Hatred Willard Gaylin (classic novels TXT) 📖

all unsophisticated about such disabilities, she was expected to keep up. This is but a paradigm for that category of frustrations that may be imposed by unreasonable and unattainable standards. In a society where white—and only white—was beautiful, a black had few options except to attempt to transform himself into something approximating white, a hopeless, frustrating, and humiliating set of maneuvers.

Much has been made of the frustration of menial, unrewarding, unchallenging work that has no beginning or end, no product or pride, work that leads nowhere, with no hope of surcease. Still, there remains the honor, worth, and pride of fulfilling our responsibilities to ourselves and our dependents. When we are deprived of our capacity to work, that is a different order of things. The mass unemployment that exists in some areas of the underdeveloped world prevents people from finding the means of survival while at the same time denying them the sense of pride that work offers. When such frustration is imposed from outside, as occurs in the Palestinian refugee camps or the underdeveloped countries, the resulting diminution of self-pride and self-respect may be perceived as the product of an assault. Someone has invaded the repository of their dignity and robbed the people of the instruments of self-respect. But often it is the wrong someone who is blamed.

Frustration will always be most malignant when it involves those aspects central to the purposes of life. Because the frustrations we experience do not generally test us to our limits, most of us are not driven to the extreme of rage that leads to murder or suicide, the hatred that supports torture and inflicts suffering. In the privileged world we occupy, our frustrations are more likely to involve the luxuries and peripherals of life. When the areas that are frustrated are as central as work or sex, the anger that emerges is immense, evil, and ugly. Violent cases of frustrated rage are increasingly evident in the world today. I have not had personal experience with torturers or terrorists, but I have dealt extensively with similar hatred expressed in crimes of passion.

The passion in crimes of passion is the rage of frustrated potency, not of frustrated love, a common misrepresentation. Violent crimes of passion are for the most part acts not of a grieving lover but of a humiliated and impotent lover. In one typical case that I studied, a teenage boy stabbed to death a prepubescent girl in what was described as a sexual crime. It would have been better described as an asexual crime.

The young man was immature and sexually inhibited, having been raised in a religious but not abusive background. He was only fifteen and had never had any sexual experiences with girls, not uncommon in the small-town Canadian environment of that period. But he had, in addition, never been able to achieve an orgasm through masturbation. One Christmas season while working part-time in a department store, he lured an eight-year-old girl who had come to visit Santa Claus into the back stockroom where he worked.

He had the child undress and masturbated while looking at her nude body. At this point he had no desire to touch her and made no attempt to harm her. After twenty minutes of frustrating inability to reach an ejaculation, he became anxious and agitated. The frightened child began to whimper and cry. He then felt threatened by exposure and urgently told her to be still, which only further frightened her. In an attempt to silence her, in a combination of rage and terror, he picked up a knife that was at hand and stabbed her repeatedly and incessantly to death.

Humiliation

The added indignity that frenzied this adolescent boy was the humiliation of having exposed his impotence to the child, who, then, through her cries, threatened to further expose him to the community as a child molester. Every aspect of our behavior about which we are ashamed—the psychological conditions that confront us with a sense of our inadequacy and the danger that represents—are compounded when these deficiencies are made public. When the “fact” that we are less than lovable is exposed to the public eye, that we are less than potent is announced in the public space, that we are deprived and inadequate becomes part of the public knowledge, we experience humiliation of the most painful order.

Obviously this exposure invites potential exploitation by those who would take advantage of our weakness. But I do not believe that fear is the emotion that underlies humiliation. Shame is unquestionably the emotion present in this situation. We define ourselves, after all, not just as individuals, but as members of groups. We take pride not just in our accomplishments but in the recognition and acknowledgment of those accomplishments by the group in which we abide, in the appreciation of our worth by the community. To be reduced as an individual in our own eyes is bad enough. To be shamed before the group compounds our pain in a way that can readily convert anger into outrage, hurt into a humiliation, and that can ultimately pierce the boundaries of our constraint.

The rampage of an ex-employee at the workplace is often a product of such a perceived public humiliation, where the “public” may be only his fellow employees at the post office. Even here it is unlikely that this rage would lead to deadly and random shootings of innocent members of the community if it were not operating within the context of a paranoid ideation, the next stage of our consideration of hatred.

Just as an individual may be humiliated, so, too, may a population held in scorn rise to assert its indignation and restore its self-respect. There are such things as righteous indignation and righteous rage. These can lead to insurrection, revolution, and outright war.

I offer these categories of the dynamics of anger, not as a definitive list, but as a first step in understanding hatred, or at least the emotional underpinnings of hatred. As