is misanthropy in fact a pathology? we are a social animal, and we cluster around the fires of society for warmth, but in so clustering we also jostle ans riot and steal and kill; we seek advantage and manipulate; we consume by the gallon and the metric ton, and generate great streams of waste; we grow drunk and fat, petty and small-eyed; we find no answers and live by no code; we splay and we loll; we chatter and parade and preen; we grow bored and seek stimulation; and we judge and condemn. and we belch and we fart. and feel pretty good about ourselves.

     contemplation of our own species very naturally provokes  a scorn of vice, smallness, corruption, stupidity, indolence. an artists, a professional close observer of his or her fellow humans and their works, will tend inevitably, if not wholly, toward bitterness.
no wholesale  reform is possible, even if renewed attempts might be desirable. whatever rigors of social control you impose, whatever programs of liberty and social justice you dream up, will only generate their opposite: corruption, licentiousness, dissolution; hatred, impatience, intolerance.

     if you are clear-sighted, you are left with a choice: walk to the margins and there nurse your own damaged soul; or accept the terms of the contest and pitch into the impossible fight.


     toby ferris
     short life in a strange world