We've lost our faith in humanity.
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This. i don't think i could of put it better myself( mainly because my keyboard and thought process hate me)Vern5 said:
OT i swing between philanthropic and misanthropic depending on my mood, and i have NEVER used that phrase, its just.....Silly.
but... the black realms are so MAJESTIC (yes, i used this as an excuse to post some metal music, its just a minor diversion whilst i get to the point)Lilani said:
[spoiler:] <youtube=uaOMriMoVmc> [/spoiler]
really, this whole thing is just people finding a way to vent their frustration in a *fairly* anonymous fashion. really, i doubt alot of people who say it really mean it, its just kind of a default response for messed up things, besides the classic ....... what the fuck? how could he/she/they/it/custard do/say that?
i wouldn't pay too much mind to it really.
also, how do you add things in the spoiler tag besides the basic "spoiler- click to view"? i cannot for the life of me remember
Well, alright, fair point. I take the stuff about Nazis back.TheSnarkKnight said:
Are you saying you've lost your faith in humanity to reach its potential, and that you're upset that it resigns itself to being rather flawed?
Btw, I don't believe people are peaceful, open-minded, or accepting at all. I probably think humanity is as flawed as you think it is. But imo it's our unchangeable nature to be the way we are, and that we haven't gotten one bit better or worse than we were during feudalism or slavery or the Enlightenment or the 60s or w/e. We just have new laws and social/cultural standards.
So I see people who claim they've lost their faith in humanity as people who've either had an irrational faith in the first place (what is it that they believed humanity can do? Create a utopia? Was their faith grounded in any reality?), or are expecting more out of humanity than it can offer (and are probably no better than the humanity they despise nor are capable of being better than that).
The worst thing is, when they say "I've lost my faith in humanity" in response to some stupid news story about some event that is nowhere close to as bad as humanity can get. I always think, "are you kidding? You lost your faith in humanity because some guy beat his daughter? In a world where people kill each other by the million, you're disappointed because some jerk beat his daughter?"
Though, I'm not talking about you in that case. I'm just curious though, do you actually maintain that faith in humanity, and continually lose it and gain it again every day (else, you'd only be able to say "I've lost my faith in humanity" once in your life)? It seems...odd, for someone who is aware how lousy humanity is.
edit: sorry if I sound like a jerk/overly aggressive. I'm not trying to be; I just get pretty miffed at the whole lose-faith-in-humanity thing
See, I'm not sure I agree. I think we have got better, in a sense. We're more open-minded and accepting and more prone to fairness. However, it's a bit like if there's a dude who murders, lies, cheats, steals and generally acts like a dick. If, one day, he stopped murdering dudes, you'd say it was definitely an improvement, but you wouldn't exactly consider him a good person now, and overlook the bad stuff he was still doing, just because he'd stopped with the killing.dyre said:
Of course, this depends what you mean by humanity. I'm guessing you mean basic human nature, come to think of it. We're basically the same people as back then, only the social norms around us are stopping us from being as douchey as we once were. Which is fair enough, because that's my problem. We HAVEN'T learnt a lesson from our barbaric past. There's no civil rights movement to end all civil rights movement, as it were. We didn't become more accepting when we stopped with the institutionalised racism; racial minorities were just taken off the list of people we were allowed to be intollerant towards.
At times I wonder what, if anything, can break this cycle. What can change the nature of mankind, so to speak. It's here that my loss of faith comes from, every time I almost dare to believe that humans are fundamentally good, I'm reminded of their pettiness and stupidity. I don't believe a utopia is possible, but I don't think that's an excuse for not striving to make the world one. Just because I can't be the nicest, bestest, kindest person ever, doesn't mean I shouldn't TRY to be a good person, and I guess that's all I'm really asking of humanity, that it at least puts in a little effort into being decent.
Yeah, see, if I heard about someone beating their daughter I'd be "wtf, dude" and wouldn't blame humanity as a whole. If, however, I went online and a bunch of dudes were saying that his daughter probably had it coming... that's when I would start to think of humanity being terrible. As for people time and again losing their faith in humanity, well, I don't know... It's like being married to a serial adulterer, every time you think about giving humanity a second chance, of giving it the benefit of the doubt, it lets you down again.
Also, no worries about coming off as aggressive or a jerk, I know how easy it is to get angry over stuff, especially when you're debating with someone online.
Seems like you just need to divorce the adulteress, and stop believing that humans are capable of being better than they are nowTheSnarkKnight said:See, I'm not sure I agree. I think we have got better, in a sense. We're more open-minded and accepting and more prone to fairness. However, it's a bit like if there's a dude who murders, lies, cheats, steals and generally acts like a dick. If, one day, he stopped murdering dudes, you'd say it was definitely an improvement, but you wouldn't exactly consider him a good person now, and overlook the bad stuff he was still doing, just because he'd stopped with the killing.dyre said:
Of course, this depends what you mean by humanity. I'm guessing you mean basic human nature, come to think of it. We're basically the same people as back then, only the social norms around us are stopping us from being as douchey as we once were. Which is fair enough, because that's my problem. We HAVEN'T learnt a lesson from our barbaric past. There's no civil rights movement to end all civil rights movement, as it were. We didn't become more accepting when we stopped with the institutionalised racism; racial minorities were just taken off the list of people we were allowed to be intollerant towards.
At times I wonder what, if anything, can break this cycle. What can change the nature of mankind, so to speak. It's here that my loss of faith comes from, every time I almost dare to believe that humans are fundamentally good, I'm reminded of their pettiness and stupidity. I don't believe a utopia is possible, but I don't think that's an excuse for not striving to make the world one. Just because I can't be the nicest, bestest, kindest person ever, doesn't mean I shouldn't TRY to be a good person, and I guess that's all I'm really asking of humanity, that it at least puts in a little effort into being decent.
Yeah, see, if I heard about someone beating their daughter I'd be "wtf, dude" and wouldn't blame humanity as a whole. If, however, I went online and a bunch of dudes were saying that his daughter probably had it coming... that's when I would start to think of humanity being terrible. As for people time and again losing their faith in humanity, well, I don't know... It's like being married to a serial adulterer, every time you think about giving humanity a second chance, of giving it the benefit of the doubt, it lets you down again.
Also, no worries about coming off as aggressive or a jerk, I know how easy it is to get angry over stuff, especially when you're debating with someone online.
The cycle isn't going to break, it'll just change between racism to religious wars to nationalism to systems of government (capitalism/communism) to opposing other cultures who "are against our way of life," and people will swallow it up every time while the leaders on top profit from it. And people will continue to be ignorant of other cultures and religions, and develop hate from their ignorance, because it's really impossible to learn about everything beyond a surface level of understanding, and people are too lazy to do so anyway.
but I really don't want to live on this planet anymore, we all know this one, I'd like to see another one too.
All joking aside, people ought to try and look at the positive things in life, the things we take for granted.
just think: everything that has'nt gone wrong has gone alright.
All joking aside, people ought to try and look at the positive things in life, the things we take for granted.
just think: everything that has'nt gone wrong has gone alright.
I lost all faith in mankind long ago. Join me! Realize how pointless the existence of this species is!
I have never understood these types of posts. By what high standards do you people judge humanity? Good and Evil? There are no such things. Left wing Right wing? Stupidity and brilliance? Those are subjective. We are a species of animal driven by our ancient evolutionary programing. The standards shouldn't be very high by which our species is judged.
I just don't get it. Some random guy on the internet makes a raciest statement while hiding behind the anonymity of the internet and a bunch of video game nerds throw their hands up and scream "I HAVE LOST FAITH IN HUMANITY!!!!" It's become a fucking meme.
I just don't get it. Some random guy on the internet makes a raciest statement while hiding behind the anonymity of the internet and a bunch of video game nerds throw their hands up and scream "I HAVE LOST FAITH IN HUMANITY!!!!" It's become a fucking meme.
It's because a lot of people lack perspective or think they're jaded/cynical, but don't seem to quite get what that actually entails. I've seen plenty of people here and in real life trying to be pessimistic or whatnot, which I attribute to some sort of self-serving mindset in which a dismissal of the rest of the human species somehow feeds their ego, in that "look at me, I'm above all of this and I recognize it for what it is, and everyone else doesn't!"
But far more likely, people saying "I've lost my faith in humanity" is closer to an idiomatic way of saying "well that is just dreadful right there". And often there's not a huge rant/lengthy post about how terrible and awful humanity is, so a lot of times the response can be chalked up to people not legitimately losing their faith in humanity (or even trying to seem jaded/cynical), but rather falling back on a common phrase to express, fairly concisely, their views on something. Much like how someone will say "epic" or "win" or sometimes "I jizzed in my pants" to express "that is awesome".
As for the parts of the post that sometimes follow the statement about losing faith in humanity, that can be blamed on a few things. Either 1) a lack of perspective, 2) impressions from the news, which almost always reports about someone doing something bad or some group being stupid (see: any article about bill battles in the US Congress), 3) the person just posting what they feel at the time of reading. 3 is often contributed to by both 1 and 2 in that list, though, as the general consensus seems to be "people always do stupid/awful shit" due to that being the sort of stuff that the media reports on most frequently. So there's a skewed perspective of "so many more bad/stupid/awful things happen than good things" which can lead to someone's initial reaction to something being along the lines of "well I guess this just further supports that X group sucks".
I really don't think it's what everyone wants to make it out to be--namely, some awful trend amongst teenagers to try and sound/look/feel old by appearing jaded and cynical and pessimistic. There are definitely people who do that, yeah, but they seem to be in the minority in most places. I seriously doubt that everyone who says "I've lost my faith in humanity" is trying to sound mature and older, but rather I think it's just a now-common idiom expressing a general discontent with the state of affairs of something.
EDIT: Just to chime in with my two cents on the whole "what do you think of humanity" thing that's kind of happening here. I think humanity, on the whole, is both good and evil. Humanity has produced some incredible fuckups--Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Il, PETA, etc--but has also produced some people that seem(ed) to have some strange unearthly ability to be totally awesome at something--Archimedes (math), da Vinci (everything), Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, and so on. However, there's a split that a lot of people don't seem to recognize (or flat-out reject when I propose it to them). There's a difference between the collective whole of human societies ("humanity") and individual humans ("humans"). Humanity frequently does awful, stupid shit like start wars, screw over the lower/middle/underclasses, make stupid decisions that kill thousands or, in some cases, millions of people (see the Great Leap Forwards). So humanity can probably be pretty accurately said to suck. Humans, though, are seldom that bad. The guy who beats his daughter or pushes some old lady down the stairs is in no way representative of most people (and anyone who says they are, you're frankly an idiot). Most individual humans will at worst act on a general basis of "don't bother them, they won't bother you". There are a few who cut corners and screw people over, but it's seldom anything significant. Someone cuts you off in traffic, someone grabs that last thing from the store shelf that you really needed, etc.
The fundamental difference is this: when you can see the other person, when they're physically present before you, it's very much more difficult to do something awful. Face-to-face most people are perfectly decent most of the time. When you make someone faceless, when you turn another person into a "them" that's off somewhere else, yeah, you're gonna be more wont to do something bad.
But far more likely, people saying "I've lost my faith in humanity" is closer to an idiomatic way of saying "well that is just dreadful right there". And often there's not a huge rant/lengthy post about how terrible and awful humanity is, so a lot of times the response can be chalked up to people not legitimately losing their faith in humanity (or even trying to seem jaded/cynical), but rather falling back on a common phrase to express, fairly concisely, their views on something. Much like how someone will say "epic" or "win" or sometimes "I jizzed in my pants" to express "that is awesome".
As for the parts of the post that sometimes follow the statement about losing faith in humanity, that can be blamed on a few things. Either 1) a lack of perspective, 2) impressions from the news, which almost always reports about someone doing something bad or some group being stupid (see: any article about bill battles in the US Congress), 3) the person just posting what they feel at the time of reading. 3 is often contributed to by both 1 and 2 in that list, though, as the general consensus seems to be "people always do stupid/awful shit" due to that being the sort of stuff that the media reports on most frequently. So there's a skewed perspective of "so many more bad/stupid/awful things happen than good things" which can lead to someone's initial reaction to something being along the lines of "well I guess this just further supports that X group sucks".
I really don't think it's what everyone wants to make it out to be--namely, some awful trend amongst teenagers to try and sound/look/feel old by appearing jaded and cynical and pessimistic. There are definitely people who do that, yeah, but they seem to be in the minority in most places. I seriously doubt that everyone who says "I've lost my faith in humanity" is trying to sound mature and older, but rather I think it's just a now-common idiom expressing a general discontent with the state of affairs of something.
EDIT: Just to chime in with my two cents on the whole "what do you think of humanity" thing that's kind of happening here. I think humanity, on the whole, is both good and evil. Humanity has produced some incredible fuckups--Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Il, PETA, etc--but has also produced some people that seem(ed) to have some strange unearthly ability to be totally awesome at something--Archimedes (math), da Vinci (everything), Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, and so on. However, there's a split that a lot of people don't seem to recognize (or flat-out reject when I propose it to them). There's a difference between the collective whole of human societies ("humanity") and individual humans ("humans"). Humanity frequently does awful, stupid shit like start wars, screw over the lower/middle/underclasses, make stupid decisions that kill thousands or, in some cases, millions of people (see the Great Leap Forwards). So humanity can probably be pretty accurately said to suck. Humans, though, are seldom that bad. The guy who beats his daughter or pushes some old lady down the stairs is in no way representative of most people (and anyone who says they are, you're frankly an idiot). Most individual humans will at worst act on a general basis of "don't bother them, they won't bother you". There are a few who cut corners and screw people over, but it's seldom anything significant. Someone cuts you off in traffic, someone grabs that last thing from the store shelf that you really needed, etc.
The fundamental difference is this: when you can see the other person, when they're physically present before you, it's very much more difficult to do something awful. Face-to-face most people are perfectly decent most of the time. When you make someone faceless, when you turn another person into a "them" that's off somewhere else, yeah, you're gonna be more wont to do something bad.
It's just a phrase people! Why does everyone take things so goddamn literally? It makes me lose faith in humanity.
Also, just because you don't approve of misanthropy doesn't mean everyone who subscribes to it is an ignorant child.
EDIT: This "superiority" thing is just getting hilarious. We have a group of people who think they are superior to another group because they think that that group is trying to feel superior by making humanity out to be generally inferior. And then there is me, who feels superior to the first group because I feel I realized that they are just doing same thing to make themselves feel superior.
And then, another person is going to come along and find flaws in what I said so that they-
Oh, fuck it.
Also, just because you don't approve of misanthropy doesn't mean everyone who subscribes to it is an ignorant child.
EDIT: This "superiority" thing is just getting hilarious. We have a group of people who think they are superior to another group because they think that that group is trying to feel superior by making humanity out to be generally inferior. And then there is me, who feels superior to the first group because I feel I realized that they are just doing same thing to make themselves feel superior.
And then, another person is going to come along and find flaws in what I said so that they-
Oh, fuck it.
I've always just thought that each generation is turning into more and more cynical little shits who dont realize times were much harder for their previous geneartion, the loss of their ipod is nothing by comparison to the misery some people are living with.
...
then again i've lost patience for that "I lost my faith in humanity" sentiment and the people who say it, so my opinion isnt very high of them.
...
then again i've lost patience for that "I lost my faith in humanity" sentiment and the people who say it, so my opinion isnt very high of them.
It may stem from the fact that most of us are raised in a way that makes us believe that there is one objective way that the world works, and then when things go wrong, we lose faith. In ourselves, in our heritage, and most of all in the world. We feel that things will always work against us. The world is not a sonnet, where there is a strict way to write the poem, but rather a free verse. Anything goes, and it's up to us to find our own ways. To quote a beloved video game of mine "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."
