On Hate

From what one gathers about the happenings in the world, one observes the pervasiveness of hate, of division amongst human beings. At all levels in life, opportunists holding the reins of social influence seek to emphasise the faultlines between people and their identities, at the expense of the common humanity we share. How easy it is to do this! A single propagandist statement repeated sufficiently and persuasively enough, even though we may initially dismiss it as divisive, may over time come to seem true. It is by such stratagem that ideologues gain power over their followers. They appeal to a certain primal desire of human beings to feel secure and obtain positive reinforcement amidst a certain group of people who share their beliefs, as distinct from the out-group.

 

If the writer is to be honest, he must admit that he at times resents, and even hates people. Hate is destructive: it puts paid to a balanced state of mind and all relationship with others. Hate is self-enclosing: a person who hates cannot be brought round by another to reason in that disturbed state. Each time one regains sanity, one has hitherto resolved to oneself to never hate again, but this has never worked. The fact is that a mere verbal pledge of non-hate cannot settle the issue.

Looking at the phenomenon of hate, it is obvious that most of us living in this society have come to see it as a disgraceful state, to be overcome as soon as possible. We condemn hate, and this very condemnation prevents us from understanding it in its entirety. We have, most of us, been told: by our elders, by our belief systems and by other systems of authority – that to hate is wrong, and to overcome it we must cultivate its opposite, which is love. Yet, the more we seek to cultivate love, the more superficial, contrived and utterly meaningless the entire exercise becomes.  There is artificiality in this: I dislike you, but I have been told that this is wrong: therefore I develop ‘tolerance’, which is nothing but the expenditure of mental effort to prevent one’s actions from producing socially undesirable consequences. In this is involved a deep inner conflict, and therefore it is not love. Can love be cultivated in opposition to hate?

Thus, returning to the point, how is one to deal with hate, which one sees is objectively a most potent poison, without either suppressing it or giving it expression? I don’t know.

But we may ask: are we capable of looking at hate as it arises, without judging it as undesirable, or taking pleasure in it?

Yes, for those of us who have not been conditioned to condemn hate, the other default response is to  actually take a sort of perverse pleasure in it. Hate, particularly when overt,  can be pleasurable, in that one revels in the evident discomfiture of the object of one's hate. Even if one feels the pain inherent in hatred, it is quite possible that one has got used to such a state, and resists when efforts are made to get out of it. So pleasure, revulsion and familiarity prevent the direct perception of the fact that one hates.

  

Coming back to the question, can one understand the process of hate within oneself without labelling it as desirable or undesirable, and carrying this observation through with utmost seriousness? After all, does not the transcendence of hate demand a total understanding of it?