Being that I’ve been a student in college for nearly eight long, inexcusable, excruciating years, one would think I have mastered every subject; ergo, have heard every side, every philosophical theory and every fallacy under the sun.

Along with my time spent here, take into account the two years in preschool, two years in kindergarten, four years in elementary school, middle school and high school, and I should be the next Einstein, Donald Trump or Bill Gates; but I’m not.

I am not here to collect pity for being a college girl in her mid-twenties on the 10-year plan but would simply like to note that any fool can take a test and get a degree. It takes a special person to be as cynical as I am; it takes a special person to be able to use that trait to argue a viewpoint against someone with a much better memory, knowledge of history, update on current events and a degree from an exclusive university.

Well, maybe that’s the “intellectuals’” tactic when it comes to getting their very expensive, college-educated point across, but it’s not mine. In fact, there’s a quote in the movie, “Good Will Hunting” where Matt Damon’s humble character says to an Ivy League know-it-all, “You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.” My point is just that: an education doesn’t necessarily make you more profound.

The other night, I was out at a bar with three friends. One of them is an extreme liberal; the second, “undecided” but swinging more to the left, and the third, “moderately conservative.” I, myself, am a realist and a self-proclaimed misanthrope.

My two slightly more liberal friends are aspiring actors (go figure), so I already had their biases pinpointed, being that 99.9 percent of Hollywood are the libertine leftists.

I don’t recall how the deliberation got started, thanks to the cloudy effects of the Guiness, but I believe I may have instigated a dispute regarding the travesty behind most social service programs. I said something along the lines of how “it’s a dog-eat-dog world,” and biologically, everything comes down to the unfortunate reality of Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory; and if people can’t get up off their rear ends and find themselves a job instead of popping out kid after unlucky kid, why should I spend my hard-earned money trying to help them?
It was soon very apparent that I was the only one at the bar who felt this way.

Their faces twisted in disgust and their mouths hung agape at the monster at the counter with whom they were sharing beers. I was even left to fend for myself with my so-called “moderately conservative” friend seated beside me on the tall barstool, who didn’t throw as much as one agreeable opinion my way. I kindly wanted to tip his chair over.

So, I continued with my common sense reasoning about how my own mother struggled raising me on her own with a waitress’s paltry salary but never allowed herself to walk into a government office to apply for food stamps.

Now, let me tell you: I do not come from a wealthy family, I’ve lived in mediocre apartments my whole life, and my mom and I have shopped at the 99 cents store on more than one occasion. Still, I put my own lower-class background behind me and argued that we need to take care of ourselves and those in our family first. Frankly, I added, other people are not my problem.

Before you write me off as an insensitive, cold-hearted, closed-minded, quintessential conservative, let me stress that playing the devil’s advocate in heated debates such as these is my favorite pastime. Call me fanatical, but I absolutely love the thrill of being the most hated person in the room. I have always liked taking the side of the least popular position, whether I believe it whole-heartedly or not. In this circumstance, however, I was serious about my disdain for lazy people and my abhorrence for my increasing taxes.

With his opinion of me suddenly shifting from disgust to pity, the liberal decided it was his duty as a Democrat to try to save me from my provincial madness and argue the side of the less fortunate.

“How can you be so insensitive?” he asked, in grave disappointment. “Don’t you care about people at all?”

Suddenly, it occurred to me that, for me, this wasn’t about politics or social ails anymore but the pure and honest fact that I just don’t like people in general.

This was the point in the evening where he got to impress me with everything he learned during his brief stint in junior college. He and the rest of the group filled me in on the history behind social welfare programs, some stats on social reform and our U.S. government’s position in it all. They threw out “facts” from the recent issue of “TIME” magazine and even brought in some arguments based on personal experiences from people they knew who were “helped” by social services.

After his lecture on sensitivity, and everyone else occasionally chiming in with concurrence, they looked at me in silence and waited for some indication that I magically transformed my ugly and selfish ways. After a long pause and a deep breath, I said, simply, “No, actually, I don't.”

The beauty behind my stance was that I didn’t need any government statistics, research, news articles or a college degree to get my point across; because the reasoning behind my argument had nothing to do with my political ideology, rather, my pessimistic outlook on society overall. My opinion is that most people are, in fact, idiots, and I probably wouldn’t help them, even if they were rich idiots.

That was all the information I needed to win the argument; because, how are you going to argue and win against someone whose logic is based solely on cynicism?

Knowing full well that there was nothing any of them could do to change my misanthropic ways, we continued our evening sitting solemnly at the bar and drinking our Guiness, my liberal friend quietly envying me for so abruptly winning an argument it took him three years in college, a daily subscription to the LA Times and three hours of CNN’s nightly news for which to prepare.