I am most tempted to enter my danger zones when dealing with electronic equipment, either in its assembly or repair. If what I am diddling with were an attempt to install or program a DVD player, the frustration that I experience has nothing at all to do with the typical image of frustration, that is, a frustrated desire . The desire to watch a movie is irrelevant. It is the evidence of my own personal ineptitude that threatens and, therefore, angers me.
What disturbs me is my knowledge that others can handle these matters quite well and that I seem to be particularly inept. The feeling of being all thumbs is not far from the feeling of having no hands. What enrages, because it frightens, is the emerging awareness of one’s own inadequacy in relation to others—relative abilities, or lack thereof, in a competitive world.
Most of us are not frustrated by our inability to climb Mount Everest, accrue a fortune, or play golf like Tiger Woods. It is dealing with the computer glitches, fixing the plumbing, or roasting a turkey that triggers frustration. The apparent simplicity of these tasks suggests that others can do them easily. Philip Roth, in his marvelously honest book Patrimony, reveals his barely constrained rage at his irritable and demanding father, rage that breaks out when his father, in a tirade against his self-sacrificing girlfriend, complains that she cannot even pick out a decent melon. Roth’s fury spills out, since he, like me, is obviously frustrated at his own inability to “pick out a decent melon,” a task that others seem to manage. Our failure is more dramatic for being so relative. If I am incapable even here, where others succeed, what does that say about the worth and reliability of myself?
We can guard against a sense of impotence by deflecting the anger from the self to others, concentrating on who created the problem rather than who it is that cannot resolve it. If the example is audio equipment that a child tinkered with and damaged, one could divert the stream of anger from oneself to the child, withdrawing the attention from one’s own inadequacy by finding a convenient, culpable target.
A more rational way to protect our self-esteem would be to avoid involvement in such trivia. Much of this is choice. Play football instead of golf. Don’t play games at all. As for the handyman or household maintenance stuff of life that confounds us, we can admit defeat by hiring someone to do it. There is no disgrace in that. We live in a world of specialized work. We don’t make our own clothes, grow our own vegetables, or hunt for our own meat. For most men “bringing home the bacon” is a metaphoric phrase that does not even involve their making a trip to the supermarket.
But what happens when we leave the world of the relatively trivial and avoidable? The learning-disabled child cannot avoid schooling, and at a time when we were 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 rag
e. 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 such, they are admittedly somewhat arbitrary and often overlapping. They do not pretend to be all-inclusive. They are only intended to indicate the multiple ways that individuals or groups can feel threatened. All threats lead to anger. All threats may be steps on the ladder to hatred.
Beyond direct threats are the equally frightening symbolic ones. They are proposed to explain how seeming “overreactions”—a response that seems inappropriate to the stimulus—can make sense when the metaphoric and symbolic nature of human existence is brought into consideration. These days we are rarely threatened by direct force, unless we are mugged or robbed. We are more likely to feel threatened by an assault on our reputation, our status, our livelihood, our manhood—or even a misperceived assault in these areas. We all live in the world of our own perceptions, where reality is only an occasional intruder.
Understanding the unconscious roots of rage, however, is only a first step in understanding hatred. Even when deprivation, injustice, betrayal, exploitation, frustration, or humiliation leads to violence, this ferocious rage is still not hatred. Rage can produce a slaughter of major proportions. There may even be transient pleasure in getting one’s own back. But surely not sustained joy in witnessing the results of our unbridled rage. One would hope that in most cases, time would produce shame and contrition.
Rage, even murderous rage, is still short of hatred. Rage is anger at its most extreme. But it is only an emotion. In the throes of this powerful emotion, one may carry out a spontaneous action of the worst kind. Rage may lead to killing a perceived enemy in a frenzied moment, but not to dragging him alive behind a truck and watching his body being shredded and dismembered. Rage is a hot emotion; hatred is a cold passion. Rage explodes; hatred festers and may also then explode. Rage is only an emotion; hatred contains elements of the emotion of anger, including rage, but it is more. Hatred is an amalgam containing an emotion, a paranoid ideation, and an obsessive extended relationship to a perceived enemy.
5
ENVY
Locating an Enemy
Modern psychology has demonstrated the irrational nature of much of human behavior. We are not nearly as reasonable or logical as we would like to believe. When our emotions are in opposition to our rational judgments, we all too often succumb to the emotion. We will risk our life speeding on a highway—cut the bastard off, tailgate to intimidate—to defend some perverse sense of pride or honor or to retaliate for a sense of respect denied. Certainly when we are dealing with terrorism, torture, and hatred, we perceive clearly that something beyond reason is happening. Something “crazy” is going on.
Rage is the feeling that underlies all hatred. Frequently, rage is supported by a feeling of envy, another powerful and destabilizing emotion. Envy is not basic to all hatred, but is frequently a factor in defining the enemy on whom we will vent our spleen. Envy is particularly important in addressing the American perplexity as to why so much irrational hostility seems directed toward us.
I have always had difficulty in dealing with envy. In my attempts to understand the range of human emotions I have been guided by the doctrine of the “wisdom of the body”—and the mind. I believe that the broad range of human emotions is designed specifically to facilitate human beings in making rapid decisions—decisions essential in supporting individual or communal survival. The one emotion that seems to consistently resist this precept is the feeling of envy.
Envy may indeed be a useless emotion. It seems to serve none of the purposes of other emotions. Unlike the emergency emotions of fear and rage, it does not serve survival; unlike pride and joy, it does not serve aspiration, achievement, or the quality of our life; unlike guilt and shame, it does not serve conscience or community. It does not alert, liberate, or enrich us. It is ugly and demeaning. Unfortunately, it is still capable of motivating us. And it plays a crucial part in the mechanisms of hatred.
Envy has long fascinated moralists. It is represented in the Old Testament by the serpent in the Garden of Eden and is implicit in the covetousness that is prohibited in the tenth commandment. In the New Testament envy is described as the “evil eye,” where—bracketed by wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, and blasphemy—it takes its place among those “evil things that come from within, and defile the man.”19
Poets and writers anticipated—albeit without the systematic approach—the works of modern psychologists and sociologists. There is nothing in Freud, our greatest psychologist, about the nature of human feeling and conduct that had not been portrayed by authors such as Euripides, Shakespeare, Molière, Balzac, Dickens, and Chekhov.
All the passion and pettiness of human existence are evident in the plays of Shakespeare. Othello is a textbook for the student who would contrast jealousy (Othello) and envy (Iago). Envy has occupied a prominent role in literature from the classic Greek drama into modern times. Milton defined envy as the devil’s own emotion (as did Bacon). In Paradise Lost, Satan is filled with envy on viewing Adam and Eve in Paradise and in love and is determined to bring about their fall.20 Grimm’s German dictionary, compiled in the nineteenth century, in a brief definition of envy (Neid) included all of its elements, which later would be examined and expanded: “Envy expresses that vindictive and inwardly tormenting frame of mind, the displeasure with which one perceives the prosperity and the advantages of others, begrudges them these things and in addition wishes one were able to destroy or to possess them oneself: synonyms: malevolence, ill-will, the evil-eye.”
I have defined envy as the bitter, resentful feeling that one has in the presence of and toward the person who is perceived as having traits superior to one’s own. I used this crude and practical definition of envy in my practice, where many patients, in the anguish of their neuroses, were tormented by envy. Later, I would read Sir Francis Bacon’s elegant and insightful essay on envy, in which he stated: “A man that hath no virtue in himself ever envieth virtue in others. For men’s mind will either feed upon their own good or upon other’s evil; and who wanteth the one will prey upon the other; and whoso is out of hope to attain to another’s virtue will seek to come at even hand by depressing another’s fortune.”21
Obviously, I am not using envy here in the vernacular sense, as a synonym for admire, as in “I envy you your patience (or drawing skills, musical abilities, way with women).” Such colloquial usages for feelings trivialize and minimize the malignancy of both the feelings and the individuals obsessed by them.
Envy is a complex amalgam of at least four conditions—all necessary for its full and true development. The first is that feeling of deprivation previously described. The mere absence of money, position, or pleasure will not alone generate a feeling of deprivation. We must go beyond the absence of goods. We must feel that this deprivation, far from being the common fate or even bad luck, was, to the contrary, imposed on us in particular. We must feel that someone has set out to deny us the good things of life. The feeling of deprivation requires imagining a malignant force in operation. Someone has done this to us.
Second, we must feel that what we have been denied is possessed by others. Crucial to envy is a comparative point of view. A sense of injustice and unfairness must prevail.
Third, we must have a sense of impotence in the face of the disparity. This impotence may exist because we are aware of our powerlessness to change our way of life or because there is no redress. Frustrated rage and helplessness are two essential ingredients in building envy. Over one hundred years ago, that great student of social unrest, Max Scheler,22 emphasized the crucial role played by impotence. Scheler said that the mere fact that another possesses that which one covets does not constitute envy. It may, he suggests, motivate one to acquire the desired object or something similar by legal or illegal means, working for it, buying it, or steali
ng it. “Only when the attempt to obtain it by these means has failed, giving rise to the consciousness of impotence, does ‘envy’ arise.”
The element that completes the mosaic of envy involves inserting a causal connection between our deprived state and the position of privilege of others. It is not just that we do not have that which they have, it is that we do not have it because they have it.
What possible adaptive value can such a demeaning emotion have? One might see it as a vestigial element from a prehistoric past. I have already indicated that I feel we are stuck operating with a physiology of anger that has been made obsolete by modern life. We resort to medical means to compensate for the adrenaline rush that has no place in a society where fight-or-flight solves few problems. Hence the large number of men and women taking beta-blockers and other drugs to stabilize their blood pressure and heart rates.
But of what value could envy have had in the prehistoric past? None that I can imagine, for it never brings gratification. We overvalue that which we do not have, and minimize that which we have been given. It is a game with no winning. The envious person would find misery in Eden.
Envy may simply be a degradation of the emotion of jealousy. Jealousy is admittedly a painful feeling, but its purposes can be traced to adaptational advantages. Jealousy is complicated by the fact that it has two separate meanings. In the sense that does not concern us here, jealousy refers to the suspicious, paranoid feeling associated with sexual and romantic attachments, where we are frightened that what we have might be stolen away. The jealousy that is relevant to this discussion is that form—often confused with envy—that focuses on what others have that we do not. Jealousy in early childhood is invariably involved with the rivalry for parental attention and affection. Jealousy emerges with the fear that the rival sibling is getting more than we are. In adult life, jealousy tends to be much less functional.
Hatred Page 6
