If anyone knows even a small bit about writing conventions, you’ll probably notice, quite readily, that this title is an obvious example of Betteridge’s Law Of Headlines:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
“Any headline (or in this case, blogpost title) that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” Hell, my last blogpost followed Betteridge’s Law:
So, since this is quite an obvious example of Betteridge’s Law, I’m not going to pretend my final answer is surprising. The answer is, no, it is not time to just accept that humanity is awful. But I implore you not to turn off your laptop and enjoy the, eh, cold and horrible windiness outside, because my hope is that you will find how I got to the “no” answer at least somewhat interesting!
Misanthrope is the hatred or distrust of humanity or human nature:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misanthropy
And, for a lot of my life, I have had, not just a disagreement, but I would almost say a hatred of misanthrope. How could anyone hate a species that creates wonderful music, and art, that saw the rings of Saturn through a telescope, and not content with that, broke free of Earth’s gravity and went on an amazing journey, just to view those rings up close? How could anyone hate the species with the imagination, intellect, and drive to create the amazingly complex device that you are viewing this very blogpost on? How could anyone hate the species that produced courageous social movements against the horrors of racism, misogyny and homophobia? (Of course with that last one you could push back by saying humans created racism, misogyny and homophobia in the first place.) How could anyone hate a species who experiences the most amazing awe, and wonder, and joy, caused by something as simple as witnessing a sunset?
Indeed, it’s probably true to say that I didn’t just find misanthropists to be wrong, but to be deeply immature. To me, misanthropists were people who never left behind a childish rebellious phase. And rebellion is brilliant, I’ll take rebellion over conformity any day, so that wasn’t the issue, it was more that I saw misanthropists as trying, and failing to be rebellious. “Oh look at me, I hate me, and you, and everyone in Canada, and that man over there walking his dog, oh look at me, I’m so rebellious!”
I mean, misanthropists hate babies. They might push back and say, “No, no, I hate humanity!” But babies are part of humanity. Ergo, misanthropists hate babies, I’m not even trying to be insulting to misanthropists, there’s just no getting away from the baby hating aspect of it! So, perhaps it may be surprising to learn that, while I’m still not a misanthropist, I could now be described as, for want of a better way of putting it, misanthrope curious. It’s like, I’ll go to all the events celebrating humanity by day, but by night, I’ll go to the secret misanthrope club. I’ll make sure nobody saw me enter, and then I’ll remove my jacket to reveal my, “Humans are as bad as leprosy” t-shirt. What I’m saying is, maybe there is a grain of truth in this baby hating philosophy after all! I’m glad this blog isn’t big enough that I have to worry about people taking me out of context! So, to my great surprise, instead of telling a misanthropist that they are wrong, completely wrong, I feel if I encountered a misanthropist right now, I would be more inclined to say, “I get where you’re coming from.” So what changed?
Witnessing Great Horror From A Privileged Part Of The World
If you’ve read my previous blogposts, you’ll know how witnessing the horror of Gaza, though granted as a privileged person who is perfectly safe, changed me in ways I’m not sure I thought possible prior to this genocide occurring. It’s not like there wasn’t absolute horror in the world before Gaza, there most certainly was, but before Gaza the question, “How would people react if the most depraved barbarity was livestreamed to the whole world for more than two years?” was nothing but a thought experiment. How would I have answered that question before the genocide in Gaza? Sure, I would have at least entertained the possibility that life would go on as if nothing happened, despite the mass slaughter, but since it would only be a thought experiment, I could comfort myself by speculating that maybe there would be a massive movement to bring an end to this horror.
And don’t get me wrong, there HAS been a massive movement, worldwide, to end the genocide in Gaza. And in conversation, it doesn’t take long to meet someone who is absolutely horrified by the carnage we have witnessed in Palestine. But do you know what also doesn’t take that long? To meet someone who doesn’t care. I have met, so, so many people who do not care. What is to blame for this, I don’t know, maybe it’s all down to Dunbar’s number, where we barely have the brain power to well and truly comprehend that more than a few hundred people exist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
The more scary answer is that, some human beings matter more than others. I’ve talked before about the quite differing response to the invasion of Ukraine:
I remember the awful day that Putin invaded Ukraine, and I remember how people coming together to oppose this senseless act of aggression, and to stand with the people of Ukraine, gave me such hope for humanity. But then, when Gaza was pretty much wiped off the face of the Earth, the answer was always, the most sickening, disgusting sentence in the English language, “I stay out of politics”. This isn’t to say that Ukranian refugees have it easy in Ireland by any stretch, and, over the last few years, I have seen an absolutely sickening rise in anti-Ukraine sentiment in Ireland. But at the same time, people who stood with Ukraine barely needed to offering an explanation for why they didn’t stand with Gaza. It was just taken as a given that people from Palestine aren’t people.
And the slaughter in Gaza continued. There was the sickening murder of Hind Rajab. Our fellow human beings burned to death. I remember seeing an image of a child in Gaza, who looked, so emaciated that, for want of a better way of putting it, they didn’t look real. My brain could barely comprehend such suffering really existing. As I looked at this image, I could feel every neuron in my brain screaming, and I genuinely feared I would have a nervous breakdown there and then. But for some, caring about this child, even a little, would be “Getting involved in politics” and we can’t have that!
How would people react if the most depraved barbarity was livestreamed to the whole world for more than two years? Some would be horrified beyond belief, that’s true, and I’ve witnessed it. Some, would just shrug their shoulders. A question I’m not sure I ever wanted the answer to, has been answered. And I don’t know will I ever be the same after receiving the answer.
A quote from Omar El Akkad that has been occupying my brain for quite some time is, “One day, everyone will always have been against this”, and he’s got a book out with that quote as the title:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_El_Akkad
We’re living through the absolute horrors of Gaza, so we don’t have the luxury of looking at it through rose tinted glasses. A lot of people don’t care. Both people in power, and “ordinary” people, have no interest in the suffering of those in Palestine. I wonder, fifty years from now, will people ask the question, “It was so horrifying, how could anyone stand back and do nothing?” and then when those same people witness a genocide, they themselves stand back and do nothing. This is of course, assuming Gaza will be remembered at all. Those in power have managed to just remove the whole horrible event from common knowledge, so it seems, I’ve written about that here:
https://autismneurodiversity.com/2026/02/20/phase-three-amnesia
So who knows, maybe it’ll be worse even than everyone being against it when it’s too late to do anything. Maybe it’ll be just, forgotten.
Are Human Beings Unusually Cruel?
There is no Betteridge’s Law in effect here. I am genuinely asking the question, are humans unusually cruel in comparison to the other animals we share this Earth with, and rather than a definite “no”, my answer could be a yes, a no, or somewhere in the middle. Other animals are, if using the word “cruel” is taking it too far, because the intentionality of it is debatable, you could at least say they commit cruel acts. Cats kill, seemingly for fun, often not eating what they catch. They seem to enjoy the thrill of, well, just killing something. But, in the case of a cat, we don’t know whether this is the equivalent of the rest of us playing some video game where we mow down a bunch of people, but it’s okay, because those people aren’t real. We have no way of knowing if the cat knows that the birds they catch are sentient creatures with pain receptors. Same with one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever witnessed, male mallards raping female mallards. I remember an awful incident where I saw three male mallards descend on a female, and I worried they would drown her. Fortunately they shortly lost interest and flew off. Again, we don’t know how much intentionality there is to what the male mallard is doing. Do they understand that they could hurt the female mallard? We don’t know. Do they understand that they risk drowning her by holding her head underwater? We don’t know. Do they understand that the whole experience is very upsetting for her? Again, we don’t know.
Many animals, whether birds of prey, lions, or foxes, kill sentient animals, that have pain receptors, for food. And while we may say that the act is cruel, I wouldn’t agree with the idea that the fox or lion are themselves cruel. They are simply doing what they have to to survive. And I seriously doubt they have the capacity to understand that they are killing sentient animals that feel pain.
There seems to be something different about it when a human being commits a cruel act. When an animal does something that we find horrible, there is usually, or perhaps even always, the explanations that if they don’t do it they will die, and that they don’t understand that the other animal they are hurting, or killing, feels fear and pain.
It seems to me that humanity might possess a fairly unique cruelty among all sentient lifeforms on Earth. The ability to hurt or kill another sentient being, whether an animal, or another human being, while fully understanding that their fellow sentient creature is sentient, and has pain receptors. And while with animals (there are exceptions, such as cats) the killing of other animals can usually be explained as a grim necessity. But humans have the capacity to kill other humans when their own survival isn’t even at stake.
So it might well be the case the human beings, are the cruelest form of sentient life that exists. Why is that? Perhaps it is a grim trade off of being imaginative enough to imagine something like a tesseract,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract
Think about it, human beings have the capacity to imagine an object that doesn’t even exist, and cannot exist in their daily lives, that they will never encounter! There is some serious brain power involved in that. As absolutely in awe as I am of the intelligence of corvids, of bees, and of octopuses, I don’t think any of them could pull off something like that. I’m hesitant to assert that humans are smarter than other animals, that could just be speciesism talking after all, but what I will say is that humans do appear to have abilities absent from the rest of the animal kingdom. Only humans can build the device you’re reading these words on, after all.
But I wonder is the price of being able to break Earth’s gravity, of being able to imagine things that do not exist, and never will in our universe, and of being able to observe things far smaller than what the human eye can see, is that we also have the ability to imagine great suffering being visited on others, and the intelligence to build machines of war to carry out that suffering. But to me, probably the most disturbing part of it all is, not that humans built guns, missiles, and the atomic bomb. For me the most disturbing part of it is that understanding, that other human beings, are sentient, that they feel fear, that they feel pain, and that they are loved. And wanting to kill them anyway.
Are Human Beings Unusually Kind?
Does human beings’ horrifying capacity for cruelty, come with it, an equal and opposite capacity for kindness? An unusual capacity for kindness even?
A story that gives me hope for humankind, time and time again, is that of the Choctaw Nation giving a sizeable financial donation to help the Irish who were suffering the horrors of the famine:
Having recently endured the horror of The Trail Of Tears, no-one would have faulted the Choctaw Nation for saying their own problems were just to big for them to worry about the suffering of the Irish. And yet, they gave generously to help people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, that they would likely never even meet. Incidentally, stories like this are part of the reason why it sickens me when I hear privileged Irish people say they don’t care about Gaza because, “We have to worry about our own problems.”
In 1862, mill workers in Lancashire, England, refused to handle cotton picked by American slaves:
Again, they were willing to endure great personal sacrifice for the sake of people they didn’t even know and were never likely to even meet.
Humanity is capable of great cruelty, but is it not equally true that humanity is capable of the most amazing kindness? With the Choctaw Nation, and with the Lancashire cotton boycott, we have witnessed that human begins are capable of caring about other human beings that live more than a thousand miles away! There is no precedent for this kind of empathy anywhere in the animal kingdom.
Now, it might be a stretch to say that this is because of being more kind. The American robin doesn’t much care about the European robin, sure. (They’re completely different species by the way.) But, the American robin doesn’t know anything about the European robin and neither do they have the ability to learn. But still, no other species other than humanity has the capacity to care about the suffering of people over on the next continent.
Humanity has the ability to inflict great suffering, and to show great mercy. Humans have the ability to commit unspeakable evil, and also do the most amazing good. We have the ability to bring amazing beauty into this world, but also unspeakable terror. So, which wins out, the good or the bad?
Is The Fact That Humanity Exists A Net Good?
Imagine everyone on Earth has been infected by an illness. The illness has no symptoms. Except for one. It means nobody on Earth is able to have children. Do you think that this illness is a good thing, a neutral thing, or a bad thing?
Part of your answer might be influenced by the fact that you want to have children, or that you would find it upsetting knowing that many people want to have children, but can’t. So, I’ll modify the thought experiment slightly to take that out of the equation. The illness will not infect the human race, until one hundred years from now. You can still have children if you wish, and so will everybody else currently alive. But, after you and everyone you know is dead, having children will cease, and the human race will just die out, not painfully, but simply through not being able to have children. Is this a good thing, a neutral thing, or a bad thing?
My answer to this is different from what it would have been ten years ago. Back then, I would have said, with zero hesitation, that the human race going extinct would be a bad thing. Now, my answer is, it would be mostly a bad thing, but I must admit there might be upsides to it.
If the human race went extinct, no other animal on Earth could be driven to extinction by us. The human made climate catastrophe would instantly be halted. (Although in the scenario I’ve come up with, there would still be a lot of time left to do a lot of damage.) There would be no more genocide. Nobody going to bed hungry. Humanity would just peacefully die out due to not being able to have children, rather than quite possibly being wiped out by nuclear war (the threat of which has escalated quite a lot in the last few months alone, with the United States and Russia opting not to renew a critically important nuclear arms treaty.)
https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/02/1166892
Humans are capable of a cruelty that, as far as we know, no other sentient being on Earth is capable of. And if the human race went extinct, all of that cruelty would stop, in an instant.
So then, what is good about humanity? I wonder is there any way to answer this objectively? Suppose you could somehow explain to a chicken, trapped in a tiny cage and bred just to be killed for meat, everything I’m talking about now. What would their answer be? Would they hesitate to wholeheartedly support the extinction of the human species?
It’s a difficult question to answer. I worry that the only answer I can give is, “I think humans are pretty cool, but I would say that, because I am human.” But I think I have an answer. An answer to the question, is our existence a net good? My answer is, I don’t know. But I think it’s possible that someday, the existence of humanity COULD be a net good.
Recall at the beginning of this blogpost, how I talked about the cruel act of male mallards raping female mallards. And I’ll state again, it’s important to note that the males do not fully comprehend what they are doing. But here’s the thing. Male mallards, are never going to collectively change and improve their behaviour. If this behaviour stops, it will be because many thousands of years from now or more, mallards have evolved into a different species. This behaviour that we find so horrible, is basically, never going to stop. And the same goes for any other animal behaviour that could be described as cruel.
There is no equivalent in the animal kingdom, to the fact that women were not previously allowed to vote, but now they can vote. (Though of course we have not yet eliminated misogyny.) There is no equivalent in the animal kingdom, to the fact that the African slave trade used to be a massive, despicable industry, and now no longer exists. (Though we have not yet eliminated racism.) Humanity is the only species on Earth with such an amazing capacity for change. A bird, or a fox, or a spider, lives pretty much exactly how their ancestor from 1000 years ago would have lived. Of course, this is a double edged sword. Animals’ behaviour cannot get worse, but human behaviour can. But equally, human behaviour can get better. It has got better.
There is of course, the possibility that, while humanity’s behaviour is less fixed than an animal’s behaviour is, it is still fairly fixed, and that’s why we still have war, and genocide, and bigotry, in the 21st century. It’s a possibility that can’t be entirely ruled out. But I’m sure the abolition of the slave trade, or a world where women can vote, would have looked completely impossible at the time. Change has a way of looking impossible. Until things change.
The death of humanity, would be the death of a unique species. A species that in 2006, launched a spacecraft to explore the dwarf planet Pluto. It fills me with awe to think that the moment before it arrived, anyone who had died before that moment, whether they be Julius Caesar, Jimi Hendrix, or a stone age hunter gatherer, lived and died without seeing that amazing landscape of nitrogen ice. You don’t even have to go that recent, I still barely understand how the humble radio works, and that was invented in the 20th century! But go back even further, much further, to cave paintings depicting animals, some of which are tens of thousands of years old. Our oldest ancestors had that spark of imagination that is so very human.
Part of the reason it would be bad if humanity went extinct is because, it’s bad if ANY species goes extinct. Humanity is unique, so it would be bad if we were gone. Of course, it’s also bad that humanity is driving a bunch of equally unique species to extinction. But hopefully, our behaviour is not so fixed, and change is possible.
Misanthrope Holds No Answers To The World’s Problems
So, despite getting very misanthropy curious over the last few years, I’m still not a misanthrope. My optimism has certainly been tested by the genocide in Gaza, in Sudan, by the Epstein files, and by the current insanity of the U.S and Israel’s war on Iran. Maybe it’s stubbornness, but I refuse to give up hope.
I feel that misanthropy is just taking the easy way out. Hatred of humanity just gives you every motivation to say “Fuck it” and not bother trying to fix any of the world’s many problems. What’s the point in protesting, in boycotting, or trying, in various ways to make the world a better place, if we’re just an irredeemably horrible species anyway?
We can’t fully see the time period we are living in, while we are living through it, in the same way we can’t see all of Planet Earth while we are standing on it. It could turn out that the horrific genocides we have witnessed, the depravity of Epstein, and now the absolutely insane war with Iran, are the last gasps of a dying empire, and all it needs is one last push for it to finally die, and be replaced with something better. Perhaps that’s true, perhaps it’s false, but all I know is, nothing positive has even been achieved by simply giving up and declaring humanity to be a lost cause.
Ponderings Of An Autist 