"faith in humanity"

Justin bienber

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please cooperate guys. my faith in humanity hangs in the balance.

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You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

It's like any other verbal chaff or rhetorical cliche. It seems almost always to be used hyperbolically, or ironically, or both. My only problem with it is that when it is used ironically it is too pat, and when used often it becomes very annoying. My faith in humanity includes a faith that people will say lots of stuff just to try to sound clever. Me included.

I think as I've become more nihilistic over the years I've become less invested in ideas of humanity as "good" or "bad" and therefore I don't really have a "faith" in humanity to be either shattered or restored. So somewhere between the "sloppy thinking" answer and the "I don't care" answer, because I don't really like the concept but I also don't necessarily assume a person who says such things is idiotic or reactionary.

But that's when people use them sincerely. As far as the truly hyperbolic, glib sort of use, sounds annoying but I haven't noticed it that much.

xp to aimless, i think you're right that it is used hyperbolically and ironically, but unlike statements like "this is the worst thing ever" or "it makes me want to kill myself", the "faith in humanity" cliche speaks to an assumption that i think is very real, which is that cultural products can be viewed as referendums on the generation/society that created them, and not just as discrete entities that at best might tell us some things about the some people within the society that produced them. people are far too willing to make the jump from "this is bad" to "my generation is fucked" and i think the faith in humanity cliche is an exaggerated version of *that* sentiment, which itself is wrongheaded. i don't know. increasingly i am finding it unproductive to have opinions on huge entities like "american culture" or "millenials" or "humanity"

and hurting, i don't know if it is nihilistic to say that humanity is neither good nor bad. humanity, and human experience, is really our only point of reference, and as such is the source of all our notions of goodness and badness. it seems only logical, to me, to say that humanity is necessarily both good and bad

I guess I just find that if you spend enough years watching news, reading a bit of history, etc., and really trying to think about it clearheadedly, it starts to seem childish and capricious to think in those terms -- "Oh, this man saved five puppies! That restores my faith in humanity!" "Oh, the hutus are killing the tutsis! That destroys my faith in humanity." Because history seems to be an endless cycle of both puppy-saving and ethnic cleansing. Which is maybe a bad example to use, since ethnic cleansing seems way more bad than puppy-saving is good. But you know what I mean -- at any given time there are brutal killings going on at at the same time most people at any given time are not brutally killing each other and are living in relative peace and tolerance of each other.

that's true. in that sense the question really comes down to human nature: are humans inherently good and corrupted by society or is society a civilizing force on our essentially amoral natures? my answer to that is both and neither. yet since society and culture, unlike nature, are fields that are always in a constant state of conflict, negotiation, and redefinition, i think it is more productive to focus one's energies not on what human nature is -- a question that is both unanswerable and pointless -- but on what we can do to create the kind of society we want to live in, which hews closely to our notions of justice, equality, and involves a minimum of pain and suffering.

so basically i think that ethnic cleansing, and even oppression in general, can be ended. even though these things have always been with us -- and are obviously reflections of something like a "dark side" of "human nature" that precludes ideas of humanity being essentially good -- that doesn't mean they can't be erased someday, somehow, like polio was erased. so i guess i don't believe in the essential goodness of people but i also am not a fatalist.

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