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

more than go on a shooting spree. As tragic as that is, it has relatively limited long-range consequences for society at large. The psychopath also has limits set on his actions. It is with the group—the culture of hatred—that monstrous evil can be unleashed. When the psychotic or paranoid is a despotic leader, like Idi Amin, with absolute authority over his nation, individual despair and resentment may be united under the banner of the leader’s insane vision. When everyday bias is supported and legitimated by religion or nationalism, the passions of ordinary malcontents will be intensified and focused, allowing a community of hatred to emerge. The conditions necessary to support mass murder and genocide are now set.

A collection of haters is generally a ragtag assembly of individuals until a powerful authority, such as a political or religious leader, provides them with a common enemy. This paranoid leadership gives shape to the group by naming an enemy, by granting legitimacy and respectability to the hatred of that enemy through its authority, and by mobilizing the disorganized group into a killing culture. The aggregate becomes a mob, a troop, or an army, brought together by the shared enemy, which has been selected and offered up to them by the paranoid political state or the fanatic religious leaders. The common bond of hatred is the common enemy. The culture of hatred is the primary threat. We are right to treat Al Qaeda with deadly seriousness. We are right to view Saddam Hussein and the other despots of the world as potential Hitlers.

It is a sad truth that religious leaders often create a forum for the dissemination of hatred. We are told that the Muslim faith is one of tolerance. But what is the Muslim faith? And who articulates it? The mullahs are no more united than the Christian or Jewish theologians. Who speaks for Christ? The Roman Catholic church, the Southern Baptists, the Christian Militia? The same condition exists in the disparate worlds of Islam. Each mullah becomes a prophet for his own people. In our time, however, only the radical Islamists have captured the attention of media. We are experiencing the extensive influence of the Wahhabi faction over modern Islam, where every infidel is the hated enemy.88

The fanatic and xenophobic Wahhabi sect of Islam has been given legitimacy and financial support through the shortsightedness and recklessness of the leaders of Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabi disseminate their hatred and intolerance everywhere in the Muslim world through the activities of irresponsible mullahs, and with the money supplied them by feckless Arab political leaders, who ought to be held responsible. Their military arm is Al Qaeda. And they speak only of hatred and holy war.

As recently as the summer of 2002 the New York Times reported an interview in which a professor of Islamic law explained to a visiting reporter: “Well, of course I hate you because you are Christian, but that doesn’t mean I want to kill you.”89 Well, the professor may not wish to kill the reporter, but the students he instills with his theological justifications of hatred may have different ideas about the proper expressions of hatred. If the theocratic dictators who dominate the oppressed minorities in Saudi Arabia and the other “moderate” Arab states think they can control the mass frenzy that they are either encouraging or tolerating, they profoundly misread human nature and the role that hatred can play.

We live in a time in which cultures of hatred exist predominantly in the Muslim world. But there are undoubtedly paranoid cultures in other areas, Africa, for example, where their effects are as yet so local and self-contained that they have not impinged on the consciousness of the larger world. It would be wise to direct some attention to these areas before the fact; to deal with the misery and frustration that are waiting to be molded into hatred before we are forced to. Once a culture of hatred has been firmly established, we are left with only the limited choices of disarming, diffusing, or destroying it.

I have tried to attend to the nature of hatred out of a feeling that a clearer understanding of its qualities can guide us in understanding its causes. The roots of hatred are buried under a surface of normalcy that obscures their depths and entanglements. They must be exposed and analyzed. I view a psychological analysis of hatred as a prerequisite, not an alternative, to investigating the social conditions that encourage its emergence; the economic aspects that cultivate it; the political and religious institutions that exploit it. Only with the knowledge of what hatred is can we uncover the conditions that nurture it.

A sense of deprivation has psychic roots independent of poverty and want. We cannot control each individual’s developmental background, and we do not need to. The isolated and individual hater can cause profound misery, but only to a limited few. The greater danger will always lie with those who would cynically manipulate and exploit such misery, those who would organize and encourage hatred for their political ends. We must attend to them, the preachers and organizers of hatred. We had a moral obligation to do so with the rise of Nazism. We didn’t care enough then. Perhaps we do now.

The moral world is the preserve of mankind. We must cultivate it. In the end, the search for the heart of evil, the “unholy grail” as Walker Percy called it, may be as elusive as the search for the Holy Grail, but it is the quest that defines our humanity.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Someone has to do the dirty work of reading an unkempt first draft. This is best hidden from all but the most forgiving. My brother, Dr. Sheldon Gaylin, also a psychiatrist, undertook this task and in the process managed to encourage and direct my progress. Further along, my sister-in-law, Rita Gaylin, offered the kind of detailed critique that only an avid reader and natural editor could supply. I am indebted