Hatred Willard Gaylin (classic novels TXT) 📖

artificial geographical borders—Rwanda or Uganda. These hostilities seem always on the verge of erupting into genocidal frenzy. The “tribalism” evidenced in Northern Ireland, central Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent—to name only those areas that made the headlines during the writing of this book—continues to astonish the world.

Notwithstanding the examples culled from the daily newspapers, most fear and rage these days are encountered in situations independent of actual day-to-day events. We read about violence; we do not experience it. Most city dwellers have never been mugged. But in New York until recent times, the amount of conversation about mugging and preparations against it was a testament to how important it was to the psyche of the city dweller. Slights, humiliations, indignities, and disgraces are equally painful even when they involve no physical distress. Worse, the mental disgrace experienced is independent of whether the disrespect is real or imagined. The actual world we live in—except in extremis (hunger, unemployment, war, homelessness, and other privations)—is less important to us than the perceived world. As long as status and power, love and respect, are equated with survival, we may respond to a bad review, a failed job interview, or an admission refusal as a direct assault.

There exists in all humankind a tangled web of feelings that can lead to a sense of failure and despair, a state of helplessness and frustration that can be a halfway station on the road to rage and hatred. These feelings exist in every culture, although the methods of eliciting them will vary. Insecurity is not the exclusive property of any nation or any class. When we enter the symbolic world, as distinguished from the actual and concrete world, there are abundant ways, beyond assault, to feel diminished or endangered. The fact that people suffer from psychological humiliation as profoundly as actual deprivation is a universal truth.

Even when we are faced with true physical danger these days, the nature of that danger and our reaction to it are different than they were in prehistoric times. The danger may come from great distances, from the sky or in a chemically treated letter. Our physiology does not prepare us for these threats. Fight (with whom?) or flight (from whom?) will not work. We are left with a set of built-in biological mechanisms, directives, and signals that will often diminish rather than enhance our chances of survival. Our emergency mechanisms are obsolete.

In an animal, the rage not only prepares it physiologically for the struggle ahead, but also communicates to the opposition its readiness to fight. David Hamburg, a behavioral biologist, describes both the adaptive values and the maladaptive hazards of anger in the following way:

The angry organism is making an appraisal of his current situation, which indicates that his immediate or long-run survival needs are jeopardized; his basic interests are threatened. Moreover, his appraisal indicates that another organism (or group) is responsible for this threat. . . . The tendency is to prepare for vigorous action to correct the situation, quite likely action directed against the person seen as causing . . . the jeopardy. The signals are likely to be transmitted to these individuals as well as the organism’s own decision-making apparatus. The significant others are then likely to respond in a way that will ameliorate the situation.18

This observation continues with an optimism that should be reassuring. Group animals establish a pecking order that serves to avoid constant confrontations. Once in place, this order serves as a civilizing mechanism that facilitates group cohesion and survival. This nice biological mechanism for stabilizing groups has not been as effective in human societies. Most human encounters are not so neatly packaged. Certainly, most of us know better than to attack a policeman or snarl at the boss, but in most social situations the pecking order is not established or, worse, is in a constant state of flux. Too often, the “significant others” will assess the situation differently from the way we do. Their assessment of the pecking order and our relative places in it may differ significantly from ours. Pecking orders in human relationships are rigidly defined only in special groups like the army or the workplace. In social groups they will often be viewed differently by the different participants. And they are ephemeral and readily modifiable. Human beings are often ready to enter the power struggle, to test, challenge, or confront the prevailing order. In human beings the biological imperative to get along with the members of the pack, defined by the pecking order, has been abandoned, without necessarily a different cultural one having been substituted.

The rules are always simpler with lower animals. In animals, aggression is limited for the most part to matters involving food, water, sexual objects, and the territory that commands these. With human beings, however, what we define as basic interests are usually elaborate, metaphoric, and symbolic, involving such nonbiological factors as status, position, self-esteem, pride, face, and dignity. The cunning human animal is likely to respond to the symbol more aggressively than to the fact. Slights to esteem are weighed with the most delicate of balances, and injuries viewed through the most magnifying of lenses. Human beings appreciate the strength and force of money, the relative power of weapons, the importance of allies and allegiances. And they can check and delay intuitive responses. They can dissemble, anticipate future rectification, store grievances. The human being has a longer perspective. He can anticipate a future and knows that for everything there is a season. He can even bear humiliation while he prepares himself to balance accounts.

Psychiatrists deal on a daily basis with the perceived humiliating aspects of life in our times. Often the symptom that drives the patient to therapy is a persistent and poorly controlled rage or a symbolic equivalent of it. The patient must be guided through this network of conflicting emotions to understand the causes of his diminished sense of self and his tattered ego. This is often a process