Amanda Mims' Meditation #11

mis·an·thrope: person who hates or distrusts humankind

I could not agree more with Alceste’s point in The Misanthrope that he makes about society, and how one of mankind’s worst flaws is hypocrisy. I am saying this while being guilty of being a hypocrite myself, but it is a valid point that is made. It is easier to criticize someone else’s mistakes or false steps or anything like that rather than your own. People say that the things that bother you the most in other people are the attributes that you don’t like in yourself. It is one thing to dislike a person for seeing in them characteristics that you do not like in yourself, but it is quite another to dislike mankind as a collective whole because YOU contain typical traits of mankind that disgust you. That is not mankind’s problem; that is your problem. Granted we are raised in a society in which it is hard to trust people and so it becomes so easy to distrust mankind as a whole. Especially after having a couple of experiences in which a single person lets you down, its hard to trust again and it’s even harder to want to trust again. However, I personally think the hardest thing to be is not the one that distrusts humankind but to be the eternal optimist and to trust everyone. Yet being the one that does trust people and believes in the best may very well be worse purely due to the fact that you are almost always continually let down by those around you. Both the misanthrope and the optimist are wrong because it is not right to assume that all people act the same, or even all people act like you do. I think that is where both stray, the misanthrope and the optimist are both wrong in their beliefs of society because there will always be those people who seek out those that they can take advantage of, and there will always be those people that will always seek out those that they can help. I think that to survive in today’s society you have to find a happy medium between the misanthropic view and the optimistic view because either way you are not seeing the world or yourself for what you really are and before the state of humankind can be fixed it is necessary to fix yourself.