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

rage that led to the many Christian militias formed in the latter half of the twentieth century. The recruits felt that they had paid their dues and had been abandoned and denied by the government they had served in war and peace. They had been betrayed.

Betrayal

The difference between feeling deprived and feeling betrayed is often only a matter of one’s identification. We are deprived by “others” who have the power. We are betrayed by our own kind. The white middle class began to feel deceived and cheated. They had been seduced by promises not kept, and then they were abandoned. They had been “led down the garden path.” They had “kept the faith” and had still been “delivered into the hands of the enemy.” Worse, they had become the enemy. These feelings and phrases are all part of the language and definitions of betrayal.

We have different expectations of those we love and those we serve than we do of strangers. When those we depend on betray us, we are outraged. Such betrayal will evoke the most fundamental fear of childhood, abandonment by the powerful parental figures.

The fear of being abandoned is compounded by the severe blow to self-esteem that betrayal produces. In life, the indifference and disdain of the impersonal world of strangers is balanced by the concern of those who love us. When that love is trivialized or denied, the balance is dangerously dislocated. If those who we had assumed value us most abandon or discard us, what actual worth can we possess?

A peculiar example of perceived betrayal occurred in the 1930s with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency of the United States. Roosevelt was a member of the elite by every definition. Wealth, religion, and family position marked him as an aristocrat. That is why the egalitarian policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal were seen by the wealthy as a stab in the back by one of their own. The wealthy hardly suffered during the depression. If anything, the pool of cheap labor allowed them to maintain their estates and mansions for still another generation. Many historians would later perceive Roosevelt and his policies as being the savior of the capitalist system. Still, the hatred for Roosevelt in the establishment was astonishing in its malevolence and rancor. In a typical display of displacement, the greatest vitriol was reserved for the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, a feminist before her time and an uncommon humanitarian. Contempt for ambitious women, an emerging threat to the male oligarchy, added another dimension to their fixation on Eleanor. This was true hatred, as evidenced by their obsession with her and her role in influencing the president’s policies. The cruelty extended beyond her actions to her very persona.

Betrayal thus manages to join the fear of rejection with the humiliation of having been deceived. Even when the deceit is a self-inflicted wound based on false assumptions, it will carry with it all the pain and mortification of expectations denied. A betrayed person feels unloved, unsure, and used.

When a significant segment of a society feels betrayed, an environment ripe for anarchy and revolt exists. The rage at the betraying authorities will be compounded by the self-anger one feels for having been accomplice to the deception, for allowing oneself to be duped. The excesses of revolution, the bloodbaths and guillotines, are all testament to the hatred that may be unleashed, particularly if a paranoid element can convince the masses that this betrayal was a calculated humiliation. Germany in the 1930s is a paramount example of a country humiliated, impoverished, and ripe for hatred.

On an individual level, betrayal is most acutely felt in the sexual area. The spurned lover has all the ingredients for hatred at his command. The attachment is there; he need only reverse the emotion from love to hate. Then rage is compounded by the metaphoric meaning of sexuality. For both genders sexuality is a measure of worth and power. Men in our culture—as in most—are taught to see their sexuality as a direct measure of their manhood. Manhood carries the mantle of power. Women, at least traditionally, were taught to view their sexual desirability as the instrument for enlisting the powerful men to aid in their survival. For both men and women, an attack on their sense of sexual worth is a strike at the core of their security. Sexual betrayal can lead to the same viciousness and brutality one sees in suicide bombers. When a body is discovered with a single blow to the head or a single stab wound, an intruder or a stranger may be suspected. When there are twenty or thirty blows, one is likely to be dealing with a frustrated or spurned lover.

Exploitation and Manipulation

Disapproval, deprivation, and betrayal exploit our inner feelings of inadequacy. Unsure of our own capacities, we feel our survival threatened when the value and esteem in which we are held by powerful authority figures or their representatives are brought into question. There are, in addition, direct assaults on our self-worth, direct affronts to pride and confidence. Exploitation and manipulation deprive us of the special status inherent in being a human being. When we feel “used,” we feel our very personhood is assaulted.

The ultimate, rawest, and most outrageous use of people is found in the institution of slavery, which is why it is universally condemned in theory if not in practice. In slavery the person is stripped of all rights of humanity and converted into a machine. But to be used in any sense is to violate that basic imperative of moral behavior set down by Immanuel Kant as at the heart of his ethics: Never use a person as a means rather than an end, for in so doing you erase the distinction between person and thing.

We go through life exposed to a continuum of circumstances in which we can never be sure whether we are valued for our services or for ourselves. Since our