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

civilization itself could be reevaluated. Civilization as a constraining influence on human passion became a final concern for Freud, ironically just prior to the rise of Hitler.35

The genie was out of the bottle; there was no getting it back in. Freudian theory became a tool for the biographer, the historian, the sociologist, and the anthropologist. Freud presented an alternative to the theological view of human nature supplied by religion and the purely economic explanation of human woes offered by Marxism. Social problems that seemed irrational were now subject to illumination via psychological analysis.

With this psychological perspective, the excesses of hatred, bigotry, and other forms of destructive human behavior could be liberated from genetic determinism (bad seed); economic determinism (class struggle); or theological explanation (the work of the devil). A new frame of reference was created. Perversity in human behavior could be traced to its psychic roots.

We are still free to accept genetic determinants of behavior—God or nature. We can also exploit economic and political insights, whether from a Hobbesian, Lockean, or Marxist perspective. But we can now enrich the mix by adding the psychological dimension. We can now examine such subjects as prejudice, bigotry, and hatred with a more complex set of variables, recognizing them for what they are: psychological symptoms of sick behavior.

8

THE PARANOID SHIFT

The words “paranoia” and “paranoid” have made the journey from psychiatric lingo to common parlance. We hear them everywhere these days. In everyday language, these words suggest a person who is suspicious, distrustful, and ready to feel unappreciated, cheated, and betrayed. These are precisely the same attributes that the psychiatrist sees as the symptoms of the paranoid patient.

What has not followed in the transfer from the clinic to the marketplace is an understanding of the mechanisms of paranoia. The paranoid delusion—I am the agent of God; I am God—is one of the strangest of all symptoms, but one that is particularly useful in understanding the processes of hatred. For one thing, the delusion seems to defy all reason. It is so “crazy.” At cursory examination it seems to offer no relief for the patient. Some paranoids express grandiose ideas that conform to the idea of a symptom as a coping mechanism. Grandiosity is an attempt to relieve humiliation, but how does one explain the delusions of persecution— enemy aliens are beaming hateful accusations into my brain—that dominate the world of other paranoiacs and cause them abject misery? What purpose does this serve? How is paranoia a reparative maneuver, misguided or otherwise?

Since paranoid mechanisms are at the heart of the phenomenon of hatred, to appreciate what goes on in the minds of those who devote their life to hatred, we must understand paranoia. To get to that understanding, we can capitalize on the insights learned about symptom formation and the meaning of symptoms. Armed with the awareness that both hatred and paranoia are symptoms, we can look at the “symptom” of hatred as a misguided repair and try to locate the underlying conflict that the hatred attempts to accommodate.

The distortion that dominates paranoia is a quasi-delusional or delusional view of the world and one’s place in it. The underlying cause that leads to the delusion is invariably a severely damaged and debased sense of self. To protect pride and face—to preserve self-esteem—the paranoid utilizes his imagination to find enemies on whom he can blame his desperate straits. He searches for a person or group on whom he can displace his rage and envy, similar to the way that the phobic displaces his anxiety. He ascribes the cause of his personal misery and failure to some manipulative and vindictive enemy, preferring to see himself as a victim rather than a failure. This assignment of responsibility for one’s failure and misery away from oneself is called “projection” in psychoanalysis. I prefer the term “paranoid shift” for reasons that will follow.

Everyday Paranoia

Elements of paranoia probably exist in all of us, since it is a common derivative of that ubiquitous feeling of insecurity that plagues most of us in our competitive world. It is easily recognized by the associated feeling: “Isn’t that just my luck!” Take, for example, the nagging and irrational feeling that many people experience at the supermarket, where it seems that whatever line they join at the checkout counters will inevitably be the slowest. Or on the highways when drivers engage in the compulsive, dangerous, and irrational lane shifting during a traffic jam, convinced somehow that their lane is always the slowest. They seem to be joined almost exactly by an equivalent number cutting in the opposite direction suffering from the same fear that they were trapped in the slowest lane. I have tried to track lane progress by stubbornly staying in my lane and marking for memory a car in the adjoining lane. I have rarely noticed any evidence of progress made by lane switching.

Most of us have on occasion suffered from the “just my luck” (always meaning bad luck) syndrome. I have watched the uneasiness of both friends and strangers who, on being led to a table by a maître d’hôtel, see in the assignment of tables some statement of respect or lack thereof. Being an early diner, I have been astonished by the significant number of people who refuse the first table offered. Diners will suggest the left side of the room when offered the right with almost the same degree of affirmation of their entitlements as those who choose the right side when offered a table on the left.

On the many trips I have made to Scotland, I have been appalled by my bad luck with the weather, since the natives always assure me how sunny it had been in the weeks before my arrival. Of course I know that it rains a lot in Scotland. Still, does every trip have to be a wet one? Yes, it does. Only after stumbling across the data in an almanac and discovering that in August, my month for