The Futurist Misanthrope FAQ

The Futurist Misanthropy movement made waves in 2003 when two of its agents were arrested on charges of plotting to nerve gas certain shopping malls in London, United Kingdom. The arrest was made on the basis of testimony by an informer, but public interest remains in this movement of violent but seemingly fair-minded people. The Futurist Misanthrope FAQ is culled from FM manifestoes, sources, and an interview with FM spokesperson Steve Christ.

Q: What is futurist misanthropy?

Futurist misanthropy is the notion that modern humans are delusional and therefore worthy of misanthropy, but that we can apply that dislike of humanity toward something positive: making the next stage in human evolution. Unlike the “progress” that both governments and dissident groups endorse, this involves making better quality humans and has nothing to do with the education, propaganda and financial rewards governments these days favor.

Our diagnosis is that misanthropy is running at an all-time high because the quality of humans is low and our society is delusional, which would make anyone sensible hate it. We’re inundated with people low in actual intelligence but “smart” in doing very specialized tasks, and they are incapable of making the type of decisions we need. From their instinct to protect each other we have gotten layers of moral manacles like humanism, materialism, philanthropy, altruism, egalitarianism, and tolerance.

We don’t need any of these things. What we need are the few good quality people to be in charge and the rest to be either oppressed or eradicated. The essence of futurist misanthropy is a slaying of sacred cows, a putting to rest of pleasant illusions, and a disruption of taboos so that the kind of common sense a high-quality person would have predominates. We’re tired of being ruled by morons, sheep and parrots.

Q: Is futurist misanthropy a political movement?

We’re a movement to change society, which includes but is not limited to politics, and our slogan is “World Moron Death” and our logo is a dead happy face.

Q: Why are you against modern society?

Modern society is based on the concept of rule by individuals pursuing self-interest, and as a result places no premium on intelligent leadership. While it can handle easy decisions, the harder decisions — the ones for which one really needs a qualified leader — it evades. This evasion results in long-term problems steadily increasing on a path toward self-destruction for the human race.

If we were to define modern society by its components, these would be:

1. Liberal democracy (statistical leadership)
2. Material self-interest (materialism, capitalism)
3. Individualistic morality (humanism)
4. Technology
5. Pluralism (a subset of 3)

These systems attempt leadership by a preponderance of opinion, social popularity or the great equalizer, wealth. As a result, we have turned our outlook from trying to create a better world to trying to divide up what we have through different methods. We have gotten to this point because the intelligent are few, and the masses are many, and so the intelligent have attempted to rule the masses through symbolic representations of truth.

These truth-symbols are twisted, especially by that species of human of mixed mass and intelligent parentage, or the “smart” person: functionally able, but not a critical thinker capable of seeing the bigger picture. All it takes is someone willing to offer a pleasant illusion with no mention of its price, and the average person is off and running after it. Stupidity drowns out intelligence because intelligence takes into account factors which may be unpopular but correct, like avoiding long term disasters by taking on short-term gains.

I have always known that modern society was a path to death. Adults confirmed it when I was young, and then added some ridiculous rejoinder like “but we do the best we can.” I’ve seen innumerable forests torn down to make shopping centers that a decade later are the entrances to ghettoes. All of humanity’s energy and effort is going inward toward things that are non-productive, and all of it is for the luxury of the illusion that the masses can rule themselves.

When money and popularity are more important than being right, people who are smart but not intelligent rule. Intelligence is the ability to adapt and see multiple layers into a situation. Smart is the ability to manipulate. Smart isn’t rare. Intelligence is. When only smart people are in charge, the finer things are lost. I want the intelligent to rule because only they will preserve it all. They understand best practices.

Best practices is the science of implementing a technology or idea not so that it just “works,” but so that it works well in the context of being built to last as near to forever as we can think of it. When you put together a best practices house, you do not save thirty cents on light fixtures because you figure that if they last ten years, that’s about good enough. You do not do environmentally destructive things, or create cheap homes that are toxic to their inhabitants because of the insulation used. You build it right, and force the profit margin to work with that, instead of toying with costs to make the profit margin wider.

Modern society runs by making most people think they’re getting a good deal, or a good feeling like compassion or righteous anger. It does not operate according to best practices. Consequently, it is sowing seeds of long-term destruction, and most people cannot figure it out. Those that can either go into amusingly futile denial and then wonder why their kids turn out all screwed up in high school, or go insane. We’re destroying our best to please the masses. This is insanity.

Q: What are your politics?

I describe myself as half-hippie and half-philosopher. My hippie half likes people and is tolerant, compassionate and loving. My hippie half is forever out wandering in the fields, meeting new people and learning their stories, and thinking about better ways to do nice things for other people. Yeah, it sounds “gay,” but it’s me and I’m sticking by it. Someone once used the term “masculine empath” and I think it summarizes this side.

My other side is nuts and bolts practical, coupled with a sense of grand design. I like the ancient societies that aspired to rise above all other humans and to do not just adequate, and not just better than mediocre, but great things. To invent anew, to build, to create, to soar… this ties into the pragmatic because I see that people who live according to this principle aren’t necessarily “happier” in some idiot survey question style, but they are more fulfilled. They have meaning to their existence, and they never question the reason for their existence. They’re not neurotic, like most people.

The pragmatic half often horrifies me with what it discovers. It thinks like Plato, or Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer in terms of social design. This half knows that a world of a half-billion would be optimal, and that we as a species should be breeding to a level of genius coupled with clear untroubled minds, good health and beauty, and higher levels of character. That path is the only one that can inspire a species to overcome its fear of death. I am also aware that over 80% of our abilities and tendencies, if not all, are inherited, and therefore, I’m a eugenicist.

I don’t see a reason to keep stupid, criminal, perverse, and mean people around. I think we should act and breed toward a higher level, and if this means extermination of 98% of humanity, well, who cares? The end result will be better, and those people will be happier than the masses of breeding idiots ever will. The lives of the dumb and miserable have been made worse by their own machinations, as they have made all other lives worse, so their future is not a great one anyway. But there’s a bigger point here.

A species that keeps moving forward includes individuals who are not obsessed with themselves and are aware of their own small role in the universe. This is realistic. Even more, since it is aiming toward a higher goal, they are never without challenges that present a sense of achievement when even partially fulfilled, and there is a sense to the entire society of purpose. In contrast, a society which worries too much about its lowest members feeling equal has chained itself to an anchor from which no progress in quality can come, although political “progress” is assured and will do nothing but further adulterate its hope of growth. We depress ourselves with this anchor, and the people we use as the anchor do not have a great time of it either. So why do it?

We do it from the pretense that we are “helping” them, but as numerous thinkers have suggested, our actual motivation is to make ourselves feel important and higher. This is fighting over details, since whatever higher we have now can be improved upon, as can whatever lower we have. This is true in any age. A time of humans with 200 IQ points average, seven-foot tall bodies of rippling muscle, and a newly supermannish clearsighted character can still improve, even if only working on teeth that never cavitize. We must always be improving, or in stagnation, we self-cannibalize.

Q: How can you identify a moron?

It makes sense to start judgment at age 18 to give people some time to develop, especially since the smarter kids develop later (the “prodigies” you see on TV are usually good at only one thing, and do not have well-developed general intelligence). The entire goal in assessing morons is to if possible save the person, because snap judgments can easily get carried away. So think positive. You have column “A” of good things, and column “B” of bad things, and if B outweighs A the person is a moron.

Column “A”: Positive
* Academic distinction
* Led a sports or debate team
* Volunteered in independent community service
* Helps other smart people unbidden
* Has IQ over 125
* Started a business or service
* Organized others toward a non-profit goal
* Has fallen deeply in love
* Has risked self to defend abstract concept

Column “B”: Negative
* Slothful behaviors: drug addiction, sex addiction, shopping addiction
* Criminal behavior
* Watches football on the weekends for more than four hours
* Has never led a single project or team
* Never done unassigned work
* Is a yes-man or teacher’s pet
* Follows a band or political leader intensely

This is a worksheet by which you determine what positive traits someone has. A column “B” heavy person cannot think independently and has some destructive or passive behaviors, while someone with everything in column “A” is not only a model citizen and critical thinker, but someone for whom character matters. Anyone who gets more than three of any column “A” mention should probably not be terminated.

Q: Why are you racist?

I do not consider myself a racist, because I do not have scorn or opinions of inferiority toward other races. However, I am a pragmatist, and I know that pluralistic systems, in which there is more than one culture or dominant philosophy, do not work. When races are integrated into a single society, the process requires that they either give up their culture to join a dominant culture made of the lowest common denominator, or retain their culture, language and ways and therefore always be outsiders. Outsiders sense marginalization and work against the dominant culture. People who are assimilated lose contact with culture and become people without an overarching values system. Either or both of these are fatal to a civilization.

It is the loss of an overarching values system that has allowed our culture to become dominated by financial interests, who because they think along a single linear path, do not consider the secondary consequences of their actions including depletion of culture, boredom and angst of people, and destruction of our environment. We need a values system in common, or a consensus on basic values, to continue to exist as a civilization, although it does not seem that way now. All of the negative effects of our way of life have been steadily increasing for generations, and as with all things, will eventually reach a threshold after which they inundate us. The other option is to reverse course toward sanity and live in a healthier, saner place.

Q: Why are you environmentalist?

Our environment birthed us, and sustains us with clean air and water as well as animal and plant species we need for food, comfort products, and energy. On a practical level, it should always be there. On a psychological level, we function best when in a natural environment, and I do not believe it is inculcated or genetic. Look at the experience: wandering among trees, in an order so random yet logical that repetition never exists, and witnessing the interaction of tens of thousands of logical systems of energy transfer. This is fundamentally better for any thinking person than drifting down square streets of repetitive functions.

My environmentalism takes the form of this awareness: individual humans see their world in terms of material that can be converted for their own benefit. They have never in history and will never self-organize for the purpose of protecting more than a few token patches which become “parks” and have trails worn through them as if their few remaining species were zoo exhibits. Although oppression is an ugly word, some of it is needed to prevent the population from getting too large and too many people conquering too much land, dividing it with fences, exploiting it and covering it with concrete, basically genociding the species.

Most environmentalists don’t want to talk about this, so I identify myself as a Socratic Conservationist, or one who sees the practical details of civilization design that affect the environment. We can’t “patch” our current civilization with non-profit organizations and government bureaucracy to fix this problem. We need to design it into our basic process, which requires deviation from the materialist/humanist standard that each person needs the freedom to exist and to pursue wealth however they find it. When we look at it from an environmentalist standpoint, materialism/humanism is license to exploit guised as human “freedom,” although we all pay the costs for the exploitation others engender.

This realization dovetails with my belief in an ever-improving human species. Most of the people causing the widest damage are not new Platos or Beethovens. They’re people escaping shattered republics or wealthy people who want to get wealthier. And what of their quality? In the third world, most people are dumb and when given the resources of the first world, tend to exploit nature for personal profit. In the first world, we have “smart” but not intelligent people who lack the wit to restrain their rapacity for profit. Neither of these groups contributes much.

I believe there are excellent, smart people in every ethnic group, and that we need to preserve these and encourage them to breed. At the same time, there is a vast mass of people who contribute nothing and take a lot, leaving behind waste disproportionate to their value. They know nothing else. Biologically, they can know nothing else. You cannot educate someone and make them more intelligent. You can feed them more facts and pragmas, but their innate intelligence is what determines how they will act. Most of our growth from 2 billion to nearly 7 billion people has been in the third world among people with an average IQ in the mid to low 90s. While IQ isn’t flawless, it’s a good general estimate.

In short, humanity has gotten fat, and like when we personally get fat, the fat goes to all sorts of useless areas like the gut and ass that restrain our motion. We need to go on a diet, and think about population quality not quantity, and recognize that we can’t make a turd into a moonstone through education. Stupid people are going to do stupid, and right now our system doesn’t restrain their breeding, so they stupidly expand radically as long as the rest of us are going to tolerate it. And if we killed them all tomorrow, our quality of life would not only fail to decline, but would improve, in that we’d have more wilderness and a healthier environment meaning we breathe healthier air, have clean water, and get fewer cancers.

If we don’t do this purge, nature is going to do it, but nature will not discriminate. Vast plagues simply kill numbers. The black plague, killer flu, or airborne ebola of the future is not going to pause at doors painted with lamb’s blood and think, “Well, this person is highly intelligent and creative and an anchor to the community, so go not here.” Nope, they’re going to wipe out everyone they can touch. The problem will be exacerbated by stupid people responding as they did to H5N1 in America and AIDS in Africa with superstition, like raping 1-year-olds to cure AIDS, or panic, namely running around screaming anytime a chicken appeared. We need cold, rational thought here and we won’t get it from most of our newly expanded population.

Lest anyone think this is a racial genocide manifesto, it’s not. I know intelligent black, Hispanic, Asian and Indian people, and would never act against them (as a side note, I also know pluralism doesn’t work, so would relocate them). I also know excellent people of all European stripes. What I’ve seen up close too much however is the “generic modern citizen,” which comes in all races but especially that mixture of ethnicities (generic European “white trash”) and mixed-race and is exceptionally stupid. I run into these in offices when they are wearing suits just as much as I find them cruising through Wal-mart in jogging outfits. They are able to function, and do things like program computers and run machinery, but every decision they make is stupid and every preference they have is destructive. I’d like to force these not to breed, as they contribute nothing and exact damage. They are low quality human beings.

Q: Why are you for space exploration?

Every species faces a race against time and itself. It must first adapt to its environment, and then find a niche in multiple environments, like a bird that specializes in juniper berries and moves on to eat and nest in pines of all types. The final stage of this, for a sentient species, is space travel. Our planet can get wiped out by a number of factors and has its doom written in the aging and death of the sun. Nothing lasts forever. For this reason, we should develop technologies for space exploration and find new homes and expand. If we do not do this, our certain end depresses us and makes us think our human effort is good for nothing in the end. Why feel this way, and live this way, when our choice of something better is easy if not a trivial re-allocation of resources to space travel?

Q: Why are you intolerant of dumb people?

There’s a hidden cost to dumb people: they do dumb things, and no amount of education or law enforcement changes that. We cannot control our society toward smarter things because dumb people either prefer dumb things, or will tolerate stupid and parasitic behavior. For this reason boycotts don’t work: a few thousand smart people boycotting a destructive product are overwhelmed by stupid people who keep buying it. We all know fast food outlets, convenience stores and shopping centers in excess produce blight, but as long as there’s a steady traffic of morons they keep appearing.

Politically, idiots also present a problem in that they’re easy to swindle. Promise them something new and claim it’s free (don’t mention the socialized costs and indirect consequences they’ll have to pay to avoid) and idiots will vote for it. In contrast, when you tell them something must be done which will necessitate immediate inconvenience but long term benefit, and they’ll vote against it. Periodically, they band together and decide they’re “oppressed” and must revolt, usually by killing any smart person they find. Note that countries with lagging average IQs have a direct correlation to past revolution, as in France and Russia, who fall on average 7-10 points behind their nearest neighbors.

What defines idiocy is a short attention span and preference for immediate rewards over long-term benefits, and this produces innumerable social blight and creates a depressing society in which smart people are marginalized. When a society in the grips of humanist/materialist principles, and idiots vote for that too, decides to try to incorporate idiots, it ends up with an “averaging” effect that stops rewarding higher performance and starts rewarding that universally-accessible trend, conformity to norms and ability to manipulate bureaucratic systems. This is a passive, subtle erosion that constitutes another form of idiot revolt.

The terrible fact of life is that any intelligently-designed system oppresses those who do not understand this intelligent design and/or are not intelligent. To reward the great, you must avoid rewarding the blockhead and average. If you do not reward the great, idiots proliferate. For this reason any system that is intelligent and rewards the intelligent discriminates against idiots, but the converse is also true: any system that is unintelligent and rewards the unintelligent discriminates against the intelligent. Until humanity can get over its moral pretense and face this reality, it will be doomed not only to remain on earth but to do so in constant petty conflict over resource allocation.

Q: What is pluralism?

Philosophical pluralism is the idea that one considers all possibilities, but political pluralism is the idea that all possibilities are represented constantly in the same society without every making a choice. It results in a total fragmentation of focus and an inability to make the most vital decisions, although easy things like “attack when attacked” are not affected.

In human terms, pluralism results from an unwillingness to make the best decision because it will cut some people out of the loop. If we decide that religions based on worship of a deity named Lord Zod who demands sacrifice in blood are illogical, those who follow the Church of Zod are excluded from our society. If we decide that buying plastic junk is illogical, people who enjoy plastic junk are probably going to suffer an inability to do so. And on and on. When a decision is not made, the result is that no decisions can possibly be made.

On many issues, it is important to have a pluralistic outlook at first and consider all possibilities. But deferring a decision when all the data is present should be seen as exactly what it is: indecisiveness. We are afraid to make a decision that would hamper anyone, and therefore end up with a gross compromise that hampers everyone. We all get more angry by the day as we realize that our society is not only not serving our interests, but seems to be unwilling to do anything but limit us from acting against that which impedes our interests. The result is sublimated tension that explodes periodically in illogical demonstrations of anger.

Q: What is utilitarianism?

Utilitarianism is the concept that the best action in any situation is the one that benefits the most people most of the time, but this is commonly interpreted through the responses of a majority. Since this majority is inevitably composed of less intelligent people, the solution that is selected becomes a compromise that benefits no one. We describe objects as “utilitarian” when they fit the average hand, the average ass, or the average taste, and by doing so become inappropriate for anyone who does not fit into a mathematical average human form. Since such a form exists only as an abstraction, everyone is equally not at home in the new object, but it’s the most “efficient” and “cost-effective” solution according to the utilitarian view.

Where utilitarianism takes hold politically, the result is the mishmash of democracy and capitalism and social control through memes regulated by media that so far is our best method of control as human beings, although our least effective method of finding a best path for society as a whole. By focusing on the equality of individuals, we have enacted a nightmare compromise that ends up alienating all individuals, even if they do not notice and cannot put it into words (or worse, some idiotic survey put forth in check boxes on a scantron sheet). We create a hybrid of intentions that has no intention, and this forces those who do have a clear intention, which by nature will inconvenience or offend someone, to work outside the law.

Utilitarianism is an offshoot of both pluralism and the material/humanist belief in equality. It believes that we can throw a question out to the people at large and have them return a cogent choice, and that from that, we can pick the best path. Utilitarian systems inevitably alienate so many people that they are immediately followed by violent revolution, the killing of smart people, and then the choice of a series of exploitative dictators. Most third world nations are former utilitarian systems, as are the crumbled republics of Rome and Greece.

Q: Why do you say modern people are delusional?

Delusion is defined as a belief which contradicts reality but is held to be reality. In our modern time, the greatest delusion comes through the media. A stunning example is the Iraq war, where the supposedly “liberal” National Public Radio and Smithsonian Magazine and even Rolling Stone all agreed with conservative Fox News and Bill O’Reilly that Saddam Hussein was a terrible murderer, genocidist, and probable possessor of WMDs. Any time someone can be accused of violating “human rights,” our entire confederacy of dunces society is united against them.

The media is one aspect of this problem, but the other aspect is the values we hold to be the foundation of our society. Since we don’t have much in common, having come from all over the world, we are forced to agree on the lowest common denominator, which is basically “don’t touch my stuff, and I won’t touch yours.” It’s immature and pathetic but this is the level on which our society operates. And so every single person out there infected by this virus has a sneering contempt for anyone who might be unafraid to take stuff away from idiots, and re-arrange it to make a better society.

People live in these little worlds they’ve made for themselves, like we are a planet of little planets moving around. They watch their favorite news source, and assume it’s fact, when months later it is shown to be wrong, consistently. They sneer at anyone who dares tell the truth and feel better about themselves for it. They send twenty bucks to feed starving children in Africa or Los Angeles and think they’re angels for the rest of the day. But they don’t go get a house in the ghetto, they don’t drive through it, and they keep working at their jobs for personal profit. Are they hypocrites? In most cases, they’re just infected with this anti-misanthropic disease of materialism/humanism.

Q: How will futurist misanthropy solve these problems?

Futurist misanthropy alone cannot solve a damn thing. If in the hands of smart people, it helps them cut through the delusion and see that our problem is low quality of human beings (intelligence and character mostly, but a good deal of them are also fugly). At that point, they have a choice. If they rise to power and oppress the moronic desires of morons, it’s a victory. If they line up everyone of low intelligence and bad character near the edge of a pit and shoot them, reducing humanity to the half-billion quality people it has, it’s a major victory in that every human born after that time will be on his or her way to a new level of human. We want the superhuman. We want a goal to society. We want a reason to strive and a belief that we will not just have quality of life, but we’ll develop greater quality of self.

Q: How can this come about?

None of the talking heads in media or the idiots you meet in jobs and churches will tell you this, but a big screwup is due soon, probably within this generation. We’ve got too many balls in the air and too many debts that need paying. This will probably not be some huge event like 9-11 squared where airplanes fly into every building and suddenly we’re in total war status, but it will be a transfer of the United States and most of Europe to third-world economies, political systems, and social expectations. You will have to bribe your way to the top, and you will never be able to rely on public resources (sanitation, education, police) for a decent way of life.

At this point, the society as a whole will be too weak to oppose decentralized aggression from lone wolf units whose main goal will be to murder the heads of the moron groups, exterminate morons from local neighborhoods, and crush any infrastructure of control (media, government, religion) they find in their local area. These people will probably not be organized by anything but the thought that world moron death is necessary for intelligence to survive, and they will act quietly at first toward achieving it. In third world states, overpopulation is the norm and constant murder raises no eyebrows, so their efforts will probably go undetected for a decade or two until the bodies start really piling up.

Of course, this isn’t certain. If it does not come about, the entire globe will slowly regress to a third-world status of cultureless grey races of lumpenproletariat who serve their sneering cosmopolitan masters, and humanity will never make it off this rock and will perish from internal conflict. Aliens passing by in spacecraft we cannot yet dream will look down at the ruin and comment, “Another failed species that cannibalized itself because it couldn’t stop fighting over the wealth that was and look toward the future.” That’s why we’re futurist misanthropes — we’re misanthropes because we believe in (sections of) humanity, and we want a better future that just sitting around in this masturbatory zone, fighting over bread and television.