“Why do people go to the zoo?”
-H. L. Mencken, on why he lives in America in spite of disliking it

When I think of zoos, I think of people telling stories about the time they saw a monkey or chimpanzee throwing its poop and/or masturbating.

These stories are always played off as funny. No one despairs over the existence of poop-throwing, masturbating-in-plain-sight monkeys, or even the fact that these seem to be the most interesting things monkeys do in zoos. But if you wanted to paint a depressing, misanthropic view of the world, a pretty good way to do so would be to metaphorically paint humanity as a bunch of monkeys that have nothing better to do with their time than throw their poop and masturbate.

Conclusion: the image of humans as poop-throwing monkeys is depressing in a way that the image of poop-throwing monkeys isn’t. Why is this? More broadly: we think a great deal of human behavior is frivolous and stupid to the point of being depressing: from reading /Cosmo/ to forwarding e-mails about how Obama is a Muslim to Scientology to liking the /Saw/ movies. But none of these things would be depressing if done by monkeys. A monkey reading /Cosmo/ would be pretty damn impressive.

The key difference, of course, that a monkey reading /Cosmo/ is greatly exceeding its normal capacities, while a human doing so is under-achieving. Such assessments are capacity-relative. When we despair over the frivolous lives of many humans, we despair over persistently unfulfilled capacity. Misanthropy has a silver lining: it’s dependent on there being a lot of human capacity, which we could only know about because it sometimes is used well–not as often as it should be, but sometimes it is.