The biggest loss in humanity has to, unequivocally, be the onset of, or transition to, apathy.
Apathy, the way I process it, is much more wretched than hate. There is a certain connotation of care in hate. You hate, therefore you manifest a feeling. Merely thinking about the person you hate evokes a feeling. Yes, this feeling is hate, but feeling nonetheless. Perhaps you just hate them because you wish they were different, perhaps they wronged you in a way, perhaps you were indoctrinated into the mentality of hatred by your lousy parents, or perhaps you were just born a hateful, fundamentalist, ultra-racist piece of shit. However, you do harbor a feeling for a person. And it is better than no feeling. This, I call "care".
Evidently, the subject of your hate would not agree with me and my, albeit arbitrary, assessment of which is better and which is worse. Assuredly, I retain only a globalized, sociological view on this subject, for the purpose of this post.
Recently, I had a person in my life (with whom I interact on a daily basis) transition almost the entire spectrum of this, so-called care. I went from not knowing them to liking them, from liking them to disliking them then hating them, from hating them to loathing them, and ultimately to simply not caring at all about them, and largely ignoring them.
This actually made me sad. No one had to announce this to me. There were no fanfare, banners flying, no big announcement with an even bigger speech. One day I just realized that the care in me, for this person, is gone. They did and said things that I just ignored. And this is a fellow human being, for crying out loud! Yet, I could not bring it out of me to care anymore. This person's presence evoked no feeling.
I am not going much further into the external circumstances that we were in, this person and I, but it suffices to say that those circumstances exhaustively aided this onset of apathy in me.
This is what I call the transition to apathy.
If you actually do not care for someone, initially, then I hold that there is no loss. But if certain feeling for a human existed in you, but progressively evaporated and is no longer there, that is the loss.
Where, do you think, did that feeling go?
You may have heard me say in person, or read my ramblings on this blog, about how I hate people. I truly do hate people. I just wish they weren’t the dumbfuck sheep that they are. Just walking around is one disappointment after another, seeing the ridiculous things that we do without putting half a mind to our everyday actions. One slip-up and I hate you, yep.
However, as an individual whose path I have not yet crossed, upon the initial meet-and-greet, I always give one the benefit of the doubt. In my mind, based on your behavior, you might, then, move in either direction – I might like you or dislike you. But now I >>know<< you and I certainly have a feeling for you.
What must transpire between us for me to lose that feeling?
And that is merely speaking about those we know. What of those we do not know at all? Where does the feeling begin? Does it begin with apathy or does it begin lopsided on some scale of care?
A couple of fundamentalists flew two planes into 3000 innocent people. Do you not loathe them? Hundreds of thousands of Somalis are suffering under famine and villainous paramilitary groups. Do you not sympathize? We’ve never even met any of these multitudes and multitudes of people, yet somehow they evoke feelings in us. How does it happen that we grow apathetic, then? How does one say “I just simply don’t give two shits about that?”
Human loss, that is.
I was going to read this. But then I stopped caring. ;)
ReplyDeleteI can't help but think I know the person you referred to here.
I hope you hate me, wait, no, like me, I mean care for me...
ReplyDeleteAll jokes aside, awesome post. I guess the apathy comes with trying. I mean, obviously if you care for someone whether it's extreme hate or love you will try to alter them in some way. Apathy comes when you realize that your actions are futile and all you've done is waste your time and you stop believing that wasting any more time on that subject will change anything.
Very interesting. I cannot relate to this experience however. I always considered myself to have a character flaw that never allowed me to forgive or forget. Once I truly dislike someone, I always dislike them. I understand how apathetic views of other humans could be scary, but perhaps this apathy has some aspects that could be positive? I can't really get into your head, so I am making no judgements here. Hate does focus your mind on negative currents. While postive thoughts would be best, is there any value in the lack of negative thoughts? Again, everyones mental landscape is too complex to make relative judgements. I held hate for my parents for much too long. Admitting that they would never live up to any real parental standards was horrifiying, but once I did it, I relieved myself of quite a mental burden. I would define my view of them as apathetic, but perhaps not in the same way you would define apathy. I shall ponder....
ReplyDeleteOK... here we go with this site's lack of ability to reply directly to comments. Maybe there is a way to do it and I just don't know. #$(*&$%_@#
ReplyDelete@Art Vandelay: You most certainly, definitely, indubitably, might know them. Good thing you didn't care to read the entire post!
@gagasam: Thanks for the comment. I can completely understand why you relate the onset of apathy to some fruitless effort. However, I wonder whether that is the bulk of it or if there is something else. That is why I was posing the question. I don't know, can you see a possibility for having a positive feeling for someone and then migrating over to apathy?
@Podster: Perhaps it was a bit of a cop-out, but this is precisely why I guarded myself by retaining the perspective of this post holistic and humanitarian in nature. In retrospect, I don't think I stated my thesis statement concisely. It should have read something like "because I care for humanity as a whole, apathy sucks". To answer your question, on a personal level there can be nothing wrong with _lack_ of negative thoughts. Hell, even in my personal example above there was a sense of relief. But when I realized what transpired on a communal level, this is what made me sad.
Thinking about all the comments, there might be more to say about this topic. Perhaps a continuation is in order, if I can gather my thoughts.