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

the actions. Cowardice is no virtue, but it is still short of evil. On the other hand, it may have been that the bystanders truly enjoyed the suffering. But even here I do not condemn those who only harbor feelings of hatred as much as I condemn those who act on them. The law, and for the most part the moral law, differentiates between feeling and conduct. Such actions as the torture and murder of the scapegoat population are defining qualities that take us beyond bigotry to hatred.

Some form of prejudice is present in most of us. When evidence of our prejudice surfaces, many of us will, in conscience, feel ashamed. But by the willingness to define our negative attitudes and feelings as “prejudice,” we have made a self-critical judgment that mitigates the force and reality of the feeling. A smaller number of us may go beyond prejudice and become actual bigots. With the bigot, the prejudice will not be defined as a failing in himself. The bigot assumes his felt superiority to the alien population is real, not a product of his own pathological viewpoint.

The bigot may have contempt, even disgust, for the outsider, but he will not commit crimes of hatred. A bigot may feel malevolence whenever he thinks of the despised group, but he is not obsessively preoccupied with them. When he becomes so, he crosses the border into hatred. Hatred requires both passion and a preoccupation with the disdained group. It requires an attachment to the hated person or population. And among the population of haters there will be a range of intensity. Many Jew haters among the Nazis who approved of the death camps could not necessarily have performed the acts of destruction. Because of this complexity, hatred can best be understood by exploring its three major components individually:

1. Hatred is clearly and most obviously an emotion, an intense emotion, that is, a passion. To better understand hatred, it is helpful to have some sophisticated understanding of human emotions—the irrational underpinnings of human behavior and the darker side of the human spirit.

2. Hatred is more than an emotion. It is also a psychological condition; a disorder of perception; a form of quasi-delusional thinking. Therefore, to understand the condition of hatred, one must understand the nature of a delusion, a symptom of severe mental disease. One must examine the meaning of the paranoid shift that is central to the thinking of a hating individual and a culture of hatred. This examination will lead us into the somewhat bizarre world of symptom formation.

3. Finally, hatred requires an attachment. Like love, it needs an object. The choice of an object—also like love—may be rational or irrational. Obsessive hatred is by definition irrational. The choice of the victim is more often dictated by the unconscious needs and the personal history of the hater than by the nature, or even the actions, of the hated.

With some understanding of these parts that add up to hatred, we can conceive how much more malignant is the sum of the parts. Since it is the feeling of hatred that directs the terrorist or the bigot to his acts of horror and enables him to justify them in his mind, it seems logical to start our understanding of that which seems beyond understanding—hatred—by examining its emotional underpinnings.

HATRED

AS AN EMOTION

3

RAGE

The Emotional Core of Hatred

For years I have struggled with the task of defining the multitude of human emotions that inform and illuminate the human condition.13 Not an easy task. Feelings are not measurable. They have no atomic number or weight. And regardless of how advanced modern biological psychology may become, we are unlikely to find a way to objectively define, calibrate, or titrate an emotion.

It is unlikely that we will ever be able to distinguish such refined emotions as “feeling touched” and “feeling hurt” by analyzing their chemical components. We may never locate the brain centers and neural pathways that differentiate shame from guilt, and even if we do, will that determination advance our understanding of those most subtle of human feelings? To paraphrase the great psychiatrist Franz Alexander, with all the advances expected in the science of acoustics and harmonics, we may someday be able to reduce a Beethoven symphony to frequencies, vibrations, overtones, and so on. But it is inconceivable that we will ever understand the Eroica Symphony better that way than by just listening to it.

My definition of the feeling of hatred is as follows: a sustained emotion of rage that occupies an individual through much of his life, allowing him to feel delight in observing or inflicting suffering on the hated one. It is always obsessive and almost always irrational. It has at its core an emotion, albeit one elaborated into a relationship. In everyday life we clarify the meaning of an emotion by saying: “You know how you feel when . . .” The problem with hatred is that most people have never really been part of the experience of hatred, and to make matters worse, they are often confident that they have.

What we can identify with is the underlying feeling of hatred. This is a relatively simple task, since the feeling of hatred is simply an intense form of anger, like rage, something that we have all experienced. Human emotions, like anger, occur in a spectrum of intensity, and we tend to use different words for each step on the scale. Anger starts as annoyance, irritation, or pique and extends to its extremes in rage and fury; it is still all anger. In this text, I will use anger and rage in human beings interchangeably, since both words are used in the literature. With animals, the emotions are less variable in intensity of expression. As a result, in the areas of psychology where animal studies are relevant, the studies tend to refer to the basic emotion as rage. I am inclined to use rage when exploring the