In precultural societies, jealousy may have served a similar role that it plays in childhood. It stirs competition. This promotes individual survival, while at the same time serving group survival in that it helps ensure that the fittest ascend to power. The fact that in our highly competitive and paranoid society, we need no spur to encourage competitive impulses does not belie the original useful purpose of the emotion.
In the case of envy, actual competition is not an essential. The envious person sees everything in a comparative and competitive framework, carrying envy into every aspect of life. Envy represents a vicious and hateful resentment of people that is independent of their actual encroachment on our pleasures. The envious resent everything about the other—their comfort, their possessions, and beyond that, their very existence.
Schadenfreude is the reverse of envy. Whereas envy generates pain in the pleasure of others—think of Satan’s agony on viewing Adam and Eve in Paradise—schadenfreude is the joy felt on hearing of others’ misery. All of us are likely to experience a certain pleasure when the high and the mighty take a fall. That simply reduces the gap between their power and ours. Schadenfreude, however, is a more severe problem. Envy and schadenfreude are obverses of the same coin, and always appear together. When severe, every success of even our closest friend will be viewed as a threat and a humiliation on our part. It is as though life is viewed as a seesaw where the rise of another human being demands our decline.
A young actress who had entered treatment with a mild depression was the first to present the most severe example of schadenfreude. One morning she arrived ecstatic and bubbling over with the news that she had just won a choice and featured part in a new play. It was the kind of part that garnered attention and could be a first step in a major career. And indeed it was.
I was a sophisticated therapist and knew enough about the tenacious quality of even mild depression—its resistance to actual achievement—to recognize that even though we had made significant progress in therapy, one event like this would not break the hold of the depression. Still, I was not prepared for the rage and despondency that emerged in her very next session. Morosely, she at first resisted all inquiries as to what had happened to dissipate the feeling of well-being that had been present only the day before. Finally, and reluctantly, she admitted with some chagrin that her change of mood was in response to a notice she had read in Variety that a close friend had been cast in a choice part in a movie.
When I questioned the vehemence of her response, her chilling answer was: “Don’t you understand? In order for me to be happy, it is not enough that I succeed. My friends have to fail.” Most of us can recall occasionally feeling some ambivalence—but not anguish—on hearing of a colleague’s success or honor, even though that success was not at our own expense or in any way diminished our own opportunities. I have heard many similar responses from patients, an inordinately large number of them from actors. I assume that the intensity of competition in the field and the scarcity of adequate roles create something approaching a zero-sum game. In almost any other field, diligence, persistence, and talent will eventually bring success and recognition. That is simply not so in the world of the theater. Obviously, schadenfreude is not limited to any one group. I remember hearing from a prominent professional man—a generous man who had demonstrated minimal rancor during the course of his therapy—that in elections for honors or to honorary societies, he found himself routinely voting against those people he knew best.
Schadenfreude is a particularly revealing means of demonstrating the negative aspects of a free, but competitive, society. Obviously, we live in a competitive world; there are areas in which another’s failure is in every way the equivalent of our success. Competitive sports is certainly such an area, and that may be one of its primary purposes, that is, to find a safe release for such competition. If my colleague bogies a hole, that is just as good as if I birdie the same one. In a running race, I win regardless of my speed or lack thereof if my opponent stumbles and falls. Similarly when I am running for office, my opponent’s severe gaffe in a debate may be in every way the equivalent of my being particularly eloquent.
The spirit of competition will not explain the tendency to convert noncompetitive areas into competitions. It would not explain the competitive angst a lawyer might feel on hearing of the success of his scientist friend. Nor does it explain the envy experienced by a divorced woman over the happiness of her married friends. These are noncompetitive situations, but in the crabbed world of the envious, all prizes are perceived as stolen from them.
The readiness to interpret a chance event as an assault on self is emblematic of the tendency of the envious to see false causal relationship—the attribution of purpose or design where none exists. The psychological device of “projection,” a key maneuver that links envy to paranoia, facilitates this tendency. Projection will be discussed in much more detail in subsequent chapters. Put simply, projection is the process by which we handle unworthy and unacceptable impulses arising from our own unconscious by attributing them to others.
A person who emerges from childhood with severe feelings of deprivation may carry with him into adulthood a desire to take from others that which he feels has been taken from him. Getting his own back. If this desire is actually perceived as legitimate, and if a perverse or absent conscience mechanism allows it, he may indulge this resentment in wanton acts of hatred. If, however, the feelings strike him as ignoble, he may project the feelings arising from within to others. The very feelings that he struggles with will then be perceived as arising from others and directed at him. This is the classic example of paranoid jealousy. It is almost a certainty that the jealous husband or wife is, at a minimum, obsessively preoccupied with illicit desires.
Jealousy is most often directed at what may be taken from us. Jealousy is anticipatory. It is fear of what is about to happen. Envy is driven by the past. There is a certainty that unfair deprivation has already occurred. With the envious person, anger and bitterness prevail because the injustice is perceived as already having happened. The emptiness and hunger are always present. “Consumed by envy” is an apt metaphor, and what is being consumed is pride and self-respect.
Chronic envy is an erosive, self-destroying disease. Like cancer, it eats away at the vitals of those who must live with it daily. When envy is a way of life, it converts the envious person into a grievance collector who masochistically embraces situations that confirm his deprivation and exploitation. If necessary, he himself will create such situations. He will interpret every ambiguous situation as a decision against him. Every route taken is the most heavily trafficked; his line at the checkout counters the slowest; his table at the restaurant the least desirable.
When the rage of frustration is joined by the irrational assumption that we are in a state of deprivation because “somebody” did this to us, we are on the road to hatred. Envy helps in locating an enemy when no more-convenient one is at hand. When the angry and envious person succeeds in locating another group on which he can fix responsibility for his deprivations, we have the essentials for prejudice and bigotry. But only when the other group or person becomes a fixation, an obsession, a passionate attachment, can a fixed hatred emerge. The distinction is crucial. Most racists in the American South did not participate in acts of violence against blacks. Not all antisemitic Germans joined in the revelries and mayhem of Krystalnacht. For such hateful acts, a social delusion is necessary, a thinking disorder must be present.
HATRED
AS A THOUGHT DISORDER
6
UNDERSTANDING “NORMAL” BEHAVIOR
When an eighteen-year-old girl straps a fifteen-pound explosive pack—loaded with nails in order to maximize the extent and degree of slaughter—around her waist; enters a marketplace that is filled with other young women shopping for their evening meal; and proceeds to blow herself up for the singular purpose of crippling, maiming, blinding, and killing as many of her fellow creatures as poss
ible, we are appalled. This is not how normal people behave. This is not consonant with the standards of human conduct as we understand them. We would assume the woman was psychotic—at least we would have assumed that in former times.
There have always existed among us those aberrant, unfortunate souls, those psychotic individuals, who have lost touch with reality and live in their own distorted world with its seemingly inexplicable sets of rules. Each thinks that he is the new Messiah, the Angel of Death, a special agent of the president of the United States, and each acts accordingly. We try to understand their illness and be forgiving of their actions. But we are not always successful, since their behavior is so alien to our sense of normal human conduct. Still, we draw a clear distinction between their behavior and the cultural standards of normalcy. Their random slaughter seems unmotivated, bizarre, and therefore monstrous.
What astonishes us with the Arab suicide bombers is that in their own community this behavior is perceived as rational. Beyond acceptance, it is actually glorified. Such conduct is elevated to a model to be embraced, admired, and emulated by their peers. Perhaps it is cynical to point out that many parents of the Palestinian suicide bombers have been paid $25,000 by Iraq and supplied a home and other comforts rare in these cultures of poverty. Children have been sold into slavery and prostitution in Africa, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and other impoverished regions for a fraction of this amount. Still, the parents of the terrorists seem to take pride and joy in their children’s behavior. Other parents aspire to the same fate for their children—or at least affect to.
And the religious leaders—the guardians and arbiters of morality in their community—join the political demagogues in celebration and endorsement of the murder and self-destruction. They do worse; they proclaim the bombers to be martyrs. It is positively dumbfounding to us that they idealize these monstrous acts, defining such behavior as being in the service of Allah—in the service of God, no less.
Is it possible to view terrorism as simply a function of cultural variability? Given the disparate potentials of human behavior, should we acknowledge terrorism as an authentic example of cultural diversity? Can we acknowledge it as normal behavior? Or are we entitled to label such action as a perversion of human nature?
The diversity of human behavior is astonishing. Each human infant is born incomplete, awaiting the variable impacts of family and culture to determine what emerges. Environmental influences modify the genetic structures and thus the very form and nature of human life in ways impossible with any other animal. And the line between normal and sick behavior is as porous a boundary as the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Defining sick behavior is contingent on defining the normal, and that is not so easy, given the singularity of the human species, the range of normal lifestyles available to our species, and the diversity of our behavior and our cultures. We must understand the boundaries of normalcy.
The arguments about normal and perverse—hatred and evil—are but part of an ongoing dialogue about human nature itself. Two contrasting views prevail. One is expressed most clearly in the beginning of the Old Testament: “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.”23 This statement definitively places man apart from the continuity of the beasts. Being in the image of a righteous and just Lord, man must by nature be endowed with goodness. And as the Bible later confirms: “Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor.”24 The Bible, in allowing our species the freedom to rebel, gave rise to the Christian doctrine of original sin. Whereas the Old Testament emphasizes an inborn goodness that is corruptible, the New Testament emphasizes an inborn corruptness that is correctable.
The view from the second half of the twentieth century—conditioned by two world wars, the Holocaust, the atom bomb, and growing ecological disasters—lent credence to an opposing view of human nature supporting those who viewed human nature as inherently selfish and evil. The world of modern anthropologists and ethologists tended to support a gloomy view of man as the destroyer. 25 These sociologists may be seen as the descendants of Montaigne, the most extreme spokesman for the vileness of natural man. Montaigne viewed man as not just an animal, but a lesser animal. The very traits that are generally proposed as our glories—our freedom and autonomy—were perceived by him as primarily the freedom to do evil. As such freedom is a baser phenomenon than the instinctually driven behavior of lower animals.26
The negative view of nature has been buttressed by the powerful emotional impact of evil since 9/11. This view is also supported by our tendency to be more fascinated by evil than virtue, discomfort than comfort, sickness than health. Look at the evening news. One manifestation of the view that we are innately evil, needing civilization to live in harmony, is expressed by the following: When a human being behaves like an animal, he is often described as having “lost control,” as though it is only conscious control that reins in our bestiality; we are presumed to be rampant individuals pursuing our own survival at any cost. However, when a parent sacrifices herself for a child, it is never described as a “loss of control.”
Obviously, no one can deny the ample evidence of morally bad behavior. But neither ought one deny the evidence of the opposite. There are noble acts of selflessness, generosity, empathy, sharing, caring, and even self-sacrifice. The difference is in that which “comes naturally.” One group chooses to see human beings as survival-oriented hedonists whose aggressiveness is contained only by the restricting forces of civilization. This group views unselfishness as an attribute that must be indoctrinated into the actions of the individual by a controlling culture. The other group sees caring as innate, but capable of being destroyed by a lack of proper nurture.
Freud straddled both camps but ended up on the side of a norm for decency. He was aware of the bizarre extended helplessness of the human child and the biological mandate for adult care and sympathy. Since the fate of the species could not depend on some learned control patterns on the part of parents, he had to assume that care for the helpless child must be guaranteed by nature, not simply learned. Caring is not like chemistry or piano playing, something that must be taught. Caring must be part of the genetic mandate of our species. A tender and protective attitude to the newborn—and by extension to the innocent and the helpless—is innate.
If we accept this premise, one can not suspend moral judgment of certain behavior by attributing it to cultural diversity. There are at least some norms and values that cross political and cultural boundaries. There are some absolute criteria of good and evil. Encouraging innocent children to destroy other innocent children for political purposes is evil. How can we cope with such evil? Only by confronting and understanding it. Only by seeing the links that tie pathological to normal behavior. Therefore we need to examine the decidedly strange conduct of “normal” people before analyzing the pathological aspects of behavior.
We do not conduct our lives like the ants, in a predictable pattern designed to support our survival. We are capable of being unpredictable to the point of self-destructiveness. The fact that we are animals endowed with rationality unfortunately does not mean that we are rational animals. The possession of reason does not ensure reasonableness. At least not all the time. One has only to look at the crazy pace and pursuits of life in our times to know that something besides survival is at stake and that something other than reason is driving us to our goals. Think of the tobacco industry, where executives spend their lives encouraging people to kill themselves by utilizing their products. And think of the people who buy these products in the face of the clearest evidence that lung cancer is an elected option, the one malignant disease we are all free to escape.
Many of us, bankers and brokers, hucksters and peddlers, devote seventy to eighty hours each week to grinding and unrewarding work, waiting for the opportunity to retire. Is there anything that money can buy that is worth the time spent earning it in often deadening and somet
imes immoral pursuits—in dissipation of energy and self-respect? And here we are talking about presumably normal behavior, as distinguished from the pathological actions of terrorists.
Human conduct is obviously not analogous to the practice of engineering. We do not take the best available evidence and apply it to the problem at hand. We do not design our lives the way we design bridges. But before we can deal with something so irrational as paranoia and psychopathic conduct, we must deal with the “irrational” elements of normal people in their everyday life—if only to be able to draw a moral distinction between them and the crazy and aberrant.
Normal human beings operate in what had for years seemed mysterious ways, best explained elliptically through the creative insights of our great writers. With the birth of modern psychology in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the study of normal behavior—perception, memory, learning, and motivation—was put on scientific footing. This was quickly followed by a systematic attempt to understand pathological behavior. Out of that crush of insight and genius emerged one towering figure who attempted to fuse the two, Sigmund Freud.
Oh, how this mighty figure who dominated intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century has fallen in recent decades! The oversell and overkill of psychoanalytic theory promised an explanation for all behavior and relief from all mental illness. No theory could ever fulfill the expectations of all this hype. But the disillusionment with what it failed to achieve—a cure for mental illness—must not obscure what it did accomplish; it supplied us with one of the most comprehensive and usable theories of normal human motivation. Certain Freudian insights can help us in understanding the variety of normal experience and also the limits of normalcy. By establishing the boundaries of even so irrational an animal as the human being, we will be able to understand the neurotic and psychotic extensions that lead to hatred and terror.
Hatred Page 7
