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

I am merely acknowledging that conditions can exploit human plasticity to produce unexpected extremes even in relatively normal people. Had I been born in a Palestinian refugee camp and exposed to precisely the same conditions as a suicide bomber, I might have become a suicide bomber. But then again, I might not have. Culture shapes personality, but inheritance is also relevant. Not all of those raised in the camps are prepared to become suicide bombers.

Most animals—from the insect to the higher mammals—have few choices of importance. Everything essential is genetically wired in: how they live, where they live, what they eat, when they mate. This is not true of human beings: We live in tropical islands and arid deserts; in Arctic tundra and equatorial jungles; we control when we have children, if we have children, even how we have children. As a result, the differences among human beings in size, strength, imagination, intelligence, and temperament are unparalleled in the animal kingdom.

Penguins not only look alike, they are alike—not just in our eyes, but in actuality. They possess limited capacity to deviate from their nature. We, in contrast, share with nature in our own design. We were not endowed by nature with wings, but still we fly—and faster than the speed of sound. If a panda cannot find bamboo shoots, he dies. It is bamboo shoots or nothing for him. If we were surviving on bamboo shoots and ran out, we’d eat the panda.

We are more variable because we possess more traits that can be modified; we use our highly developed brains to adapt to the widely diverse environments our imagination drives us to explore. Our lifestyles, conduct, and very physical appearances are so alterable that we might appear to an outside observer as multiple and varied species. This capacity to redesign ourselves, to slip the yoke of instinct and genetics, is a cardinal element of human nature.

The result of this variability is that we are capable of developing into saints or monsters. Still, both of these extremes are alien to the average person leading his ordinary life. Terrorists, sadists, and torturers are the evil examples that define the borders of normal human behavior. We must not trivialize the tragic extremes of their hatred by assuming that they are commonplace representatives of human variability. Such a judgment is an attempt to deny their depravity and contain our anxiety. These people are different from you and me. We are capable of feeling transient extremes of rage that we call hatred, but the true haters live daily with their hatred. Their hatred is a way of life. It is, beyond that, often their raison d’être. They are obsessed with their enemies, attached to them in a paranoid partnership. It is this attachment that defines true hatred.

When we confront the true hater, he frightens us. Too often we struggle to avoid facing this extreme hatred by emotionally distancing ourselves from it. One way to do this is through denial, a mental defense mechanism that permits us to cope in the presence of the unbearable. Its classic embodiment is in the denial of death that is part of the universal human condition. Human beings are burdened with the awareness that their lives must end, independent of anything they may do. We handle the existential dread of death by denying its presence. We go on living as though there were no end. We must do that. We are “in God’s hands.” It is all part of “a grand design.” Our dead child is “safe now,” “in a better place.”

I do not believe that it is mere coincidence that during a period in which terrorists purposely targeted buses of schoolchildren for maximum effect, the American public embraced a novel like The Lovely Bones,2 in which dismembered and murdered children are portrayed as living in heaven, sucking lollipops, and playing in fields of flowers in perpetual bloom. We must find ways to avoid facing the abominable and incomprehensible.

Another way of distancing ourselves from horror is by romanticizing it. The right to a “death with dignity” is a recent shibboleth of medical reformers. What they really want is a death without the dying. Not the retching, puking, pained, and bloody death of the intensive care unit, but the romantic death of Love Story and La Traviata. Of course, we all wish for a “proper” and “dignified” death, but we are unlikely to get it. Dying is rarely dignified, and death is the ultimate indignity. Still we dream of a painless and peaceful death in our sleep, in the comfort of our homes, with the companionship of our loved ones. We create a romantic and rarely achievable illusion. We treat hatred the same way.

A startling and unexpected example of romanticizing an act of hatred appeared in an article in the New York Times on April 5, 2002. Unexpected, because it was after 9/11,3 and in New York City. The article was entitled “2 Girls, Divided by War, Joined in Carnage.” It featured large side-by-side, strikingly similar, pictures of two lovely brunette teenage girls.

“Two high school seniors in jeans with flowing black hair, the teen-age girls walked next to each other up to the entrance of a Jerusalem supermarket last Friday. . . .

“The vastly different trajectories of their lives intersected for one deadly moment, mirroring the intimate conflict of their two peoples. At the door of the supermarket, Ms. Akhras detonated the explosives, killing Ms. Levy and a security guard, along with herself.”

The total effect of the article, whether intended or not, was to equate the two in tragedy, like star-crossed lovers drawn to a common cataclysmic end in a romantic movie like Titanic. As the article indicates, they were drawn to their deaths via the irony of “two vastly different trajectories.” But what distinguished the two was not simply their differing orbits, but their purposes, their reasons for being in that particular grocery store at that particular time. As the article itself succinctly stated: