Last year, a friend of mine remarked that we all choose our undergraduate majors based on what we feel we are most deficient in. To wit, psychology majors are insane, religious studies majors run the local Atheist Student Alliance, math majors can't balance their checkbooks and anthropology majors are all misanthropes. But since then, I have come to realize something: scratch a cynic, and you find a disappointed idealist underneath. Scratch a misanthrope, and you find a quivering coward hiding beneath his skin.
It's easy to look away and dismiss this ethnic conflict as another example of people being club-wielding territorial primates, this creep at the bar just another beta male trying to nose his way in, this evening news report on another corporate scandal as yet another example of the bourgeoisie exploiting the proletariat. It's easy to look away. It's easy to get bogged down by 'compassion fatigue' and give up on compassion altogether.
This is one of the biggest reasons why relatively few anthropology undergrads ever become actual honest-to-god anthropologists — it takes a special kind of crazy to leave the comforts of home and go hang out with the homeless in the bad part of town, or talk to refugees being warehoused at the local center, or identify decomposed bodies in the latest routine atrocity. It's easy to sigh and give up. Devote yourself entirely to theory and the Ivory Tower. Get a real job answering phones in a call center somewhere, or conducting harmless market research, well away from any ethical quandaries. It's way too easy.
Misanthropy asphyxiates the soul. A life lived only for yourself is no life at all. Jean-Paul Sartre, you were wrong; Hell is not other people. Hell is being stuck in a room forever with only yourself to keep you company. Hell is allowing life's boundaries to shrinkwrap your soul, hermetically seal it against the tragedies and joys of life, keep the detritus and debris of other people's problems out of your own muddied inner morass. Hell is a letting it all be somebody else's problem. Hell is diffusion of responsibility. Hell is relentless intellectualism and rationalization. Hell is what you make of it.
So dare to give a shit.