by John Grauerholz
Misanthropic pessimism is the suspicion that existence itself is a rather horrible affair and that any change human beings might make on this earth would only make things even more horrific. Misanthropic pessimism starts from the recognition that life itself is agonizing and appalling – and the realization expands to the awareness that it is actually other people that have made things so much more anguished and atrocious. Humans, being what they are, will start to meddle in this awful reality – and all that effort and exertion will only make this planet all the worse.
Being born is bad enough to begin with, but it is humanity that makes this world unendurable. For a pessimistic misanthrope, mankind is the worst thing about existence – other people are the most ghastly and grisly things in the universe.
Think of the cosmos as a sort of concentration camp – a terrible enough way to live out one’s days. But, to make things even crueler, each inmate is then violated and victimized by the other prisoners, making life all the more terrifying. Being imprisoned in life is ruinous enough – but the every day you are raped and ravaged by the other convicts. Just as in a Nazi death camp, the Jewish kapos were far more sadistic than the German overlords. Like a celestial warden, Jehovah delights in your eternal suffering. Human existence is a life sentence.
There is an easy and obvious solution: extinction of the entire species. Only human extermination and execution will end this scourge. The only encouraging thing about modern society is that total annihilation is close enough to tickle the nose hairs. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army determined that sometimes it is necessary to destroy a village in order to save the territory – so it is necessary to eliminate the whole species in order to attain salvation. The only thing that ought to inspire and invigorate you is the prospect of complete eradication of the human race.
by John Grauerholz
There are some scientists that scrutinize the behavior of animals in a zoo – I stalk complete strangers in order to understand human interaction. One of those research subjects is you, my dear reader. Consider this surveillance to be a sort of study project.
I sit outside your house and keep watch. I observe who you might let into your home. I follow you just beyond your peripheral vision. I keep a record of where you’ve been and what you’ve done.
Consider stalking to be a kind of guerrilla ethnography. I scrutinize everything. I record your every lapse and your every longing with a pinhole camera. I photograph your daily routine; I capture every facial expression; I video exactly what it is that you do in your bedroom.
Consider stalking to be a type of research project. Sometimes I plant hidden microphones – but I won’t tell you exactly where. I possess a recording of every telephone conversation that you have ever made. When you accidentally reveal your deepest secret, I listen in. Stalking gives me an opportunity to monitor human beings in the wild, as it were.
Sometimes, though, I place obstacles in your environment – just to evaluate how you might react. If you have recently experienced some unfortunate events, if you have recently undergone some unpleasant episodes in your life, perhaps these impediments are part of my ethnographic experiment. Sometimes I make a few alterations in your text messages before they are released to the recipient – just slight improvements, mind you. Sometimes I withdraw a little bit of money from your bank account – just enough to see how you might respond.
The act of surveillance transforms the observer: watching my human experiments invariably makes me feel isolated from the rest of society. The act of stalking creates a boundary between the viewer and the subject. The process of keeping targets under surveillance transmutes the personality of the stalker. Covert observation gives the watcher the impression that he is of a completely different species than that of his subjects. Conducting surveillance is a means of my own exaltation.
Taking a surreptitious photo gives me an intuition that I “own” you. When I shadow your movements through the city, I have this idea that I am, somehow, controlling your travel direction. I stalk you for this particular rush of “deification” and “superiority” into my psyche. An individual becomes one of the elite not by treating other humans kindly, but by reducing other people to the objects that they truly are. Watching you gives me the sensation that I am a god.
Don’t mistake me – you are of no particular importance to me. You are just a target for me to calibrate my awareness. You are a subject precisely because you are so worthless – after all, an ethologist does not select one specific animal because it is unique, but because the creature is completely representative of the entire herd.
You are of such insignificance that I know you better than you know yourself. You only exist because you are in my files. You are only alive only because I opened a dossier on you. If something were to happen to my data, your life would vanish. If I were to close my eyes, you would disappear.
by John Grauerholz
Feeding the homeless is like feeding pigeons. If you start giving food to one hungry creature, you’ll quickly be sieged and surrounded by the whole flock. If you offer a single slice of bread, pretty soon these critters will have shamed you into handing away the entire loaf – and you will have nothing left for yourself. The more you donate, the more these ravenous animals are going to want. Better to contribute nothing – and keep on walking. Just be careful of all their shit on the sidewalk.
Scavengers care nothing about you. An opportunistic bum doesn’t care if he takes so much of your own resources that you are unable to assist him ever again. A rabid animal does not care if he bites off the fingers that feed him. You are just a single serving for a zombie.
Helping the unfortunate will always result in the total opposite of your intentions. Saving a life might ultimately cause a population explosion that imperils the entire species. The more you help these beasts, the more they are going to breed. Once the animal’s stomach is full, his instinct spread his bodily fluids as widely and as wildly as possible.
Kindness is always counterproductive. A little callousness is often best for the earth. The cascading effect of a single act of compassion can well be complete environmental devastation. Caring for no one but yourself is always best for the world.
Just as wild animals will sometimes over-reproduce and consume all the resources in a given environment, so the human populace will expand until they devour all the charity handouts in an urban geography. We need some serial killers to thin out the herd. Ted Bundy was just doing some environmentally friendly things. A little slaughter is always good for the ecosystem.
If you really cared about their environment, then you would become a spree killer. But since we both know that you don’t have the guts – then at least have the good grace to shut the fuck up about protecting the planet. If you don’t have your finger on the trigger, then you aren’t saving shit.
