Why I am a Misanthrope

I want to explain today why I am a misanthrope. I don’t mean this in an abstract metaphorical sense, or as some sort of hyperbole. The simple fact of the matter is that I don’t like humanity. And when I say don’t like, that is in fact, a euphemism for hate. I can’t remember a time when I did like humanity. I’ve always had the reaction to humans that you do when you have a big black fly show up in your house. “This disgusting thing needs to go.”

It’s not that I take delight in cruelty, that I am some sort of psychopath who would like to torture people in his basement. No, the very opposite is true. The problem rather, is that to make a human being, is a very ambitious project. Nature produced various animals, one more cruel than the other. The baboon will chew on a gazelle’s hind legs while the poor animal is still alive. The gazelle is high on endorphins and can’t abstractly contemplate its fate. What sets you apart from a baboon, is that you are able to understand the difference between right and wrong.

Human beings are predisposed to cruel behavior. They don’t show this generally speaking, because the culture we live in condemns it. The culture we live in condemns it, because society doesn’t function well if cruelty is tolerated. That doesn’t change people’s character however. Human beings desire status and power. If you give them status and power in exchange for torturing prisoners, they will torture prisoners. If you give them status and power in exchange for feeding hungry orphans, they will feed hungry orphans. It’s not that the prior group is evil and the latter is benign, it’s that the cultural context has changed and so people who are fundamentally self-interested now display behavior that we will interpret as altruistic.

You can still get people to display their real character, if you feed them drugs that reduce their inhibitions. People like to blame alcohol and other drugs for their behavior, but the reality is that it is simply your attitude towards other people that is revealed, which is normally concealed by the social norms that your conscious mind understands it has to follow. This is why really nasty people tend to avoid drinking alcohol altogether.

If you want to understand how people really are, then you need two ingredients.

1. To start with, you need to offer them people with a low status, who have something of interest for them. It could be property, it could be the simple pleasure of (sexually) abusing another person.
2. You need to create the kind of conditions, in which people don’t fear any personal consequences whatsoever for mistreating a person with a low status. Drugs like alcohol and cocaine help with this, but strange political situations can help too.

That’s really all you need. I want to show you what happens if you create this situation. I’m simply going to take the Wikipedia page and then I’ll add some comments, but the page mostly speaks for itself.

We begin the story with an average white working class girl in Australia, named Leigh Leigh. She is fourteen years old. She lives in a broken family, her parents divorced when she was seven and she lived in public housing. Judging off this one photo, she seems to be a little plain looking, she’s probably not the prettiest girl in her class. And so, because teenage girls are judged primarily off their looks and their parents socioeconomic status, people don’t respect her.

I know some of you will frown when I say this, but that just shows how acculturated you are. You don’t like to see me say that someone is plain looking, because you fundamentally still base a teenage girl’s value as a human being off how attractive she is to guys. You just can’t break that link in your head, that a teenage girl’s value is ultimately derived from how she looks. There was a time when feminists rebelled against the idea that a woman needs to look pretty, but nowadays the mentality instead is to pretend that every woman is very pretty, no matter her weight or appearance.

Anyway, despite people not treating her with respect, she has the same simple desires as almost every other teenage girl. She wants to socialize, she wants to have fun and she would probably like a boyfriend. Here’s what we know about her:

Leigh spent most of her weekends and school holidays with her grandmother at her house in Kilaben Bay. Her cousin and best friend Tracey stated she and Leigh enjoyed going to the cinema together, as well as roller-skating and “just hanging about”. According to her aunt, Leigh had wanted to be a veterinarian.[3]:126 Both Leigh’s mother[6] and her grandmother described her as a “typical teenager”.[3]:125

The most typical teenage girl you can think of. She wants to go to the cinema with her friends, roller-skate and one day hopes to take care of animals. One day, she was invited to a party and, like most fourteen year old girls, she was excited about the prospect:

Fourteen-year-old Leigh had a written invitation to attend the party and permission from her mother to stay there until 11 pm; Leigh’s mother had been assured that responsible adults would be present at the party. Matthew Webster and Guy Wilson, who acted as bouncers, were the only people aged over 18 at the party. Leigh was said to be very excited, as it was the first teenage party she had attended.

What sort of desire did the boys have? They wished to degrade and abuse her:

Matthew Webster and Guy Wilson, who acted as bouncers, were the only people aged over 18 at the party. Leigh was said to be very excited, as it was the first teenage party she had attended. According to police witness reports, Leigh was one of several under-age girls who were invited to the party for the purpose of getting them intoxicated and having sex with them. According to a police report, Webster approached another person at the party and said, “Hey dude, we’re going to get Leigh pissed and all go through her.” Leigh was also one of several under-age people for whom an adult purchased alcohol before the party; she and her friend were given a bottle of Jim Beam whiskey, which they then mixed with Coca-Cola. She was reported to have gotten heavily intoxicated very quickly. A 15-year-old boy, who for legal reasons could not be named and was referred to in official documentation as ‘NC1’, is quoted to have said, “I’m going to go and fuck [Leigh].” Shortly afterwards Leigh went to the beach with NC1; witnesses stated Leigh was so intoxicated that he “had to almost carry her”.

There you see the problem with human nature. We enjoy sex because it produces more humans and whatever produces more humans is something your brain will probably encourage you to do. For a man it’s relatively straightforward, you can theoretically create a little copy of yourself with two minutes worth of effort. A woman has to spend nine months with a little human in her womb and so a woman will tend to be more reluctant to have sex.

There is thus an inevitable discrepancy between what men want and what women want. Males have come up with various ways of overcoming that discrepancy, a very popular one is to simply dehumanize a woman. Women in turn, have come up with various ways of surviving the discrepancy between what men and women want and men’s response to that discrepancy. Many women are extremely eager to win men’s respect. If they interpret you as a human being, they’re less inclined to rape you.

Other women adjust psychologically in other ways: They convince themselves that what men want is what they themselves want as well. Some women adjust simply by growing resentful towards men and avoiding them altogether. But most depressingly, many women tend to adjust their self-image based on how their environment treats them. If she spends her whole life being abused, then that’s what she will believe herself to be good for.

But Leigh Leigh was still very young, so she had not really learned in any real way how to survive and protect herself in a world dominated by men’s desires:

When Leigh returned from the beach, she was bleeding between her legs, distressed, crying and seeking assistance. Some people at the party reported trying to console Leigh and find out what had happened to her Leigh “asserted she had been raped”, replying “[NC1] fucked me” and “I hate him”. After witnessing Leigh’s complaints, Webster is quoted as saying to a group of boys “she’s a bit of a slut and why don’t all of us have a go”. Nineteen-year-old Guy Wilson then approached Leigh, placed his arm around her and asked her for sex. Wilson pushed Leigh to the ground when she refused, and was joined by Webster and around ten other boys who surrounded Leigh. They yelled abuse, kicked her, poured beer on her and spat both beer and saliva on her. Several people witnessed the assault, yet nobody came to help her or attempted to contact the police, her parents or other adults. The assaults continued for approximately five minutes; Leigh stood up when they stopped and staggered away before picking up an empty beer bottle and throwing it at the group of boys, missing them. Guy Wilson threw a beer bottle back at her as she left, which either hit her in the leg or missed, according to different witness accounts.

So, they are faced with a crying fourteen year old girl, who is bleeding from between her legs. So what do they do? They try to force her to have sex with them too. When she refuses, eleven boys surround her and begin spitting on her and pouring beer on her. What are these, you might wonder? Are these Vietnam veterans who had to crawl through mountains of corpses? Are these death row prisoners with clinically diagnosed psychopathy?

No. These are eleven boys in Australia, a first world country, in the year 1989. They find themselves in a group context, where humiliating and abusing a drunk crying girl who is bleeding between her legs and says that she was just raped is encouraged. This is the point I want you to understand. In your experience, everyone probably tends to be nice to you on a daily basis, because that’s the socially encouraged group context. However, you feed a handful of teenage boys a bit of alcohol and the group context changes.

So how does the story end?

The group of boys followed her inside the crowded clubhouse where she sought refuge, and similar assaults continued. Leigh was seen leaving the club and walking towards the beach at about 10:30pm. Leigh’s stepfather arrived at the party to pick her up at 10:50pm. He and several of the party-goers searched for Leigh, but she could not be found. After repeated search attempts, Leigh’s mother and stepfather decided to wait for her to return home, assuming she had gone to a friend’s house for the night. Leigh’s stepfather recommenced the search for Leigh the following morning, aided by several youths from the party. Her body was found in the sand dunes about 90 metres (300 ft) north of the surf club. Leigh’s invitation to attend the party was still in her pocket.

Leigh was found naked except for her socks and shoes, with her knickers and shorts around her right ankle. She was on her back with her legs apart. Her bra, which had its securing hook bent, was found nearby, as was her shirt and jumper, which were intertwined, inside out and stained with liquor. Saltbushes nearby had been flattened. According to the police forensics report, a blood-stained rock weighing 5.6 kg (12 lb) was found next to her, and blood stains were found up to 2.8 metres (9.2 ft) from her body.

The postmortem report stated Leigh’s cause of death to be a fractured skull and injury to the brain. Leigh had been struck with great force several times, including at least three times in the head. The postmortem also found that Leigh had asphyxial haemorrhages, and multiple injuries to the jaw, ribs, liver and right kidney. Leigh had neck fingertip pressure injuries, indicating she had been choked before she died, though this was not the cause of death. Leigh’s blood alcohol reading was 0.128, a level which, according to the University of Notre Dame, would have caused “significant impairment of motor coordination and loss of good judgment”. There was no doubt that Leigh was violently sexually assaulted before she was murdered, and the evidence indicated that prior to the night of her murder she had not had sexual intercourse. Leigh had deep bruising to the left wall of her vagina, extensive bruising to her hymen and two tears, one 20 millimetres (0.79 in) long, to her vulva. An analysis of the postmortem by Dr Johan Duflou, deputy director of the New South Wales Institute of Forensic Medicine, stated that an inflexible object, possibly a beer bottle, was likely to have caused most of her genital injuries. No semen was found in her body.

And I’ll spare you most of the details, but here’s the murderer’s confession:

While he was still on bail on 16 February 1990, during his third interview with police, Webster admitted to killing Leigh. In the interview transcript, Webster initially denied killing Leigh, then “without being asked a further question” he stated, “Well, I did it. But I just can’t believe … it happened. It’s just unbelievable.”Webster went on to state that he saw Leigh while he was looking for his stash of beers. According to Webster, they walked to the saltbushes together, where he pulled off her clothes and stuck a finger in her vagina. Webster stated he lost his temper when Leigh rebuffed him, choking her for a while before killing her with a rock,specifically saying he killed Leigh because he “thought she would squeal on [him] for trying to rape her”. After spending the weekend in a police cell, Webster appeared in court on 19 February where he was refused bail.

But here’s the important point I want to make clear to you, I can’t emphasize this enough. You have eleven guys with a bit of alcohol in their blood standing around a drunken, crying girl, with blood dripping from between her legs. They now wish to have sex with her too and in response to her refusal, they pour beer on her, kick her and spit on her, while hurling abuse.

What sort of guys do you think these are? Well there’s the mistake. For the purpose of your own sanity you want to imagine that these are the world’s drug kingpins, death row prisoners and Blackwater mercenaries. But they’re not. This is just the average dude placed in a context where his worst traits can manifest themselves. These are the lawyers, the politicians, the bankers, the doctors, the dentists, the car mechanics, the fathers, the soccer dads, the scout leaders, the friendly smiling neighbors and the pastors you know in your daily life.

They’re normal socially well-adjusted people. Like all normal socially well-adjusted people, they adjust to their environment. The environment temporarily condones abuse and dehumanization, so they engage in abuse and dehumanization. Then the alcohol wears off, adults are reintroduced and they cease to engage in abuse and dehumanization. That’s the thing to understand here.

This is also why the community didn’t really want the murder to be investigated. To the community, these boys were “good kids”, who would have their lives ruined over one unfortunate mistake. At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, the general attitude of most people is that when for whatever reason you find yourself dehumanized by your surroundings, then you just deserve the treatment that accompanies it.

There are also a handful of people who are genuinely emphatic. However, to be emphatic in a context where it harms you, means to simply be poorly socially adjusted. Empathizing with people who are subject to group dehumanization is a genetic dead-end, a trait that doesn’t survive in our gene pool. The only exception, is when you have a cultural context where this trait is encouraged.

I’m of the opinion that Christianity created such a cultural context. It’s rare to have a society where humility is genuinely treated as a virtue. Our society doesn’t endorse humility, it endorses “confidence”. We like people who are “confident”, but when we say confident, we generally mean the opposite of humility. However, people who are full of themselves generally struggle to empathize with those who are vulnerable. That’s how we ended up with the modern situation.

And honestly, this is why we ended up with an epidemic of they/them girls too. A girl who is not very pretty is treated like less than human in our society. So, what do these girls do? They dissociate from their femininity, they wish to be anything but girls. J. K. Rowling understands this part, so she was canceled.

But anyway, this is why I am a misanthrope. I mean it when I say that I feel nothing but disgust for humanity. I care about individuals, but humanity as a whole is a tragic mistake. The idea that you should feel some sort of love for humanity, that we are engaged in some sort of great fantastic global project, is a modern liberal idea.

It’s really not a good sign either, when you find yourself in a position where the crowd agrees with you, or sympathizes with you. We live in a sick culture and so if you find that the masses adore you, then it generally means that you’re amplifying sickness.

If you recognize what humans are, then the only thing you will truly want is less of us. I’m still rooting for SARS-COV-2. There is not much I enjoy more than to see this virus spread throughout the population, constantly mutating and reinfecting people as the hospitals become unable to cope.

What do you see in your mind, when you think of the word humanity? Perhaps you see a flag on the moon, perhaps you see the Sistine chapel. I see just one thing. A fourteen year old girl at her first party, crying and bleeding from between her legs, surrounded by a group of boys with wealthy parents, who spit at her, kick her and pour out beer over her.