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

to identify specific terrorists instead of terrorist societies, they confound us by revealing the advantaged nature of their early lives. The Baader Meinhof Gang, which terrorized Germany from 1968 to 1977; Carlos, “the Jackal”; and Kathy Boudin as well as most of her colleagues in the Weather Underground were privileged members of the bourgeoisie. The leaders of Al Qaeda seemed to have emerged largely from the advantaged classes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. I allow that economic factors are not incidental. They are relevant, but they are not central, as they have been assumed to be. When we do not have answers for social problems, we are likely to assume poverty to be the cause and money the solution. Confessing ignorance, abandoning clichéd and faulty answers, is an essential first step to understanding.

Looking for causes by rounding up the usual suspects, poverty and inequity, will not work here. Worse, it adds two harmful dimensions to the discourse: First, it draws our attention away from a study of the pathological nature of the terrorist. Second, it suggests that if only the victim population had been more charitable, the slaughter would not have occurred—blurring once again the crucial moral distinction between the murderer and the victim, a pervasive tendency in modern liberal cultures. We have behaved like the well-meaning narcissists that we are. We have asked why they did this to us. We have been searching our souls, when we should have been examining theirs.

The ultimate flaw in the analyses that draw on the history of terrorist populations is that they attempt to locate the root causes of something before defining or even knowing what that something is. To discover the cause of, and thus a cure for, erythroblastosis, one must start with the knowledge that it is a fetal blood disease, not an adolescent skin rash. We must ask what hatred is before we assay the nature of its causes.

Hatred is, if nothing else, a feeling, an emotion. One would logically have expected much of the commentary in response to the 9/11 nightmare in the United States to have focused on human feelings. Instead, the psychology of hatred has barely been mentioned. Having started in the middle of the problem, we are in danger of going off half-cocked. Since the shock of the 9/11 attacks, all sorts of experts have weighed in to explain why this happened. So far no one has called in the doctors.

Because the actions of the terrorists arose in the context of political events, we have concentrated our attentions almost exclusively on historic causes. But before we ask what historic or political factors cause hatred, we ought to ask, “What is hatred?” And that requires a different kind of exploration with a different set of investigative tools. The difference between exploring the causes of an entity and defining its essence leads to a different kind of argument, a different expertise, and is articulated with a different “story line.”

The story that emerges with any investigation of human motivation will always vary with the investigative tools employed as well as with the biases of the investigator. A physiologist looking at migraine headache will offer explanations different from those of a psychiatrist. Both will contribute accurate but incomplete knowledge. Each specialist finds answers consonant with her discipline; when your only instrument is a hammer, everything looks like a tack. Looking for the roots, the conditions that created something, directs one inevitably to a historic and political narrative. When, instead of a purely historic event—for example, the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s—we are examining a psychological and emotional state like hatred, we had better define the condition before calling in the experts in causation.

Take the example of stress. What causes stress? Where can one locate its roots? Start by defining what one means by stress. There are six distinct and different definitions in my dictionary. If you mean stress as: “an applied force . . . that tends to strain or deform a body,”10 and the “body” is a bridge, then one needs to consult an engineer or a metallurgist. On the other hand, if you mean: “a mentally or emotionally disruptive or upsetting condition . . . capable of affecting physical health,” you had better call in the doctors. Whether you prefer a psychiatrist or an internist is dependent on your bias. Both would have much to contribute.

Let me make it clear. I am not disparaging historic, sociological, or economic analyses of the roots of hatred. I have learned immeasurably from such sources, but they will not be the focus of this book. They are an essential part of the armamentarium in our battle against the disease of hatred, but they are not alternatives to exploring the nature of hatred. That requires using philosophical and psychological tools. The few great works written in modern times on the nature of hatred have been created by philosophers and psychologists, such as Max Scheler, Gordon Allport, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The most evident aspect of hatred is the intense emotion that supports it. Therefore, hatred historically was first studied by those interested in human nature and human conduct. In the days before a field of inquiry called psychology existed, human emotion was the purview of philosophy. To understand the influence of emotions on human conduct one turned to the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Pascal, Hume, Rousseau, and William James. They were the ones who dissected and examined the complex nature of emotions.

William James was a major transitional figure. With James we see the fusion of the traditional philosophical approach and the burgeoning new field of psychology, in which he was a pioneer. From its earliest days with Freud and Pavlov, psychology has brought a new illumination, a new emphasis, to the analysis of emotions by focusing on the internal psychology, the underlying physiology, and the interpersonal dynamics of the emotions. The emotions are of particular importance when dealing with hatred.

To the average person, hatred is an intense feeling