Hatred Read online

  The unconscious roots of rage are found in all the symbolic ways we feel diminished. Some of the more common psychological assaults perceived by modern people follow. They are often many steps removed from the primal paradigm of the tiger in the compound.

  Deprivation

  Feeling deprived bears no relationship to the actual amount of comfort or goods that a person may possess. One can be surrounded with all the indulgences of the affluent society and still feel deprived. Contrary to this, we can observe people existing in great poverty, where each expenditure must be measured and considered, every nutrient stored and rationed, who still do not feel deprived.

  Human beings can tolerate amazing privation and hardship. People can exist in poverty, even to a point of cold and hunger, with dignity and nobility. I remember as a child watching Robert J. Flaherty’s exceptional documentary, Nanook of the North, with amazement. I had grown up in the relative comfort of a middle-class family, experiencing little privation, certainly no hunger. Raised in the bleak and extended winters of the Great Lakes, however, I had come to hate the cold.

  I watched the Eskimos enduring hunger and poverty, struggling with minimal modern tools to sustain daily life for themselves and their children. Everything depended on the luck of the hunt and the vagaries of nature. The struggle for survival was real here. The hunt was an accepted part of life. Its failure in a season could mean hunger or starvation. Tension and anxiety would be inevitable, but no evidence of self-pity, no sense of “poor me” seemed present in the documentary or was evident in the anthropological studies of these communities.

  These lives were lived from birth to death in the bleakest and harshest of environments and in a cold that I could but imagine. Despite hardships that to me would have been unbearable, Nanook and his comrades experienced joy, absolute joy, in their search for food and struggle for survival. In this environment of privation, they not only endured, they triumphed.

  During the Great Depression, multitudes suffered true privation and most were not alienated. People were jobless, homeless, and often hungry. Fear was palpable, but not anger. What anger existed focused on the times, the “system,” the landlords, and the bosses. The most aberrant response emerged from among the more intellectual-minded who embraced a half-baked and optimistic attraction to Marxist literature and Marxist causes. Although Marxist literature had a peculiar affinity for the hyperbolic language of hatred, most of my socialist relatives and teachers seemed immune to the vitriol and wonderfully free of malice. There was little rage and resentment neighbor to neighbor. All were members of the same community sharing the same fate. I am not trying to romanticize poverty and privation. Grinding poverty is degrading and dispiriting. It is indecent. It can cause severe damage to the spirit and psyche. Only in the capacity to generate rage and hatred is relative deprivation more important than actual privation.

  A sense of deprivation thrives on differentials: when others have what we do not. It is a relative feeling, more closely associated with entitlement than want. We suffer from the fact that we do not have that which we need, unless we feel it has—somehow by someone—been denied to us or, worse, taken from us. We then experience a sense of violation, of assault on our dignity that ultimately is perceived as denigration.

  When a sense of deprivation ceases to be a transient phenomenon and is perceived as a way of life not just for ourselves but for our group, the parent society is ripe for an explosive release into organized hatred and violence. If this were the Congo in the nineteenth century, such rage could not have been directed at those who actually deprived them. Leopold II, the King of the Belgians, would not even have been known to them and certainly not available. Instead, the resentment might have been deflected onto those who were innocent of cheating them, but in some unfathomable way could have been considered the agents of their deprivation. They might have been a traditional enemy, a neighboring tribe, who by its proximity could afford a convenient outlet for this rage. These local battles became diversions from the true sources of deprivation in the economy or the culture of colonial Africa.

  The smoldering rage that results from feeling cheated is always a component of deprivation. Who deprived us is not particularly important. We know deprivation when we see a disparity between that which we have and that which, by observing the standard of some others, we assume to be our due.

  Inequity, Unfairness, and Injustice

  A sense that the world we occupy operates according to principles of equity and fairness is essential for peace of mind and a relative contentment with the state of authority. The moral sensibility of a child is born within the concept of fairness. “It’s not fair” is so often the first statement of moral outrage that one is inclined to believe that some concept of equity or justice must be a part of our genetic inheritance.

  Often, this outcry is first heard in the context of sibling rivalry, the sibling “got away with” something, was given something more or better, or was allowed a privilege or indulgence that we were denied. It may be equally present when the parent seems to be changing the rules of the game, violating the standards they, themselves, had previously seemed to endorse. To have played the game according to the rules and still be penalized carries the grievance beyond unfairness to the more generalized feeling of injustice. If the social order is corrupt, outrage and rebellion are justified. This is why the downbeat endings that fascinate so many novelists and movie directors prove to be anathema to the public at large. We want the good guys to triumph and the villains brought to justice. We believe in just deserts.

  The anomie that infected some sections of the white working class in the latter half of the twentieth century and led to the various white supremacy movements had its roots in a profound sense of injustice. Members of this group began to feel deceived and treated unfairly (a halfway house to paranoia, as will be discussed later). They felt they had been seduced by promises not kept. They had kept the faith, played by the rules, and still were denied the respect they felt they had earned. The injustice that the bourgeoisie as well as the working class felt may well have started in the 1960s with the revolt of their own children.

  The revision of values that began in that decade was perceived by parents as an assault on their standards and way of life. In the short-lived antimaterialism of the student revolt of the 1960s and 1970s, the white middle-class parents joined with the working class in a sense of outrage and betrayal. The parents had purchased the material goods, which their children affected to reject, at extraordinary cost in sweat and labor. They had lived their lives doing unrewarding work, consoling themselves with the assumption that what they could purchase with the earnings from their labors was adequate reward for the sacrifice and drudgery they had endured.

  Their children—by rejecting and thereby showing their contempt for split-level homes, two-week vacations, large American-made cars—were challenging the trade-off these parents had been forced to make. Spitting on the flag was not all that outraged these parents; spitting on the twenty-one-inch color television set, the wall-to-wall carpeting, the patio furniture, the microwave oven, and the Buick was worse. Finally, the image of the drop-out child and the druggie became the ultimate assault on the work ethic by which their parents lived—and sacrificed. The children were ridiculing a way of life for which their parents had paid dearly.

  In addition, these parents identified the trappings of a middle-class lifestyle as the social sign of their upward progress from the Great Depression days of their childhood. While their children were choosing to go barefoot, they were recalling the times when, for them, going barefoot was not a choice but a necessity. It was a shameful stigma of social caste. For children to affect the dress of the working class—the overalls, the work shoes—was a bewildering rejection of the very status symbols for which the parents had traded much of their pleasure and time. They had sweated out their lives for these “things,” not just for their own sake, but for their children’s. In attacking these symbols of succes
s, the student revolution had raised doubts about the irrevocable contract that the middle class had signed. It was too painful to acknowledge the possibility that they had opted for simply another mess of pottage.

  The social revolution of the late 1960s and the 1970s, with its Nietzschean “reevaluation of values,” shook up the working class. To make matters worse, the Great Society, with its rising concern for the rights of minorities, led to welfare programs and affirmative action that seemed to preclude that class. Even worse, the sympathy that the liberal community expressed for the minorities seemed in contrast with the contempt it had for blue-collar tastes and values. White middle- and working-class people were feeling the same injustices that minority groups had been experiencing for years, stemming from the lesser share that they were expected to accept, although for different reasons. They had earned their proper share—not through the “dole” or special consideration, but through their labor and diligence—and now the value of that share was suspect. Somehow or other the promise had been broken. The just rewards for labor had not been meted out. The rules of the game had been changed.

  This sense of injustice, of a tacit agreement revoked, continues to feed the mass resentment and rage that led to the many Christian militias formed in the latter half of the twentieth century. The recruits felt that they had paid their dues and had been abandoned and denied by the government they had served in war and peace. They had been betrayed.

  Betrayal

  The difference between feeling deprived and feeling betrayed is often only a matter of one’s identification. We are deprived by “others” who have the power. We are betrayed by our own kind. The white middle class began to feel deceived and cheated. They had been seduced by promises not kept, and then they were abandoned. They had been “led down the garden path.” They had “kept the faith” and had still been “delivered into the hands of the enemy.” Worse, they had become the enemy. These feelings and phrases are all part of the language and definitions of betrayal.

  We have different expectations of those we love and those we serve than we do of strangers. When those we depend on betray us, we are outraged. Such betrayal will evoke the most fundamental fear of childhood, abandonment by the powerful parental figures.

  The fear of being abandoned is compounded by the severe blow to self-esteem that betrayal produces. In life, the indifference and disdain of the impersonal world of strangers is balanced by the concern of those who love us. When that love is trivialized or denied, the balance is dangerously dislocated. If those who we had assumed value us most abandon or discard us, what actual worth can we possess?

  A peculiar example of perceived betrayal occurred in the 1930s with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency of the United States. Roosevelt was a member of the elite by every definition. Wealth, religion, and family position marked him as an aristocrat. That is why the egalitarian policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal were seen by the wealthy as a stab in the back by one of their own. The wealthy hardly suffered during the depression. If anything, the pool of cheap labor allowed them to maintain their estates and mansions for still another generation. Many historians would later perceive Roosevelt and his policies as being the savior of the capitalist system. Still, the hatred for Roosevelt in the establishment was astonishing in its malevolence and rancor. In a typical display of displacement, the greatest vitriol was reserved for the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, a feminist before her time and an uncommon humanitarian. Contempt for ambitious women, an emerging threat to the male oligarchy, added another dimension to their fixation on Eleanor. This was true hatred, as evidenced by their obsession with her and her role in influencing the president’s policies. The cruelty extended beyond her actions to her very persona.

  Betrayal thus manages to join the fear of rejection with the humiliation of having been deceived. Even when the deceit is a self-inflicted wound based on false assumptions, it will carry with it all the pain and mortification of expectations denied. A betrayed person feels unloved, unsure, and used.

  When a significant segment of a society feels betrayed, an environment ripe for anarchy and revolt exists. The rage at the betraying authorities will be compounded by the self-anger one feels for having been accomplice to the deception, for allowing oneself to be duped. The excesses of revolution, the bloodbaths and guillotines, are all testament to the hatred that may be unleashed, particularly if a paranoid element can convince the masses that this betrayal was a calculated humiliation. Germany in the 1930s is a paramount example of a country humiliated, impoverished, and ripe for hatred.

  On an individual level, betrayal is most acutely felt in the sexual area. The spurned lover has all the ingredients for hatred at his command. The attachment is there; he need only reverse the emotion from love to hate. Then rage is compounded by the metaphoric meaning of sexuality. For both genders sexuality is a measure of worth and power. Men in our culture—as in most—are taught to see their sexuality as a direct measure of their manhood. Manhood carries the mantle of power. Women, at least traditionally, were taught to view their sexual desirability as the instrument for enlisting the powerful men to aid in their survival. For both men and women, an attack on their sense of sexual worth is a strike at the core of their security. Sexual betrayal can lead to the same viciousness and brutality one sees in suicide bombers. When a body is discovered with a single blow to the head or a single stab wound, an intruder or a stranger may be suspected. When there are twenty or thirty blows, one is likely to be dealing with a frustrated or spurned lover.

  Exploitation and Manipulation

  Disapproval, deprivation, and betrayal exploit our inner feelings of inadequacy. Unsure of our own capacities, we feel our survival threatened when the value and esteem in which we are held by powerful authority figures or their representatives are brought into question. There are, in addition, direct assaults on our self-worth, direct affronts to pride and confidence. Exploitation and manipulation deprive us of the special status inherent in being a human being. When we feel “used,” we feel our very personhood is assaulted.

  The ultimate, rawest, and most outrageous use of people is found in the institution of slavery, which is why it is universally condemned in theory if not in practice. In slavery the person is stripped of all rights of humanity and converted into a machine. But to be used in any sense is to violate that basic imperative of moral behavior set down by Immanuel Kant as at the heart of his ethics: Never use a person as a means rather than an end, for in so doing you erase the distinction between person and thing.

  We go through life exposed to a continuum of circumstances in which we can never be sure whether we are valued for our services or for ourselves. Since our services are inextricably bound to that which we call our “self,” a direct request for services can often be seen as honoring that which we can do and, therefore, that which we are. When lying and deceit are involved, we know that we have been manipulated, used as a means to someone else’s end. This explains our anger in the face of even well-intended manipulation. Paternalism is one example of this. Paternalistic medicine, even when practiced for reasons of compassion, came to be resented during the latter half of the twentieth century. When physicians attempted to shield patients from the most malignant implications of their diseases, the patients felt “patronized” and took offense. Truth telling took priority over beneficence. Patients implore doctors to give them the unvarnished truth, but most will resent it if a doctor responds by telling them that they have an incurable cancer.

  Still, doctors should honor the truth, while trying to offer some latitude for hope and comfort. When we try to control or influence our patients by means that bypass their rationality, will, and volition, we diminish their autonomy. We reduce them. When they sense this, they will respond with rage.

  Frustration

  Anyone or anything that makes us feel less whole, less powerful, less useful, and less valued will make us feel endangered. We depend on others and the respect of others
to support our self-esteem. If others indicate their contempt or indifference to us, we feel vulnerable. But it is not just in our relationships with others that we can be made to feel inadequate. Our self-confidence is equally founded on ourselves and our own performance, particularly as measured against an ideal imposed from within ourselves as well as from the environment. Anyone exposed to frustration in attempting even a minor task is aware of how quickly our irritability level can rise. And how rapidly we can convert our dissatisfaction with ourselves into anger with some other. This conversion is a step that we all experience and is crucial to an understanding of the mechanism of scapegoating that will be presented later in the book.

  My own personal frustration tolerance is at its lowest when performing fine hand movements, at which I am particularly un-talented. Small parts in fine works are my particular nemesis-the tiny screw that must be positioned into the small opening under an extended ridge that is protected by a delicate filament or wire that must definitely not be disturbed. It is a situation that even in anticipation is sufficient to get my hands trembling with anticipated rage and frustration, and the trembling in turn is sure to disturb the wire that must remain inviolate for the mechanism to survive. Even in movies I find myself most anxious in those clichéd scenes where if a bomb is not defused, the good guys will be destroyed and the bad guys triumph. Such scenes inevitably produce in me a frisson of terror. It is the wise person who knows his own poisons and avoids them.