While our minds are at their most pliable we are subjected to an environment where there is no hiding place, no avoidance method, and no let-up. As a result, each character develops coping methods. Some develop a strong sense of denial, others become aggressive and yet more become shy of people and begin to avoid social activities at all costs. As the aggressive types become emboldened by their peers (the I dare you clan) and their achievements, which is a feedback from those around them and those they subject to their specific type of hate to which they and their enablers call banter, extreme reactions develop. Collective education has a lot to answer for! What it is doing to children is deplorable.
In the most extreme cases, you later see a school shooting by a loner or a pair of conspiring individuals, one usually coaxed by the other. But in any and every case, the crowd and the environment is always at fault for developing the extremists. Society creates its own extremists by allowing the collective to be basal to an extreme towards those who either don’t fit in for superficial reasons, or choose not to fit in for ideological reasons, although the crowd isn’t by any means intelligent enough to know or detect these nuances by a long shot.
The petty feedback (having a laugh) achieved by the followers and peers of the aggressive actors is seemingly justification enough for the distorted way we all live later in life. And yet no one gives a thought to the fact that one day, they might be lonely. How will they hold back the depression (the yang of the laughing yin they had in early life), and experience the feedback they used to have from this whole sick setup?
Notice how more and more are and will become psychologically ill in the next decades. The technology has enabled the above described scenario to such an extreme, that the opposing side of the coin which is never even considered until the coin is flipped becomes ever more daunting for the individual.
To prove this is an extreme illness to experience, trying to combat and remove it causes suicidal tendencies. Buddhism, esoteric Christianity, Jain, Sufi, and just plain mindfulness, in fact all real methods of religion or separating from the crowd involve constant messages of peace for exactly that reason. First of all, so one doesn’t become extremely misanthropic towards the crowd, but also so that the aspirant doesn’t end his or her own life.
Misanthropists don’t just hate people. They hate the crowd and that is entirely justified. Søren Kierkegaard said it best with his book The Crowd is Untruth and his dislike of collective religions. He argued they were going the wrong way entirely by being a crowd of believers rather than individual knowers.
Finally, a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Alone - All One 