Hatred by Willard Gaylin (best autobiographies to read TXT) 📕

Table of Contents

ALSO BY WILLARD GAYLIN, M.D.

Title Page

HATRED

Chapter 1 - CONFRONTING EVIL HEAD-ON

Chapter 2 - DEFINING HATRED

Prejudice and Bigotry

HATRED - AS AN EMOTION

Chapter 3 - RAGE

Anger as a Model

Chapter 4 - FEELING THREATENED

Deprivation

Inequity, Unfairness, and Injustice

Betrayal

Exploitation and Manipulation

Frustration

Humiliation

Chapter 5 - ENVY

HATRED - AS A THOUGHT DISORDER

Chapter 6 - UNDERSTANDING “NORMAL” BEHAVIOR

Chapter 7 - UNDERSTANDING “SICK” BEHAVIOR

Abnormal Behavior

Sick Behavior

Chapter 8 - THE PARANOID SHIFT

Everyday Paranoia

The Paranoid Personality

Grievance Collectors

Chapter 9 - THE PSYCHOTIC AND THE PSYCHOPATH

The Psychotic

The Psychopath

HATRED - AS AN ATTACHMENT

Chapter 10 - IDENTIFYING THE SELF

Identity: The Self

Modeling and Identification

Chapter 11 - IDENTIFYING THE ENEMY

Scapegoating

The Territorial Enemy: The Enemy at Hand

The Ideological Enemy

THE CULTURES OF HATRED

Chapter 12 - A CULTURE OF HATRED

Antisemitism

Nazi Germany

Chapter 13 - A COMMUNITY OF HATERS

Joined in a Web of Hatred

The Power of Religion

Chapter 14 - CONFRONTING HATRED HEAD-ON

Acknowledgements

INDEX

Copyright Page

ALSO BY WILLARD GAYLIN, M.D.

Psychodynamic Understanding of Depression: The Meaning of Despair

In the Service of Their Country: War Resisters in Prison

Partial Justice: A Study of Bias in Sentencing

Caring

Doing Good: The Limits of Benevolence (with I. Glasser, S. Marcus, and D. Rothman)

Feelings: Our Vital Signs

The Killing of Bonnie Garland: A Question of Justice

The Rage Within: Anger in Modern Life

Rediscovering Love

Adam and Eve and Pinocchio: On Being and Becoming Human

The Male Ego

The Perversion of Autonomy:

The Proper Uses of Coercion and Restraints in a Liberal Society (with Bruce Jennings)

Talk Is Not Enough: How Psychotherapy Really Works

And next to him malicious Envie rode,

Upon a ravenous wolfe, and still did chaw

Between his cankred teeth a venomous tode,

That all the poison ran about his chaw:

But inwardly he chawed his owne maw

At neighbors wealth, that made him ever sad;

For death it was, when any good he saw,

And wept, that cause of weeping none he had

But when he heard of harme, he wexed wondrous glad.

EDMUND SPENSER

The Faerie Queene

HATRED

1

CONFRONTING EVIL HEAD-ON

One day, in July 1941, half of the population of Jedwabne, Poland, murdered the other half—some 1,600 men, women, and children representing all but 7 of the town’s Jews. Before killing them, the Poles tortured and humiliated the Jews. They gouged out their eyes with kitchen knives, dismembered them with crude farm instruments, and drowned the women in shallow waters. Infants were pitchforked in front of their mothers and thrown onto burning coals, all accompanied by the shrieks of delight, indeed the laughter, of their neighbors.

The slaughter of the Jedwabne Jews lasted a whole day. And their neighbors, the entire Polish population of the town, either witnessed or participated in the torment. Roughly 50 percent of the adult Polish males were later identified by name as active participants. Even in Nazi Germany whole communities of “normal” people did not rise up to destroy their neighbors. They mostly left that to the professionals while they passively assented—crime enough. In Poland an entire community voluntarily butchered their neighbors and delighted in the activity.

How can one explain such cold passion, such monumental hatred, such cruelty—not on the part of some insane and deranged madman—but by an entire populace in concert, and against the very neighbors who had previously shared their everyday community and life? Jan T. Gross, who wrote an account of the slaughter in his remarkable book, Neighbors,1 made no attempt to explain the phenomenon, having set as his task the meticulous documentation of this seemingly incredible event.

A distinguished journalist, commenting on this book in his column, addressed the question of motivation (always a treacherous and difficult assignment), which Gross chose to ignore. His answer to the question of why the Poles acted with such bestiality and hatred was “because it was permitted. Because they could.” This response implies that given the opportunity, we would all delight in such pursuits; thus he denied the special impact of history, culture, religious passion, individual and mass psychology, and paranoia—and blamed it squarely on human nature.

As a lifelong student of human nature and human behavior, I know this to be wrong, dangerously wrong. All of us have the opportunity to torture animals, but the majority of us do not. We are disgusted and bewildered by that minority that takes pleasure in doing so. Surely, then, we would not all avail ourselves of the opportunity to torture our neighbors, given the opportunity. I would not pitchfork an infant merely because the opportunity presented itself (“because it was permitted”), nor would the journalist. I would not pitchfork an infant under duress, nor would he. I would like to think that neither one of us would do it even at risk of our lives, but of this I cannot be sure. And I suspect that the columnist himself, when not pressed by journalistic deadlines, would agree that this slaughter was not purely opportunistic.

To say that a massacre such as the one at Jedwabne is not normal to human conduct is obviously not to deny that it is within the stretch of human behavior. We know that it was done. But it was beyond normal expectations. A tsunami may occasionally devastate the coast of Japan, drowning thousands, but we do not consider it an expected or reasonable aspect of weather conditions. Human behavior is as unpredictable as, and more variable than, the weather. Such behavior could not have been anticipated by most of us and even now is not believed by many.

Still, while not “natural,” hatred is a function of human nature. To understand hatred, one must understand the special qualities of human, and only human, life. Human behavior is famous for its plasticity and variability. As a result, we have witnessed such brothers in humanity as the grotesque Pol Pot and the glorious Saint Francis. Neither of these extremes expresses the expectations one has for ordinary people, but both are testament to the protean nature of the human species. I am not offering these two eccentrics as products of genetic determinism, as I might have with the examples of Newton or Mozart.