Hatred

by Willard Gaylin

  Aristotle brilliantly distinguished anger from hatred: “Whereas anger arises from offenses against oneself, enmity may arise even without that; we may hate people merely because of what we take to be their character. . . . Moreover, anger can be cured by time; but hatred cannot. . . . And anger is accompanied by pain, hatred is not.14

  Pioneering psychologist Gordon Allport, in his monumental book, The Nature of Prejudice—close to five hundred pages in the abridged paperback edition—devoted just a brief three pages to the nature of hatred, but he got it right. He clearly distinguished between the various forms of prejudice and hatred. Then drawing on this very discussion in Aristotle, he, too, distinguished hatred from the anger with which it is always associated. He agreed that it is the sustained nature of hatred that distinguishes it from the volatile and often passing nature of anger. As he is an interpersonal psychologist, he intuitively latched onto another essential distinction between the two.

  Allport stated that anger is an emotion, and by implication purely an emotion, “whereas hatred must be classified as a sentiment—an enduring organization of aggressive impulses toward a person or toward a class of persons.”15 In other words, the second element of hatred is a profound, if negative, attachment to another person or group. Although Allport did not emphasize or even identify the paranoid shift essential to hatred—he was, after all, a psychologist studying normal personality, not a psychiatrist involved with mental illness—he, nonetheless, came very close: “Since it [hatred] is composed of habitual bitter feeling and accusatory thought, it constitutes a stubborn structure in the mental-emotional life of the individual. By its very nature hatred is extra-punitive, which means that the hater is sure that the fault lies in the object of his hate.” This is precisely what Sigmund Freud referred to as “projection” and what I have called the “paranoid shift.” Allport continued: “So long as he believes this he will not feel guilty for his uncharitable state of mind.”16 This absence of guilt, I suspect, is why Aristotle believed that hatred does not involve pain, whereas anger does. But doesn’t the person who is exercising an action of righteous rage feel guilt-free, too?

  Before elaborating on what distinguishes hatred from anger, it is advantageous to appreciate what they have in common, the emotion. The feeling that is experienced in road rage is fundamentally identical to the feeling in hatred.

  Anger as a Model

  Few readers will have experienced hatred as I have defined it. Every reader, without exception, has experienced anger. Since the conditions that elicit anger are the same as those that support hatred, the feeling of anger can be utilized as a stand-in to build a model of hatred.

  We all know how feelings color and determine our experiences. We often feel “good” for indefinable reasons; a feeling of joy or well-being needs no analysis or justification. We may, in contrast, find ourselves in a state of anguish or despair for no apparent reason. Here, too, the realistic basis for the shift of feeling may not be all that apparent. Nor for that matter may it be rational. Still, our feelings, not the realities, will determine the quality of our lives—the way we value our existence. The irrational and inappropriate external events that precipitate suicide attempts will horrify the objective observers. More important, when the suicide attempt is unsuccessful, the survivor may, himself, arrive at the same state of bewilderment confronting the trivialities that once convinced him to terminate his life.

  Feelings do more than quantify the joy or pain of our everyday life: They also are directives and stimuli, prompting us to specific behavior and responses. Our emotions inform and guide our conduct. As we tend to avoid the sentient experiences of pain and seek pleasure, we listen to our emotions to guide us to sources of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Feelings direct our actions more than we care to admit. We like to think of ourselves as rational animals, but students of human behavior never underestimate the power of the emotional in influencing behavior.

  Human beings, both blessed and burdened with an intelligence and a freedom from fixed instinct unparalleled in the animal kingdom, are constantly faced with important choices. Animal lovers insist that animals too must make choices. Whether to eat the mango or the papaya first is of course a choice, but not the kind of significant choice that humans often face. Human beings may decide not to eat anything in the presence of hunger. Despite the drive of intense hunger, they may refuse to eat in order to conserve food for others, or in order to apportion it in an equitable manner, or because they can anticipate a season of want even during a season of plenty. Such anticipation defies other animals, who must always follow the urge of instinct. To help in making such significant choices, human beings are equipped with a repertoire of unique feelings not necessary in other animals, where most of the important decisions are genetically programmed.

  Lower animals, with no conscience mechanisms, do not require such emotions as guilt and shame. Guilt and shame are designed to serve our moral values, our better selves. Lower animals do not have “better selves.” They are what they are for good and bad, fixed by nature. Fear and rage, however, are emotions common to both the beasts and to us, and we understand their mechanisms better because of the capacity to do animal studies. But the trigger in human beings for either of these emotions differs vastly from that in other animals.

  It is impossible to analyze anger without considering it in conjunction with fear. Fear and anger are usually so inextricably intertwined that a psychotherapist is likely to ask a frightened patient what he is angry about, and to ask an angry patient what is frightening him. Fear and rage are generally perceived as the two basic emotions that support our behavior in emergencies. They are part of an elaborate emergency response mechanism built into higher animals. Rage sets in motion the machinery for a frontal physical assault: Appropriate skeletal muscles are tensed; certain muscles are contracted and opposing ones are relaxed; the autonomic system moves to increase the supply of adrenaline and redistribute the blood flow of the body. All of this to prepare the body as an assault weapon.

  With fear, the same kinds of physiological responses are initiated, but with opposite distributions of neural stimulation and body chemicals, wiring, and the preparation of different muscles. This time, to facilitate escape. These reactions, wonderfully researched over the years, have come to be called “the fight or flight” responses, after the pioneering work of the American physiologist Walter B. Cannon almost one hundred years ago.17 A typical animal experiences these two emotions—and probably only these two—on those occasions when it, its territory, or its breeding rights are under attack. The zebra feels terror with the scent of the lion. He feels rage when the younger male zebra intrudes on his horde.

  Most of an animal’s time is spent free of emotions. Its “work” is survival, and in that it is guided by rigid instinctual patterns built into its physiology. Food, sex, care of the young, and defense of territory are its sole concerns. Hyenas are not stimulated by imagination of a better life that might be, nor haunted by a sense of inadequacy and deficiency for failing to be better parents or citizens of the community than they are.

  Animals survive with the limited resources offered by their biological makeup. They live the same way in the same places doing the same things that their ancestors did eons before. The lamprey inhabits the same ocean depths and is occupied with the same activities that its ancestors did back to the first lamprey of its species. Animals do not imagine the unimaginable. The lion does not aspire to fly like an eagle, roam the seas like a whale, or build “mansions” like termites. Uninspired by imagination, animals do not build ships to explore new worlds, seek new wealth to build new palaces, erect new cities of a grandeur and style inconceivable to their ancestors in the caves. Only Homo sapiens does these things. Only human beings have higher goals and purposes and are equipped with the broad range of feelings that serve this creative imagination. Still, in an emergency, when faced with danger, we will respond with the same basic emotions and physiological responses as the bear a
nd the bobcat.

  These emergency emotions of fear and rage were established—biologically fixed through adaptation—into our physiology in those barbaric times that preceded civilized life. For prehistoric people, the meaning and nature of danger were unequivocal. A threat to survival was present. The danger was real and physical—a predatory beast, an enemy horde, a rebellious member of the clan. In these conditions, these emergency emotions served us well. We became an armed instrument for assault. But how about today?

  In civilized society—even before the actual threats of terrorists made our culture seem devoid of civilized restraints—we continue to respond to perceived threats with fear and rage. We gear ourselves up for assault. But assault on what? In our civilized existence what dangers remain that are satisfactorily resolved by clubbing? Often it is not the enemy we face, but his agent; more often than not, we are confronted by an idea, a doctrine, or a document—an eviction notice, a dismissal slip, a divorce decree. How does one attack such threats? With one’s teeth? We all constantly arm ourselves for dangers that are not physical and cannot be handled via either fight or flight. Worse, some of the threats we perceive exist only in our imaginations.

  Once we convince ourselves that the danger is real, we may behave in such a way as to create the very things we contemplate with dread. In either case, the biology set for a prehistoric way of life does not serve us well in the civilized world we now inhabit. What served the human species so well for the million and a half or more years that we lived in caves has been undone by a mere ten thousand years or so of civilization.

  Actual violence still does occur in everyday life, even for twenty-first-century human beings. There is the urban violence of the mugger and his victim; there is the violence in the family where a brutal or drunken man may exercise his rage and frustration on his wife and children, inflicting life-threatening injuries on the helpless. Warlike intertribal battles still occur in some areas. We see it in Africa, where traditional tribes and nations may be confined within 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 of tracing the path of a perceived threat that leads to fear, and through fear, to rage. Similarly, to understand those who hate, one must follow the elaborate pathways that lead from vulnerability to hatred.

  4

  FEELING THREATEN
ED

  Fear and anger were designed to serve as responses to threats to our survival. To our survival—not to our pride, status, position, manhood, or dignity. Somehow we have developed in our minds a crucial linkage between even minimally measurable affronts to our status and the very fact of our survival. We respond to these affronts with biological defenses appropriate to an actual assault. Even a simple direct gaze may be perceived as an attack. “Dissing” someone on a subway or the streets of the city may be an invitation to an assault. In the subways of New York City something as inoffensive as a direct look may be interpreted as an act of contempt and assault on dignity.

  For years the direct relationship between fear and rage remained undiscovered. Fear was clearly a response to someone who threatened to harm you. Rage was the seemingly opposite emotion. You had rage in the face of someone who affronted you or frustrated you in your pursuits. The intimate connection between them was not appreciated.

  These two emotions operate on a toggle switch, readily convertible, one to the other. In cultures where fear is perceived as unmanly—and where is it not?—the emotion of fear is humiliating and must be repressed. Men, real men, do not eat quiche or show fear. Rage is the public face of fear in most men and many women. The two can be considered as opposite sides of the same coin, the same emergency response. Therefore, to determine what enrages a population, look for what threatens them.

  Anything in society, in daily life, or in the broader conditions of existence that makes the environment seem more threatening can invoke rage. Anything that diminishes self-confidence or raises questions about one’s strength, value, or worth—in other words, one’s capacity to defend oneself, one’s honor, one’s territory—can also invoke rage. The vital balance perceived between the power of “them” and “us”—the measure of our vulnerability—will determine the degree of fear and rage operating on any individual or in a culture.