the idea that you could uncritically "like" everyone is as ridiculous as the idea that you could hate everyone...i suppose they both are symptomatic of a refusal to engage with other people on a meaningful level, and both these types of people tend to be fundamentally self-obsessed.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
turning it around, the do-goody christian/university union "i'm friends with everyone" types are ball-achingly irritating, the idea that you could uncritically "like" everyone is as ridiculous as the idea that you could hate everyone...i suppose they both are symptomatic of a refusal to engage with other people on a meaningful level, and both these types of people tend to be fundamentally self-obsessed.

I wish I'd written that.

:cool:
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
I agree with John, misanthropy must inevitably be more of an aspiration than an actual psychological state, given the inherent difficulty of the thing- is it possible to be misanthropic to humanity in general, but ok with individual people? Or to love humanity, but despise each individual example of it that you happen to meet?
 

mms

sometimes
black metal shrives on misanthropy or kvlt behavior, negative feeling is their reason d'etre, or negative feelings expanded into total negativity about humans or superiority mythology wrapped in misanthropy.
i don't know how they keep it up.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
black metal shrives on misanthropy or kvlt behavior, negative feeling is their reason d'etre, or negative feelings expanded into total negativity about humans or superiority mythology wrapped in misanthropy.
i don't know how they keep it up.

Certainly for the Norwegian lot I always saw it as an over punk response to living in a liberal climate : faced with a society that lets you out of prison at the weekend, what can you possibly do to piss your parents off? Or anyone for that matter? A return to Odinist pagan times is like the dumbest thing you could do in that situation, thus...
 
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