Hate
Do you hate anyone? Is there anyone you truly hate? I realized today that I hate no one. That word is vastly overused. I’m hardly the archetype of universal love, but I don’t hate.
I was planning to post a link and write, “I could write a treatise about how much I hate this guy, but this piece is really brilliant.” That would have been tongue in cheek, of course, since I don’t hate the guy as much as I find him on many occasions really annoying, and I have only met his online persona. But still, I think hate is too strong a word, even in a joke-y context.
Hate is incredibly strong. Most people are either vastly more hateful than me, or they’re using the word too lightheartedly. I really doubt I’m that much more compassionate and forgiving than most people. I just don’t hate. Not even Hitler.
Hitler is a good example of what’s not hate: a distanced contempt. Hate isn’t distanced, nor is it simply contempt. Don’t get me wrong: Hitler was horrible. Truly horrible. But he didn’t touch me personally. It’s a fact of human psychology, at least my pscyhology, that (perceived) proximity to the center of the universe self is a very important factor in determining the intensity of emotion. Six million Jews, sixty million soldiers and civilians — they’re statistics that fail to move me. I’m not a psychopath: I maintain, as does most everyone, a kind of distanced sadness for the useless suffering and loss of human life that is WWII, and for every similar conflict, on a large or smaller scale, but it doesn’t move me to hate. Moreover, I think few other people are moved to hatred by such conflicts; most of them were personally involved. Unless you were personally affected by the Holocaust, and/or managed to channel your hatred for something else into this one outlet, one person, or a personified movement such as Nazism, I don’t think you really hate Hitler or the Nazis either.
That’s just as well, because true hatred is intense, it’s powerful, it’s potent, it’s unpredictable, often irrational, rarely efficient in serving justice, and generally explosive. If you had ten people you hated with equal intensity, for different reasons (so that you’re not directing your hatred for those ten into a kind of mentally unified entity, a mental Mr. Nazism or what-have-you, that stands for all that those ten have done together), I’m positive you would have several murders on your conscience. I don’t think any human can deal with that much hate and not snap.
Sure, there are moments of hatred. When I get really, really angry at someone, I probably hate them. For fifteen minutes, and thankfully, I can control myself for fifteen minutes, or I would’ve done a lot of horrible stuff I’d later regret. Hatred coupled with anger is explosive. Long-standing hatred, though, is a lot rarer, I think. There is the heat of the moment, which is anger plus hatred, and then there’s long-term hate, which is rare indeed.
Some people for some reason or another bear a kind of personified hate against groups of people. I don’t know what’s actually happening in their brains, but metaphorically, they’re breathing life to a person that represents a whole group and making this mental golem the object of their hatred, and the golem can sometimes possess the bodies of individual members of the group, which is what we see when there are ethnic riots or when someone gets beat up or killed because of their sexuality or skin color. I don’t consider this hate against many people, but hate against a single, mental “person” that represents all these people — I truly believe hating a million people individually would make your neuronal pathways melt, all mental locks spring up, and massacre or suicide would result. I think there are few true group haters — people with true hate directed towards a personified group, like Jews or Homos or Blacks — out there. Few of the people cheering Proposition 8 hate homosexuals. Most of them, if they snapped, would kill their wives’ secret lovers long before they would give gays a thought. (Proximity to the self, again.) There may be a few who would go after gays first, but they’re not many. No one you know truly hates gays or blacks or whatever, statistically. Which is an important point: you don’t need to hate to harm seriously.
I’m not one of the group haters, and even if you spout anti-gay and racist bigotry every day (which surely you don’t, but imagine you did), you probably aren’t, either.
At about this point I might have added a section about the subtleties of hatred versus acts of hatred, but instead I’m going to jump ahead to something more interesting. There’s one person I could conceivably hate. One candidate on my Who to Torture and Kill When I Snap list. (Just so you’re not worried: no, I don’t have one.) This person is a bully. He bullied me for many years; physically and psychically, by himself and through proxies. There have been extended periods of my life when I truly hated this guy. One time, I actually threatened to kill him, to his face, and I meant it. (I think it was in sixth grade.)
He fullfills the proximity criterion: he caused me personally a lot of suffering through the years. And yet, he’s removed from me as I am today in time. A few years ago, when I realized that I didn’t hate him anymore, that I couldn’t summon the intense anger, fear, hatred, the murderous fantasies that I once had, it felt really weird. I guess I should be happy, because that hatred was hurting me and I don’t truly believe hurting him would be justice. But instead, I just feel empty. I suppose that’s what actual hatred does to you: either you act it out and have to live the rest of your life with that knowledge, or it gradually disappears, leaving a hole. Without amateur freud-ing too much here, and without projecting too far into the future (I’m still young, and I don’t know how I’ll feel when I’m fifty or eighty), I can only describe the feeling as a void. When I think about it or try to summon the hate in me, it’s like the abyss is gazing into me (thanks, Milton).
Maybe it seems petty to admit that I can’t muster hatred for the slayer of millions, but I could for a childhood bully. That’s just how it goes. True hate, I think, requires personal contact. Don’t worry, though: there’s plenty of other destructive emotions out there that can promote unrest, suffering, revenge and death in the world, even if they’re not really hate.
Do you hate anyone?
