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

of tracing the path of a perceived threat that leads to fear, and through fear, to rage. Similarly, to understand those who hate, one must follow the elaborate pathways that lead from vulnerability to hatred.

4

FEELING THREATENED

Fear and anger were designed to serve as responses to threats to our survival. To our survival—not to our pride, status, position, manhood, or dignity. Somehow we have developed in our minds a crucial linkage between even minimally measurable affronts to our status and the very fact of our survival. We respond to these affronts with biological defenses appropriate to an actual assault. Even a simple direct gaze may be perceived as an attack. “Dissing” someone on a subway or the streets of the city may be an invitation to an assault. In the subways of New York City something as inoffensive as a direct look may be interpreted as an act of contempt and assault on dignity.

For years the direct relationship between fear and rage remained undiscovered. Fear was clearly a response to someone who threatened to harm you. Rage was the seemingly opposite emotion. You had rage in the face of someone who affronted you or frustrated you in your pursuits. The intimate connection between them was not appreciated.

These two emotions operate on a toggle switch, readily convertible, one to the other. In cultures where fear is perceived as unmanly—and where is it not?—the emotion of fear is humiliating and must be repressed. Men, real men, do not eat quiche or show fear. Rage is the public face of fear in most men and many women. The two can be considered as opposite sides of the same coin, the same emergency response. Therefore, to determine what enrages a population, look for what threatens them.

Anything in society, in daily life, or in the broader conditions of existence that makes the environment seem more threatening can invoke rage. Anything that diminishes self-confidence or raises questions about one’s strength, value, or worth—in other words, one’s capacity to defend oneself, one’s honor, one’s territory—can also invoke rage. The vital balance perceived between the power of “them” and “us”—the measure of our vulnerability—will determine the degree of fear and rage operating on any individual or in a culture.

The unconscious roots of rage are found in all the symbolic ways we feel diminished. Some of the more common psychological assaults perceived by modern people follow. They are often many steps removed from the primal paradigm of the tiger in the compound.

Deprivation

Feeling deprived bears no relationship to the actual amount of comfort or goods that a person may possess. One can be surrounded with all the indulgences of the affluent society and still feel deprived. Contrary to this, we can observe people existing in great poverty, where each expenditure must be measured and considered, every nutrient stored and rationed, who still do not feel deprived.

Human beings can tolerate amazing privation and hardship. People can exist in poverty, even to a point of cold and hunger, with dignity and nobility. I remember as a child watching Robert J. Flaherty’s exceptional documentary, Nanook of the North, with amazement. I had grown up in the relative comfort of a middle-class family, experiencing little privation, certainly no hunger. Raised in the bleak and extended winters of the Great Lakes, however, I had come to hate the cold.

I watched the Eskimos enduring hunger and poverty, struggling with minimal modern tools to sustain daily life for themselves and their children. Everything depended on the luck of the hunt and the vagaries of nature. The struggle for survival was real here. The hunt was an accepted part of life. Its failure in a season could mean hunger or starvation. Tension and anxiety would be inevitable, but no evidence of self-pity, no sense of “poor me” seemed present in the documentary or was evident in the anthropological studies of these communities.

These lives were lived from birth to death in the bleakest and harshest of environments and in a cold that I could but imagine. Despite hardships that to me would have been unbearable, Nanook and his comrades experienced joy, absolute joy, in their search for food and struggle for survival. In this environment of privation, they not only endured, they triumphed.

During the Great Depression, multitudes suffered true privation and most were not alienated. People were jobless, homeless, and often hungry. Fear was palpable, but not anger. What anger existed focused on the times, the “system,” the landlords, and the bosses. The most aberrant response emerged from among the more intellectual-minded who embraced a half-baked and optimistic attraction to Marxist literature and Marxist causes. Although Marxist literature had a peculiar affinity for the hyperbolic language of hatred, most of my socialist relatives and teachers seemed immune to the vitriol and wonderfully free of malice. There was little rage and resentment neighbor to neighbor. All were members of the same community sharing the same fate. I am not trying to romanticize poverty and privation. Grinding poverty is degrading and dispiriting. It is indecent. It can cause severe damage to the spirit and psyche. Only in the capacity to generate rage and hatred is relative deprivation more important than actual privation.

A sense of deprivation thrives on differentials: when others have what we do not. It is a relative feeling, more closely associated with entitlement than want. We suffer from the fact that we do not have that which we need, unless we feel it has—somehow by someone—been denied to us or, worse, taken from us. We then experience a sense of violation, of assault on our dignity that ultimately is perceived as denigration.

When a sense of deprivation ceases to be a transient phenomenon and is perceived as a way of life not just for ourselves but for our group, the parent society is ripe for an explosive release into organized hatred and violence. If this were the Congo in the nineteenth century, such rage could not have been directed at those who actually deprived