UNIFYING AGENT – HATRED!
Shakespeare got it right, we hate what we fear; that includes the truth about ourselves. Intelligence, even genius, cannot protect us from
the corrosive venom of hatred. Hatred can scar everything we say and do, and ultimately
shatter our physical and emotional health. Moreover, people whose values I may find
unsettling, I may dislike personally but that is not the same as hate. To put
it another way, I do not hate someone whom I go to great pains to avoid.
Dislike has gotten a bad rap. It is treated as if the same as hate. Dislike is preferential; hate is visceral and
consuming.
With dislike, you are not comfortable with certain
people. It may be a matter of their
personality, social tics, or their inability to share a single view without
lying three times in the course of a single sentence. In other words, you don’t accept them as they
are, and you best avoid them, because you will not change them, and if you attempt
to do so, you will either be disappointed or come to own their problems. That is not hatred; that is dislike. Let us call it “partisan.”
The counterintuitive nature of hate is that you want the
hated person to think, believe, value, enjoy and be obsessed with the same
things that you are because only then can you allow yourself to love yourself
as you are. Notice I say “love,” not “like.” This brings us back to like/dislike.
Another word for “like” is self-acceptance, the acceptance
of ourselves as we are, warts and all, which in turn leads almost automatically
to an amazing tolerance for other people as we find them; people who differ
with us in some or many ways.
It doesn’t matter whether the difference is large or
small. Other people’s views do not belong
to us.
Since these views or problems don’t belong to us, we are not
responsible for them; and therefore should we attempt to change their views or solve
their problems, we would be disappointed because we cannot solve what we cannot
own, and in any case, we wouldn’t be successful if we tried because only the
problem possessor is privy to the subtle vagaries of the problem.
Well intention people are always surprised and often hurt when
people whom they try to help hold them accountable and sometimes even in
contempt when they fail to solve their problems.
This is a simple but pivotal fact: people never quite understand
that because they have the same conflicting views of themselves as others have
of themselves – in terms of like and dislike, hate and love – that what is
personally confounding should be less so in the collective.
This bewilderment is largely energy sapping because we have
difficulty admitting to ourselves much less to others that we dislike much less
hate certain people. We like to think of
ourselves as being tolerant when clearly we are not. Indeed, in terms of self-dislike and self-hatred
we are mainly self-estranged. Since
like/dislike and love/hate is either ill-defined or denied, is it any wonder
that our relationships vis-à-vis others is often troubling?
Imagine the cleansing feeling if we could say, “I dislike
this person because. . .” or “I hate this person because . . .”? Neither dislike nor hate are grounded in the
rational much less the acceptable or the charitable. Instead, what do we do? We attempt to justify our feelings, failing
to realize when we describe what we dislike or hate, we are equally apt to be
describing what irritates us about ourselves to ourselves.
Consequently, people obsessive about such matters remain trapped
in personal disgust and collective bewilderment not only with others, but with
themselves as well.
Now, the reason I see this as being counterintuitive is that
the hater, and Hoffer is very clear on this, finds it nigh impossible to "love"
himself but incredibly easy to hold himself in self-contempt to fill the void left
by the visceral emptiness of his hatred.
So, we are back to Shakespeare, “we hate what we fear,” and with the hater no one is hated or
feared more than the hater of him or herself.
Quite remarkably, haters find there are tons of people who
are equally uncomfortable in their own skin, and therefore are attracted with
delirious excitement to others who are so inclined, making hatred one of the
most unifying concepts of contemporary life, not only in these United States,
but apparently across the world.
I’ve always been more interested in ideas than people, and
as a consequence have never been interested enough in others to loathe them much
less hate them. If hatred is the other side of love then it may mask sincerity with
duplicitous deceit.
People can be intimidated if you don’t think, value, believe
or behave as they do, or as they would expect or like to think you do. Hatred in such instances is a fear of not belonging
to something bigger than oneself, something in which to lose oneself, but disguised
as a wholesome ideal or holy cause.
Visceral hatred puts me in mind of a person in a cage of their own
making where there is no freedom, no precious dawn, no warm sunny afternoon, no
tranquilizing and peaceful sunset, but one continuous all-consuming life-destroying
imprisoning agony. Such a person should not be despised but pitied as he is dead in the sepulcher of his own confinement. Hoffer sees the devil in all this.
Hoffer writes:
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive
of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self,
makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking.
He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with
his like into one flaming mass. Heine (Heinrich, German poet)
suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.
Mass Movements can rise and spread without
belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a
mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When
Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: “No
. . . . We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy,
not merely an abstract one”. . .
That hatred springs more from self-contempt
than from a legitimate grievance is seen in the intimate connection between hatred
and a guilty conscience.
There is perhaps no surer way of infecting
ourselves with virulent hatred toward a person than by doing him a grave injustice.
That others have a just grievance against us is a more potent reason for hating
them than that we have a just grievance against them. We do not make people humble
and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves.
We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness.
Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us. There
is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation
of self-righteousness.
To wrong those we hate is to add fuel
to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred
for him. The most effective way to silence our guilty conscience is to convince
ourselves and others that those we have sinned against are indeed depraved creatures,
deserving every punishment, even extermination. We cannot pity those we have wronged,
nor can we be indifferent toward them. We must hate and persecute them or else leave
them or else leave the door open to self-contempt.
A sublime religion inevitably generates
a strong feeling of guilt. There is an unavoidable contrast between loftiness of
profession and imperfection of practice. And as one would expect, the feeling of
guilt promotes hate and brazenness. Thus, it seems that the more sublime the faith
the more virulent the hatred it breeds ((The True Believer, Ibid, pp. 85-86, pp. 89-90).
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