Hatred

by Willard Gaylin

  Known terrors are always more bearable than the dread of the unknown. What is knowable may be controllable. We use anticipation to protect ourselves by making contingency plans in advance of the impending disasters. When the reservoirs are dangerously low, we restrict water consumption. We store the bountiful harvests in anticipation of droughts, thus preventing famines. We arm ourselves in the presence of the predator; secure food supplies and stake out territories that supply them; protect ourselves from the elements; and in this modern age of medicine, take care of our health. Above all, we plan and anticipate. But there is no way that we can prepare our psyche to accept the unknown and unknowable. We, therefore, find means of rationalizing the unknowable.

  The greatest perceived threat is always the unknowable one, which is epitomized by one of the earliest fears of childhood—fear of the dark. Even this fear represents a reparative step. It defines a way out. If that which one fears is literally “the dark,” one can always turn on the light. With the intellectual and metaphoric darkness, we need symbolic candles. The evolution of the varying symptoms of neurosis, as described in Chapter 7, can all be explained in terms of controlling the unknowable by adding light and understanding. Neurotic behavior can be viewed as an attempt to control an existential, or free-floating, anxiety through various displacements and rationalizations.

  All of us have felt anxious, as distinguished from worried. We worry about events. We are anxious about what we do not know. But for most of us, the anxiety we occasionally experience is similar to the temporary feelings of depression that we endure. We know that this vague anxiety—extending in severity from unease to dread—will pass. With some people, the anxiety will not pass. This is the state we psychiatrists refer to as an “anxiety neurosis.” Such patients are forced to use the reparative devices of neurotic symptoms to help limit their anxiety. The phobic avoids the source of his anxiety; he decides that an animal is the true source of his fear and he stays away from that animal. The obsessive eliminates the source of his anxiety; if every aspect of life is managed and controlled, there can be no surprises, and thus there will be no uncontrollable events. The delusional explains it; that which seems threatening is really a part of a grand design to exalt rather than to reduce one. But all neurotic repairs eventually fail, as reality inevitably breaks through, necessitating newer distortions and displacements.

  Hatred can be understood in the language of repair and symptoms. Hatred is a neurotic attachment to a self-created enemy that has been designed to rationalize the anxiety and torment of a demeaning existence. It is a defense against the hopelessness of despair. Hate-driven people live in the distorted world of their own perceptions. Normal people also live in the perceived world rather than the actual one, but saying that both the bigoted hater’s perceptions and the normal person’s perceptions are subjective does not eliminate the real distinction between those perceptions. It does not morally equate the hater with us. Hatred is their disease at this point, and we normal people must protect ourselves against it. To do so we must appreciate its complexities.

  Hatred must not be perceived as a mere extension of the transient feelings of rage that we all have experienced. It is an emotion, but beyond that, it is also a psychological state that defines the self in terms 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 v
an” 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 more than go on a shooting spree. As tragic as that is, it has relatively limited long-range consequences for society at large. The psychopath also has limits set on his actions. It is with the group—the culture of hatred—that monstrous evil can be unleashed. When the psychotic or paranoid is a despotic leader, like Idi Amin, with absolute authority over his nation, individual despair and resentment may be united under the banner of the leader’s insane vision. When everyday bias is supported and legitimated by religion or nationalism, the passions of ordinary malcontents will be intensified and focused, allowing a community of hatred to emerge. The conditions necessary to support mass murder and genocide are now set.

  A collection of haters is generally a ragtag assembly of individuals until a powerful authority, such as a political or religious leader, provides them with a common enemy. This paranoid leadership gives shape to the group by naming an enemy, by granting legitimacy and respectability to the hatred of that enemy through its authority, and by mobilizing the disorganized group into a killing culture. The aggregate becomes a mob, a troop, or an army, brought together by the shared enemy, which has been selected and offered up to them by the paranoid political state or the fanatic religious leaders. The common bond of hatred is the common enemy. The culture of hatred is the primary threat. We are right to treat Al Qaeda with deadly seriousness. We are right to view Saddam Hussein and the other despots of the world as potential Hitlers.

  It is a sad truth that religious leaders often create a forum for the dissemination of hatred. We are told that the Muslim faith is one of tolerance. But what is the Muslim faith? And who articulates it? The mullahs are no more united than the Christian or Jewish theologians. Who speaks for Christ? The Roman Catholic church, the Southern Baptists, the Christian Militia? The same condition exists in the disparate worlds of Islam. Each mullah becomes a prophet for his own people. In our time, however, only the radical Islamists have captured the attention of media. We are experiencing the extensive influence of the Wahhabi faction over modern Islam, where every infidel is the hated enemy.88

  The fanatic and xenophobic Wahhabi sect of Islam has been given legitimacy and financial support through the shortsightedness and recklessness of the leaders of Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabi disseminate their hatred and intolerance everywhere in the Muslim world through the activities of irresponsible mullahs, and with the money supplied them by feckless Arab political leaders, who ought to be held responsible. Their military arm is Al Qaeda. And they speak only of hatred and holy war.

  As recently as the summer of 2002 the New York Times reported an interview in which a professor of Islamic law explained to a visiting reporter: “Well, of course I hate you because you are Christian, but that doesn’t mean I want to kill you.”89 Well, the professor may not wish to kill the reporter, but the students he instills with his theological justifications of hatred may have different ideas about the proper expressions of hatred. If the theocratic dictators who dominate the oppressed minorities in Saudi Arabia and the other “moderate” Arab states think they can control the mass frenzy that they are either encouraging or tolerating, they profoundly misread human nature and the role that hatred can play.

  We live in a time in which cultures of hatred exist predominantly in the Muslim world. But there are undoubtedly paranoid cultures in other areas, Africa, for example, where their effects are as yet so local and self-contained that they have not impinged on the consciousness of the larger world. It would be wise to direct some attention to these areas before the fact; to deal with the misery and frustration that are waiting to be molded into hatred before we are forced to. Once a culture of hatred has been firmly established, we are left with only the limited choices of disarming, diffusing, or destroying it.

  I have tried to attend to the nature of hatred out of a feeling that a clearer understanding of its qualities can guide us in understanding its causes. The roots of hatred are buried under a surface of normalcy that obscures their depths and entanglements. They must be exposed and analyzed. I view a psychological analysis of hatred as a prerequisite, not an alternative, to investigating the social conditions that encourage its emergence; the economic aspects that cultivate it; the political and religious institutions that exploit it. Only with the knowledge of what hatred is can we uncover the conditions that nurture it.

  A sense of deprivation has psychic roots independent of poverty and want. We cannot control each individual’s developmental background, and we do not need to. The isolated and individual hater can cause profound misery, but only to a limited few. The greater danger will always lie with those who would cynically manipulate and exploit such misery, those who would organize and encourage hatred for their political ends. We must attend to them, the preachers and organizers of hatred. We had a moral obligation to do so with the rise of Nazism. We didn’t care enough then. Perhaps we do now.

  The moral world is the preserve of mankind. We must cultivate it. In the end, the search for the heart of evil, the “unholy grail” as Walker Percy called it, may be as elusive as the search for the Holy Grail, but it is the quest that defines our humanity.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Someone has to do the dirty work of reading an unkempt first draft. This is best hidden from all but the most forgiving. My brother, Dr. Sheldon Gaylin, also a psychiatrist, undertook this task and in the process managed to encourage and direct my progress. Further along, my sister-in-law, Rita Gaylin, offered the kind of detailed critique that only an avid reader and natural editor could supply. I am indebted to both of them. By then I was ready for a professional.

  My long-time agent and friend Owen Laster once again proved his abilities by directing me to my current editor, Kate Darnton. Critical yet supportive, gentle but persistent, she applied her youthful enthusiasm and considerable talents to the task of improving this manuscript. She is a delight to work with.

  With each new book, the task of “acknowledging” my wife’s contributions to my work becomes more difficult. Time and love have eroded those separate identities—the her and me—that we first brought to our young relationship, leaving in its place a stubborn and persistent thing called “us”.

  INDEX

  Abnormal human behavior

  biblical references to

  defining

  in literature

  and standards for insanity

  See also Human behavior; Mental illness; Normal human behavior

  Abortion

  Abuddabeh, Nuha

  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The

  Affective disorders

  Afghanistan

  Al-Akhras, Ayat

  Alexander, Franz

  Allport, Gordon

  Almog, Shmuel

  Al Qaeda

  American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

  Amin

  Anger

  chronic

  and envy

  See also Rage

  Animal behavior

  and animal rights beliefs

  and emotional responses

  and pecking orders

  Anti-abortion activists

  Anti-Semite and Jew
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  Anti-Semitism

  in Asia

  in literature

  literature on

  themes in

  Antisemitism: Its History and Causes

  Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred

  Antisemitism Through the Ages

  Anxiety

  Arab communities

  dictatorships in

  and early Arab trauma

  envy of the United States by

  See also Al Qaeda; Terrorists

  Ardrey, Robert

  Aristotle

  Aryan Nation

  Atta, Muhammed

  Baader Meinhof Gang

  Bacon, Francis

  Badger Herald

  Balzac, Honore de

  Barnett, Victoria J.

  Basic Works of Aristotle, The

  Baz, Rashid

  Beautiful Mind, A

  Becker, Ernest

  Beethoven, Ludwig von

  Betrayal

  Beyond Freedom and Dignity

  Bible, The

  Bigotry. See Prejudice and Bigotry

  bin Laden, Osama

  Blacks

  Bliven, Naomi

  Bodily Changes in Panic, Hunger, Fear and Rage