I need to practice hate. I can’t keep up with the big haters. I can’t imagine voting against Obama’s economic recovery plan because a radio demagogue has excited my limbic node. I’m not properly hating able bodied people who plunge ahead of me in public and then fail to hold the door open as I approach. I need to become much much angrier. I will have to study this matter. How does one become a misanthrope? Is there a workshop somewhere I can take? You know: “How to Hate People 101”.
Having been blind since childhood I know a few things about being lonesome. And I still go to cocktail parties and feel out of the loop, standing in a corner with my dog at my side and a foggy sense of the isolato about me. Everyone else it seems has made useful eye contact. I sip a glass of wine that someone has brought me and think about the icons in a Russian church. I’m lonesome in public.
Haters don’t think about the icons in a Russian church but prefer to imagine that everyone else has something they don’t. Lost in my corner I think that everyone is likely lonely its just that my brand of it has greater evidence. I think of a weeping icon. I think of gold dust in the corner of Mary’s eyes. I take another sip of the Merlot.
Hate is dependent on abstraction. If human beings are symbol making animals as everyone from Ernst Cassirer to Foghorn Leghorn will tell you then its also patently obvious that the ability to metaphorize others is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut would say is a problem of having “a big brain”.
The big brain says that someone who is not you is getting a better deal, more land, more natural resources, more beach front property, more poems in the New Yorker, more sex, more and more. In “Hate 101” the step from envy to metaphorized hatred involves demagoguery. The anthroposophist stands on a soapbox and shouts. He has an unfortunate reedy voice. He sounds like Orville Popcorn. He says that the people in the next neighborhood are stealing the bedsheets off the clothes lines. Never mind it was the wind. Its the Poles or the Slovaks or the Finns or the Blacks or the Jews or the Arabs or the unions or what have you.
Someone yet to be named is stealing from you. But in “Hate 101” that’s just the first lesson. The next step is to imagine violence against your house, your district, your local watering hole. Imagined violence is the Big Brain’s specialty. “The Gulf of Tonkin” or “Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq” are two useful examples.
In washington the Republican’s rage concerning Obama’s stimulus plan has much to do with the sense that the Democrats are now getting the goodies. They forget Haliburton. Forget the secret energy deals. Forget the siphoning of American wealth upwards to the top wealthiest 10 per cent.
But it doesn’t matter because the Big Brain is outraged. Someone is stealing. I’m going to hate you. I’m going to stop thinking. What a relief this will be. Hate is to discernment as connect the dots is to designing a micro processor but what the hell.
And this of course is the problem for me. Hate is easy so I don’t trust it. Not in the abstract. The man who beats his horse in front of my house is a different matter. He’s real. He needs to be confronted. We might have to arrange to steal his horse. But that’s for another class. “Horse Thievery 101” will be next semester I’m told.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Lately, I’ve wondered if a pinch of hate isn’t essential. If we profess great love, doesn’t hate follow, in some form, somewhere?
Who, for example, doesn’t hate cruelty? Or rotten laws. Personally, in no particular order, I hate tainted food, inclement weather, and foul odors. I hate cancer and nasty colds, wars, genocide, poverty, and ignorance. I hate all ugly behavior and more, and can not understand who doesn’t.
When I was young, I might argue the following, but lately, I’ve had to concede that morality really does come down to infinite shades of gray.
PS. Lance Mannion sent me here and I thank him for it.
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I disagree with the idea that experiencing the emotion of hate, or any other emotion — be it love, passion, worry, empathy, or even indifference– necessarily means that one doesn’t think. That would mean that we would have to eliminate all emotions from our lives. This just isn’t human. Why? because it is HUMAN to feel emotions. Does the author believe that Steve Jobs and Mike Wozniak, who actually designed and built computers, never feel emotions? Or that Beethoven and Wagner, composers of some of the most beautiful (and emotional??) music in the world never felt emotions? That’s ridiculous.
Neither do I agree with what some would argue, that some emotions are “better” or “healthier” than others. That hate is less healthy than love. Again this argument is without merit. They are simply two sides of the same coin, two facets of human experience. Would it be “wrong” or “unhealthy” to love a romantic partner who has earned your love? No, no more than it would be wrong or unhealthy to hate someone who just beat and robbed you, or murdered your husband, or raped your wife. Just because you feel hate or love does not mean that you should therefore ACT illegally or stupidly (either by loving someone who does not deserve your love, or by physically attacking someone you hate). That is a different issue.
I think it’s high time we moved away from the quasi-religious embargo on “hate” that exists in some circles. I’m a thinking atheist man, and I hate, just as much as I love. To deny this would be dishonest.
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Gorgeous. Well done, sir.
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