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

such, they are admittedly somewhat arbitrary and often overlapping. They do not pretend to be all-inclusive. They are only intended to indicate the multiple ways that individuals or groups can feel threatened. All threats lead to anger. All threats may be steps on the ladder to hatred.

Beyond direct threats are the equally frightening symbolic ones. They are proposed to explain how seeming “overreactions”—a response that seems inappropriate to the stimulus—can make sense when the metaphoric and symbolic nature of human existence is brought into consideration. These days we are rarely threatened by direct force, unless we are mugged or robbed. We are more likely to feel threatened by an assault on our reputation, our status, our livelihood, our manhood—or even a misperceived assault in these areas. We all live in the world of our own perceptions, where reality is only an occasional intruder.

Understanding the unconscious roots of rage, however, is only a first step in understanding hatred. Even when deprivation, injustice, betrayal, exploitation, frustration, or humiliation leads to violence, this ferocious rage is still not hatred. Rage can produce a slaughter of major proportions. There may even be transient pleasure in getting one’s own back. But surely not sustained joy in witnessing the results of our unbridled rage. One would hope that in most cases, time would produce shame and contrition.

Rage, even murderous rage, is still short of hatred. Rage is anger at its most extreme. But it is only an emotion. In the throes of this powerful emotion, one may carry out a spontaneous action of the worst kind. Rage may lead to killing a perceived enemy in a frenzied moment, but not to dragging him alive behind a truck and watching his body being shredded and dismembered. Rage is a hot emotion; hatred is a cold passion. Rage explodes; hatred festers and may also then explode. Rage is only an emotion; hatred contains elements of the emotion of anger, including rage, but it is more. Hatred is an amalgam containing an emotion, a paranoid ideation, and an obsessive extended relationship to a perceived enemy.

5

ENVY

Locating an Enemy

Modern psychology has demonstrated the irrational nature of much of human behavior. We are not nearly as reasonable or logical as we would like to believe. When our emotions are in opposition to our rational judgments, we all too often succumb to the emotion. We will risk our life speeding on a highway—cut the bastard off, tailgate to intimidate—to defend some perverse sense of pride or honor or to retaliate for a sense of respect denied. Certainly when we are dealing with terrorism, torture, and hatred, we perceive clearly that something beyond reason is happening. Something “crazy” is going on.

Rage is the feeling that underlies all hatred. Frequently, rage is supported by a feeling of envy, another powerful and destabilizing emotion. Envy is not basic to all hatred, but is frequently a factor in defining the enemy on whom we will vent our spleen. Envy is particularly important in addressing the American perplexity as to why so much irrational hostility seems directed toward us.

I have always had difficulty in dealing with envy. In my attempts to understand the range of human emotions I have been guided by the doctrine of the “wisdom of the body”—and the mind. I believe that the broad range of human emotions is designed specifically to facilitate human beings in making rapid decisions—decisions essential in supporting individual or communal survival. The one emotion that seems to consistently resist this precept is the feeling of envy.

Envy may indeed be a useless emotion. It seems to serve none of the purposes of other emotions. Unlike the emergency emotions of fear and rage, it does not serve survival; unlike pride and joy, it does not serve aspiration, achievement, or the quality of our life; unlike guilt and shame, it does not serve conscience or community. It does not alert, liberate, or enrich us. It is ugly and demeaning. Unfortunately, it is still capable of motivating us. And it plays a crucial part in the mechanisms of hatred.

Envy has long fascinated moralists. It is represented in the Old Testament by the serpent in the Garden of Eden and is implicit in the covetousness that is prohibited in the tenth commandment. In the New Testament envy is described as the “evil eye,” where—bracketed by wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, and blasphemy—it takes its place among those “evil things that come from within, and defile the man.”19

Poets and writers anticipated—albeit without the systematic approach—the works of modern psychologists and sociologists. There is nothing in Freud, our greatest psychologist, about the nature of human feeling and conduct that had not been portrayed by authors such as Euripides, Shakespeare, Molière, Balzac, Dickens, and Chekhov.

All the passion and pettiness of human existence are evident in the plays of Shakespeare. Othello is a textbook for the student who would contrast jealousy (Othello) and envy (Iago). Envy has occupied a prominent role in literature from the classic Greek drama into modern times. Milton defined envy as the devil’s own emotion (as did Bacon). In Paradise Lost, Satan is filled with envy on viewing Adam and Eve in Paradise and in love and is determined to bring about their fall.20 Grimm’s German dictionary, compiled in the nineteenth century, in a brief definition of envy (Neid) included all of its elements, which later would be examined and expanded: “Envy expresses that vindictive and inwardly tormenting frame of mind, the displeasure with which one perceives the prosperity and the advantages of others, begrudges them these things and in addition wishes one were able to destroy or to possess them oneself: synonyms: malevolence, ill-will, the evil-eye.”

I have defined envy as the bitter, resentful feeling that one has in the presence of and toward the person who is perceived as having traits superior to one’s own. I used this crude and practical definition of envy in my practice, where many patients, in the anguish of their