my pessimism

you know, i am a very big pessimist. or at least i have been one up until this point in my life, not that i necessarily need to remain that way. a friend told me that most kids are already experimenting with sex and making out and dating and stuff like that at age 13, and he felt that since he started at age 17, that was a late start. well, i have never had any romantic relationships, and i have only done sexual stuff with one other person, on two separate occasions. quite frankly, i do not give a damn about most people. there are a million reasons why i do not care about other people. i do care to a certain extent, and i am a good person at heart, i think. i am not good 100% of the time but when i am evil i am willing to be honest enough to acknowledge that i have some evil in me. i am good the vast majority of the time, anyway. supposedly i am good-looking (at least according to my mom) and i am very smart and well-educated, and hard working (just ask my supervisor at work). but i hate myself, not just a little, but a lot. and i do not really like other people that much either. i tend to see the bad in other people and not the good. except when it comes to physical appearance. that is the one area where i can really have a completely positive impression of someone.

now, if you were to judge me by my thoughts, i am certainly a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-religous, closed-minded bigot. but i do my very best to act nicely to other people and not be a major league asshole. someone has to really rub me the wrong way and do mean things to provoke me a lot before i start getting mean at all. but i cannot stand criticism at all. it really gets to me, because i have such a low opinion of myself, and i tend to agree with anything bad other people say about me, and disagree with anything good said about me. i mean, sometimes i wonder whether i even deserve to live or if i am just some sort of malicious parasite feeding off society. at least, i wondered that before i got a job. not that i was on welfare or anything; i was just getting everything from my parents.

but generally i have a pretty low opinion of human beings. i don’t like myself, and don’t particularly like anyone else that much either. i don’t really respect anyone or trust anyone or look up to anyone as a role model. in my judgement, we are a fairly primitive race of life form, compared to other intelligent civilizations that almost undoubtedly exist throughout the universe. although we have developed some relatively advanced technology, most people still seem to have a problem telling truth from lies, right from wrong, good from evil, and fantasy from reality. hardly anyone is well-informed enough to make many sweeping judgements like that anyway, but people go around over-generalizing about things all the time, especially pessimists like me.

now, i have asperger’s syndrome, so i lack empathy, and i am not good socially. so, even if i manage to act well enough in a social situation so that the other person is not left with a bad impression or disliking me, even if i am able to act nice and if they like me to some extent, i still end up feeling bad. because there is just a deep fundamental disconnect between me and other people. i cannot be honest with other people about what i think or how i feel, because if i were, nobody would like me, since my pessimistic thoughts about them would be very insulting. i always have to hold my tongue and avoid expressing my views on that, but it is second nature to me, anyway. the way i act around other people is mostly a front and does not show how i truly feel at all. i often suspect that other people dislike me but are keeping quiet to avoid offending me, or that they talk about me behind my back. why? because that is how other people would be, if they were like me. and i am the only person i can understand, so it is easiest to think of other people as being like me.

i have heard it said, and read many times, that most people’s favorite subject is themselves. for me, that is quite a sore subject, and i actually hate talking about myself, because of my incredibly low self-esteem. i hate having to tell people about myself, if i am just getting to know them or whatever, because i really quite honestly have nothing good to say. i usually end up saying something bad about myself and making myself look bad and then i get all upset about it, and the other person does not respond well to this, and then i end up feeling like they were the one who insulted me and not me. i cannot for a moment fathom how someone could possibly enjoy talking about themselves, or how someone could like themselves. it does not make sense. i certainly do not like that kind of person. people who like themselves and like to talk about themselves, i basically see them as arrogant and obnoxious, always trying to rub it in your face that they are better than you. i much prefer other people who have low self-esteem, because at least they make some fucking sense to me. but, i don’t like them either. they are all losers anyway. just like me. i don’t want to associate with losers. i would rather associate with nobody at all. which is exactly what i do.

see, not having friends as a kid, and being picked on all the time, despite having the best grades in the class and being smarter than everyone else, that really fucks with your head a lot. i mean, i got so used to being insulted all the time, that when it stopped happening, i was confused and at a loss, disbelieving, not knowing what to do. in some ways, i wished things would go back to me being insulted all the time, directly, because at least then i knew what to do. pretend not to let it affect me, never talk to anyone, and then go home and cry about it to my parents and my dog. not literally cry of course, except when i was quite young. but you know what i mean, bitch and whine and complain and all that. but it seems i just tend to notice bad things people say about me and not good ones. mostly because i think the good ones are bullshit. flattery. people trying to win me over, to get me to do things for them. that happened in school a lot. people would use flattery to get me to do their homework or let them cheat on tests, and then afterwards, they would go back to being mean to me, and not invite me to their parties or anything. it was the popular kids who did this to me. that really confused me, because i could never tell if they liked me or disliked me, because there were so many mixed signals. one minute everyone is picking on me and saying i am a loser who has no social skills and will die a virgin. the next minute, someone is saying how i am so much smarter than them and going to be much more successful than them and would i please do their homework because they are too stupid to understand even the most elementary problems. and since i am a nice guy, i eagerly oblige and do their work for them and cooperate fully. but for some reason, have no friends and never date anyone. strange.

so, i do not trust other people, and i look at them as essentially selfish and evil. yes, people are good and selfless sometimes, but only because this benefits them in some way. when i look at my past i see myself as a victim, as someone mistreated by a society filled with evil, heartless, sadistic people, who enjoy causing and then observing the misery of other people. once this kid bent a spoon back and forth again and again until it broke, and the two ends of where it broke were red-hot, and he stabbed one of them into my arm and burned me, for his own amusement. that is how i was treated as a kid. that is how i see the essential part of human nature. the goodness and virtue people have, i believe, is simply so they can feel better about themselves and so they can be praised by other people.

just think about the concepts of heaven and hell. people need to be told that they will be eternally punished for being bad, or eternally rewarded for being good, or else they cannot find it in themselves to be moral at all. they claim that morality can only exist within the context of religion and an afterlife where your conduct while alive is either rewarded or punished. more than anything else, this demonstrates the fundamentally selfish and evil nature of humanity. a truly moral person would be moral even if there were no reward at all, even if there were a great reward for acting immorally. in fact, they would even act morally if it meant torture and doom for them! now, this is not exactly a rational way for a person to behave, although there have been many martyrs throughout history who behaved in exactly that way. the thing is, if someone has a deluded notion of what is right and what is wrong, and then takes a strong moral stand which is risky for them, that is not something that ought to be looked up to. adolf hitler believed that when he was committing genocide against the jews and using eugenics to try and create a superior aryan race, he was doing the right, good, moral thing. most people agree that adolf hitler was pretty much as evil as a person can be, but he believed the exact opposite about himself, and so did his supporters, the nazis. why would people support such an evil man, and do such evil things, unless they are not themselves evil, deep inside? and who are we to say that we would not be as evil as the nazis, if we were under the same conditions? anyone who believes in unquestioning loyalty to their nation, their government, that person would definitely be a nazi if they had lived in nazi germany. people who believe the united states is 100% good and righteous in international affairs, they would have been nazis in nazi germany. and yet we still have solid majorities approving of every war our country starts, until things start going badly for our own country. this is that selfishness again. we do not care one iota about other countries, we only care about our own. such is human nature. we consider the lives of “enemy” soldiers or civilians to be useless, expendable, or a necessary sacrifice for some so-called “greater good”. but anyone who abides by the deliberate killing of other people has already abandoned any pretense of having respect for the sanctity of human life. such people are arrogant nationalists, supporting whichever country they happen to live in, despite the fact that they only live there due to circumstance, and could just as easily have been born and raised and be living somewhere else.

throughout the world, most people tend to believe in whatever religion their parents raise them in, despite the fact that this is a matter of circumstance, and you can consider it random, if you are thinking, what if i were just one of the babies born in a certain year, at random, but born somewhere else, under other circumstances? would i still be the same person? what things about me would still be true? what things would i still know to be true? if someone is a christian because they are born and raised in a christian country, they are no better than a muslim born and raised in a muslim country, or a hindu born and raised in a hindu country, a buddhist born and raised in a buddhist country, a jew born and raised in a jewish country, or a communist born and raised in a communist country. it is easy to believe whatever the people in your geographical area tell you to believe, and it is intellectually lazy and is not at all a rational approach towards finding out what the real truth is. if you want to understand reality, you have to take a more holistic approach and think about how you might think differently if you were born under other circumstances, and then take that into consideration. if each religion contradicts all the others, then either there is only one true religion, or they are all wrong. and if one religion happens to be true, then what about people who lived before that religion existed? are they all lost souls? that is not a morally justifiable outcome. what about how people choose religion based on the circumstances of where they are born and who their parents are? no religion has been able to pass the test, to demonstrate that it really is the ultimate truth, that people everywhere can believe it, in large numbers, in every country around the world, and that it can appropriately deal with unbelievers in a morally acceptable fashion. like, take christianity for instance. christianity says that unbelievers all go to hell, and only true christians go to heaven. that is not a morally acceptable outcome, and under that scenario, god is evil, because he is discriminating against people born in parts of the world where virtually nobody is christian, while showing outrageous favoritism towards people born in places where almost everyone is christian. hardly anyone in japan believes in christianity, yet they have a very low crime rate, a prosperous economy, a strict system of morality that exists outside of any religion, and the highest life expectancy in the world. how is it that the japanese are able to have such a strict system of morality outside of any religion? how is it that in ancient greece, philosophers who disbelieved in the gods were still able to come up with a system of morality that is the basis for morality in western civilization to this day? clearly, morality is entirely separate from religion, or at least, it can exist entirely separate from religion, but sometimes gets intertwined with it, unfortunately.

now, human beings are quite stupid organisms, along with being selfish and evil. we do not realize what the truth is, or at least most of us do not. we arrogantly think that whatever we have been taught, in our society, must be true, and what people elsewhere think must be false if it contradicts our beliefs. and of course children can be quite mean and nasty; morality and being good do not come naturally to kids, unfortunately. morality and being good are things that must be taught to children, since these are alien concepts, unnatural concepts, created by human society, because societies that have morality survive better than societies that do not have it. a civilization where people cooperate and help each other out will be more prosperous than one where nobody cares about anyone else and everyone is immoral and selfish. thus, the great european powers conquered the world, because they had a system of morality that made their societies successful enough, strong enough, and unified enough to go around conquering “less advanced” societies. although perhaps it was the europeans who were less advanced, since they fought so many wars and had such an unfair hierarchy for their society based on the circumstance of who a person’s parents are. arguably, many less technologically advanced societies around the world were more morally advanced, such as many native american tribes, or perhaps that is just a myth. who knows? anyway, the point is, morality is the creation of society in order to have the society be self-regulating and more prosperous. it does not have any natural or biological origin, and by nature, we are evil and selfish beasts. do you think animals give a damn about each other? does a lion give a fuck about what a zebra thinks, when the lion viciously attacks the zebra and rips it to shreds? of course not! animals are just as selfish as us, for the most part. the notable exception is dogs. and dogs would not even exist naturally. they are an artificial creation, the product of selective breeding over thousands of years, and they originated from wolves. wolves are vicious predators who attack innocent animals and rip them to pieces. we have managed to use eugenics and selective breeding to artificially create a species of animal that is born with a natural tendency to be moral and good and righteous. quite amazing, really. as for our own species, humanity? well, we have not come so far ourselves. bad, evil people still have children, and pass on their genes to future generations. so there is no hope for us to genetically evolve our way out of being evil and selfish. society and morality are the only hope.

but, there are many different societies, and many different systems of morality. there is a lot of conflict in the world. how can we know right from wrong? here is an easy way: if someone is a human being from the planet earth, they are probably wrong, because they are evil and selfish, and if they think they are good and moral, that is just because they have been brainwashed by their society and want to feel good about themselves so they can sleep at night. even genocidal dictators can love their own family. my point is, nobody is morally right 100% of the time. even if we have enough self-control to always behave in a way that we personally believe is morally correct (which hardly anyone has enough self-control for), we would still be wrong a lot of the time, because we are fallible humans prone to error. i, like every other person, sometimes do things to purposefully make other people feel bad. therefore, i am evil, just like everyone else. but what makes me better than a lot of people is, at least i am honest enough to admit to this evil, and not lie about it and say i am totally righteous when i know i am not. that type of person would be a hypocrite, and i hate hypocrites. of course, i am a hypocrite myself, to some extent (but at least honest enough to admit it), and thus i hate myself, to some extent. it is all rather unfortunate.

so, i do not really have respect or trust for other people, but i can at least have fun with them and enjoy being around them, right? well, yes, i can. it happens sometimes. it is not a necessary prerequisite for having fun with someone, that you respect them and trust them completely. you can still hang out with someone who you think is a bad person, or do stuff with them, or even be friends with someone evil. i mean, who isn’t evil? according to christianity, only one man ever met that challenge of not being evil, and his name was jesus christ. but according to me, not even jesus met that challenge... we are all evil, at least to some extent. this is the natural state of affairs, for we are a species of animal. luckily society has taught us morality and made most of us behave good most of the time. but the morality society has taught us is not right about everything, and lots of times leads to the wrong outcome. but it is better than no morality. what would be best is to have a morality where we fix as many problems as possible, and have a humanist, utilitarian system of ethics and morality that provides answers to all moral dilemmas. but, ultimately, it seems that the morality we are taught here in the united states teaches us all to be selfish and not care that much about others. at least that is the morality i have been taught, through bitter experiences of other people being mean... and i will have to un-learn that morality and re-learn the correct morality. otherwise there is no way i could ever really love another person and actually care about them anywhere near as much as i care about myself... and i don’t even really care about myself that much anyway. or maybe i do. who knows? but i do know that i am irrational, and need to work on becoming more rational. my irrationality is what causes me problems, not other people’s irrationality. it is what upsets me over little things and makes me emotionally unstable and filled with self-loathing. if i repaired my brain, and became rational, it would solve everything. i would finally have a positive attitude, and be sociable, and enjoy the company of other people. and then, i would go quite far in life.