"Are you surrounded by fools and non-entities, by people with bad taste and silly desires, by boring people undeserving of your attention, by people who can be understood quickly by applying a broad and negative brush—creeps, stuck-up snobs, bubbleheaded party kids, smug assholes, and, indeed, jerks?
If this is how the world regularly looks to you, then I have bad news. Likely, you are the jerk. This is not how the world looks to most people, and it is not how the world actually is. You have a distorted vision. You are not seeing the individuality and potential of the people around you."
That's some bullshit right there...
If you've climbed out of the cesspit of modern society to actually reach for real human potential, it doesn't make you a jerk for looking out over the masses of immorality. Lust, greed, vanity, laziness, gluttony, etc. All the people wallowing in their own crap, look up and see you doing better, doing the right thing, working harder and smarter...they can't stand that and will do whatever, say whatever they can to pull you back down into the pit (or at the very least take advantage of you). This guy is trying to say that you're a problem if you're striving to be better. "Since most of us are down here wallowing in crap, we are obviously right...majority rules. You just can't see our individuality and potential from there!" Quite the opposite, it's the height of human potential that gives real perspective, and everyone can see the peak of human potential if they'd look up. The higher you climb human potential the farther you can see out over the writhing masses and see how little "individuality" there is in the pit of society, everyone lying, cheating, stealing, fucking each other (literally and figuratively), trying to amass more worthless crap and or brag about how much crap they have...whatever. You can sometimes spot those special people who have real individuality because they also decided to climb. Sometimes though, the place you climbed up has nobody near and it can really feel like you against the world. Obviously nobody is perfect, life is a struggle and there are lots of things that can make you slip...and the easiest way to fall back into immorality is to start thinking you're better because you climbed above it for a while.
Living a truly good life is hard.
I have no delusions about it...I'm actually pretty pathetic, I've only climbed up out of the cesspit a little way. I try to tell myself it's OK because I'm willing to help others up this little way, but the truth is I'm to scared, weak, and fraught with temptations to climb any higher. I've gotten comfortable clinging to my spot but I know that all it'll take is a little rain to wash me down. I've spent several years here in this spot (very lucky so far), and even when thinking about it I can't seem to muster any power to do something about it. I am definitely no better than those in the crap below me, but I can also see enough from here to know how disgusting most of humanity is as well. Those who have amassed the most crap in life still have collected nothing more than an ant hill of garbage compared with the mountain of life.
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