Hatred Willard Gaylin (classic novels TXT) 📖

of a relationship with an enemy. Hatred can be seen as being structured very similarly to love. However, the opposing feelings that underlie the two emotions make love an enriching and expansive experience, while hatred is a constricting and destructive venom. One can compare hatred and love:

1. Both are supported by powerful feelings, but both encompass more than feeling in their definitions. They are not simply emotions like rage, fear, guilt, or shame.

2. Both require a passionate attachment that must endure over a significant time.

3. Both require an object of their attachments. In a love relationship, the attachment is generally to an individual and the object is invariably idealized; in hatred the object of fixation is usually to a group and the object population is demonized.

4. Those who love or hate are obsessed with the objects of their emotional states and insist on sharing their lives with them.

5. Finally, both hatred and love involve an often dangerous infatuation—“a foolish, unreasoning, or extravagant passion”—and that can lead to disastrous action.

In neither hatred nor love is the object of their attachment, the obsessive focus of their passion, all that the individual makes it out to be. It is not surprising that, as William Congreve wrote, “love to hatred turned” is such a familiar story. All that is required is a shift in the emotion. Everything else is in place.

The fact that hatred is formed and structured like a neurosis does not mean that we ought to grant to hatred the exculpation afforded the sick. Antisocial behavior must be governed and controlled. To do that we insist on autonomy and responsibility. Unless you are truly insane, the presence or absence of mental illness has little relevance in the law. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Men who are not insane nor idiotic [are expected] to control their evil passions or violent tempers or brutal instincts, and if they do not do so, it is their own fault.”85 The sardonic statement of the judge in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon highlights the central position that responsibility holds in the social contract:

You may say that it is not your fault. The answer is ready enough at hand, and it amounts to this—that if you had been born of healthy and well-to-do parents, and been well taken care of when you were a child, you would never have offended against the laws of your country, nor found yourself in your present disgraceful positions. If you tell me that you had no hand in your parentage and education, and that it is therefore unjust to lay these things to your charge, I answer that whether your being in a consumption [tuberculosis] is your fault or no, it is a fault in you, and it is my duty to see that against such faults as this the commonwealth shall be protected. You may say that it is your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate.86

Those of us who have never experienced the cold and continuing passion of hatred can never truly understand that which exists in the hearts of the haters. We do not know how “they feel when . . .” And for that we must be grateful. But to limit the reach of hatred, we must try to understand it. There is such a thing as evil; there is such a thing as paranoid displacement; there is such a thing as a culture of hatred. And it is with the last-named that the danger is compounded.

Generalized theories of violence and hatred often prove vulnerable because they seek a common internal dynamic that drives all haters. That problem almost destroyed psychoanalysis. Freud established his theory of neurosis built on unconscious drives and defenses against them. He postulated that dynamic forces from the patient’s past determined his neurotic fate. Then Freud and his followers assumed they could find common patterns in all who suffered a similar neurosis. This ushered in the silly season of dynamic speculation that sought universal and overarching causes. Only later would psychoanalysts recognize that it was not a common drive or common past that determined the nature of a phobia, for example, but a common defense. The same is true of hatred.

Even the best of researchers continues to be beguiled into looking for universal causes for sociological behavior. Richard Rhodes, in his admirable book Masters of Death,87 struggled in a similar fashion to find some common bonds that would link the Nazi SS murderers, in hopes of introducing some dynamic, regardless of how demented, that might explain the killings. But these people do not share a psychological unity or a basic dynamic. They are not a universe of like-minded people. Each of them is playing out his own scenario of misery and rage determined by his unique history.

Similarly, the profilers and other self-appointed predictors of human behavior patterns do a disservice to the complexity of human motivation by their generalizations. They inevitably describe the unknown terrorist in the image of his predecessor, and in the process often lead law enforcement down a garden path, as in the disastrous effort to find “the white man in a white van” in the search for the sniper killers in the Washington, D.C., area in the fall of 2002.

There are as many variations of psychodynamics leading to hatred as we find in neurotic patients. Each, neurotic and hater, takes the building blocks—his unconscious or conscious feelings of terror, deprivation, impotence, humiliation, and frustrated rage—and constructs a setting for hatred. Each one will search for direction and outlet for his misery that exonerates himself. He will build a scenario of persecution by utilizing whatever leads are at hand. He will invent an enemy. He may exploit individual scapegoats: blacks, Jews, abortionists, gays. He may discover a previously designed enemy supplied to him by groups with consonant concerns—safeguarding the environment, protecting animals, preserving racial purity.

The deranged individual has a limited capacity to wreak havoc. The psychotic is too disorganized to do much