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

Neither Max Scheler, at the turn of the nineteenth century, nor Gordon Allport, in the 1940s, two major scholars of bigotry and prejudice, anticipated the new sense of community created by the communications revolution and what it would mean. Both assumed that hatred was likely to emerge in heterogeneous societies and democracies that promised more than they deliver. And both were dealing with prejudice, not obsessive hatred.

Scheler was convinced that prejudice stemmed from the discrepancy between the political promise of power to a group of citizens and its actual power. He was thinking in terms of a country, a democratic country at that, where a group of citizens saw promises unkept and equality denied. Such a group would be resentful of any other groups that seemed to be flourishing at its expense. It could harbor a righteous rage at their leaders, but to change leaders might require revolution, and revolution is difficult. Instead, it could identify a victim minority that seemed to be stealing its birthright. Scheler—writing a full generation before they occurred—anticipated the conditions of Germany in the 1930s.

Allport listed ten conditions for prejudice to prevail. It required a society:

Where the social structure is marked by heterogeneity

Where vertical mobility is permitted

Where rapid social change is in progress

Where there are ignorance and barriers to communication

Where the size of a minority group is large or increasing

Where direct competition and realistic threats exist

Where exploitation sustains important interests in the community

Where customs regulating aggression are favorable to bigotry

Where traditional justifications for ethnocentrism are available

Where neither assimilation nor cultural pluralism is favored76

Both Scheler and Allport were thinking in terms of geographical communities, and they had in mind Western democracies like Germany and the United States. None of the six first conditions in Allport’s list is present in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, or most of the Islamic states from which Al Qaeda draws its loyalties. Neither author envisioned the kind of ideological community that transcends physical boundaries, the kind of community that became possible only in the new age of communication.

Isolated and alien haters spread across an increasingly shrinking globe can now find their emotional counterparts in lands they barely knew existed. Furthermore, the disparity between their existence and that of people in the developed nations—once only barely appreciated—can now be visualized in all its plush and plentiful detail. The impoverished Afghans or Palestinians in refugee camps can view on television the good life that others enjoy in different and distant societies, leading to feelings of unfairness and envy. And of course such disparity in the human condition is monumentally unfair. Such people can then be convinced that their misery is part of a zero-sum game that is necessary to support the indulgences of a rich society like the United States.

The cynical leaders of these depressed communities encourage such displacement in order to divert the frustrated rage away from the even more extreme inequities at home, where gilt palaces coexist with mud houses. The enmity between Sunni and Shiite, Iraq and Iran, can be put on hold while all join in unity supporting Al Qaeda. This group cuts across national boundaries and creates a true community of haters bonded by their shared envy and intense hatred of that great Satan, the United States of America. Why the United States? Who else represents all that they desire, all that they are entitled to? In the world of paranoia and projection, he who has what you have not has taken it from you.

What distinguishes the hatred of the Al Qaeda from the hatred manifest in the Palestinian refugee camps is that with the latter there is an actual geographical community and a territorial enemy to be joined with an ideological one. Still, the nature of the hatred is the same.

Hatred is always an attempt to find a way of dealing with one’s impotent rage before it strangles one. Hatred is designed to make reason of one’s agony and frustration. It is an attempt to convert humiliation into pride. Hatred among the Palestinians is an attempt to find rationality out of the inequity of their conditions and that of their neighbors in Israel. The Israelis exist in a state that—by its sharp contrasts—mocks the conditions of their Arab neighbors. They are a high-tech, democratic state that illuminates all the true deprivations of the vast majority of the Arabs in the Middle East from Egypt to Iran. And with the emergence of an almost steady state of war, actual grievances support the biases of the Arabs.

The Israelis are but a pygmy, however, in comparison with the American colossus that bestrides the real world. Hostility towards the American Goliath is seeping into the cultures of such European democracies as France and Germany, which feel eclipsed and less respected, less “equal.” Unilateral actions by the United States, of course, do not help. If resentment against the United States exists in such similar states—with allies bonded by two world wars—what can one expect from the disenfranchised? Because of its strength and its riches, United States has become a target for the envy of all the oppressed Muslim communities from Africa to Asia. Al Qaeda taps that envy to create a community of haters that ignores the local political conditions, which clearly separate the interests of the disadvantaged groups. Hatred for the United States can make allies out of Iran and Iraq.

While the inequities between Israel and the United States, on the one hand, and these deprived communities, on the other, are real, the ascribed cause of the inequities is manufactured out of convenience. It is easier to blame the other rather than one’s own. It is the cynical leadership of Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the Palestinians that control their people and deprive them of a richer life in a modern world. But that same leadership controls the media and the schools that will determine the perceptions of the