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

as formidable and life threatening. They must be aliens of great cunning, the devil or his agents. In destroying the enemy, the paranoid wants to feel he is saving not just himself, but his country or, as with Schreber, redeeming the entire race of man. The individual will be supported—more often, directed—by an equally powerful ally. He will view himself as the agent of the president of the United States or of God himself.

Those who are not delusional do not have the capacity to distort or ignore reality sufficiently to claim that the devil or aliens from Mars are out to destroy them. Instead, they must locate their enemies in the real world among their traditional antagonists. Not all of these antagonists will at first be perceived with a deeply ingrained hatred. That will emerge in time. The object of group hatred is often a product of calculated propaganda generated to mobilize the population. During a period of actual conflict, as in wartime, a concerted campaign must be launched to demonize the enemy. This propaganda will facilitate the assaults on morality that are inevitable in wartime. Often these wartime hatreds disappear faster than they are created. To the shock of most Americans, within a period of time no longer than the conflict itself, the German and Japanese enemies became our allies in the Cold War against our former ally and new enemy, the Russians.

We are free to locate enemies anywhere, but it is always easier to place blame on a traditional enemy, to revive past grievances, and by so doing, to rationalize our choice. When locating enemies, therefore, we are likely to start by looking at our neighbors. I have labeled such enemies as “territorial.” At the opposite end of the spectrum are enemies whom we could not recognize on contact, but whose ideologies offend us, and who may be labeled “ideological enemies.” These terms—territorial and ideological— are part of a seamless whole, since even those based on actual territorial disputes inevitably will require an ideological component to perpetuate a lasting hatred.

Ideological enemies may be built on a framework of true ideological differences, such as in religious wars. But as with the Christian Crusades, there is often a crude territorial objective hidden within these “ideological” struggles. Sometimes enemies seem to be manufactured out of chance and coincidence. The Holocaust was constructed out of the paranoid needs of the German leaders, since the Jews in Germany were a tiny minority and were by most objective standards simply “Germans” in their day-to-day behavior and their loyalty to the Fatherland.

It is often only too obvious that the “enemy” is merely a convenient contrivance to serve some inner anguish and rage. This is particularly apparent in the often drunken “let’s get them” Saturday night entertainments that once were endemic throughout America and that involved tormenting blacks, Jews, gays, or whatever despised group could be found. What is more difficult to perceive is that even when there are true ideological differences, the ideology itself is rarely the issue. Here, too, the primary purpose is to find a rational alternative to ourselves and our leaders as the source of our deprivations and misery and as an outlet for our anger. The goal is to shift the blame.

The Territorial Enemy: The Enemy at Hand

The injunction “to love thy neighbor as thyself” has always seemed to me to be the most unreasonable directive in the New Testament. This casual statement in Leviticus was embraced and elevated in importance in the New Testament, where love rather than justice played the central role. The Old Testament is a practical guide for living, and its Ten Commandments are a possible, though admittedly difficult, code of conduct to maintain. The commandments also attend to our behavior with our neighbors. They proscribe both “coveting” and “bearing false witness against” one’s neighbors. But loving your enemy as you love yourself or your loved ones? This seems to me beyond the reach of most human beings. One is more likely to “love” a stranger or an abstraction—humankind—than the competitor at the borders of your private space. I have made the point that identity is proximal. Love and hate both are founded in the cauldron of identity. One is more likely to hate one’s neighbor than a distant creature who does not impinge on or limit one’s actions. The injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself is deemed so central to the Christian ideal that this same directive appears at least five times in the New Testament.60 But then, Christianity is a religion that motivates its followers by an image of admittedly unattainable perfection. The New Testament simply wants you to try and allows for forgiveness

These cautionary statements about one’s neighbor—not rules of general decorum among people—implicitly recognize that the most likely source of war and conflict in earlier history would involve those others who are at our borders. It specifically pinpoints the competitive rivalries in early times, when communities were small, competition for food and water great, and mutual cooperation for a larger good not yet anticipated. The injunction to love thy neighbor serves a political as well as an ethical purpose. At the least, it was a prophylactic attempt to inhibit the emergence of hatred in neighboring communities by aspiring to brotherly love.

The history of civilization is a matter of a paltry few thousand years in the millions of years that our species, Homo sapiens, has existed. By definition, we have no records or proofs of the exact nature of prehistoric life. We have some knowledge. We can roughly date the discovery of metals, tools, and agricultural techniques. We have cave drawings that date and define hunting procedures. What we do not have is any evidence, any record, of what the prehistoric people thought.

While we cannot know the content of their ideas, we do know that the minds of our ancestors must have operated according to the same principles as ours. After all, in anthropological terms, they are