Hate
Love is hate. The great Greek insight is encoded in the Theogony, where Chaos gives birth to Love, and Night gives birth to Day, Earth gives birth to Heaven. We love as a red heart, and hate the black space behind her. For to love a person is to hate many of her possibilites: the possibility of her as corpse, victim, suicidal, self-destructive, cheater, betrayer. We love a narrow range of her being. And we hate the rest. Love can focus itself very finely and intensely, as on the idea of a God, and then hate everything else broadly to contrast and support that love. Or one can love very widely, and thus necessarily mix the hate directly with the love.
“Hate? Hate? I hate nothing. I am such a lover. Only that one thing I have to do, of it I will complain. That one person I must work with, him I will disdain. Nothing as high and colored as hate.” Yet our canine teeth thirst for blood: they sweat for cruelty, if only a little. From this instinct to cruelty, we feel we need to justify it with a good reason. That reason is hate. We hate because we are cruel. What is pure hate? Once we peel away the leaves of fear, anger, and cruelty, possibly guilt also, what do we see left? Pure hate implies love. We hate here because we love there. Hate pains in presence, and wishes it was not. Hate wishes his object did not exist. Anger merely wishes to change his object, and so hates small parts of it, but loves the other parts and potentialities. Hate is broader and more thorough.
Hate is also love. The opposite of love is fear.
Just as we do not know what to make of our own greatness, and in fear, arrogate ourselves, so too do we not know what to do when another injures us. This embarrassment seems to be resolved when we learn that we are to hate.
“Take my wife, please!” Do you hate or do you love? Can you tell? There is no real ambivalence, only love. Hate means that you have only partially dissected your beloved into necessity and fruition.
Our self love is original, but our self hate borrowed. We cannot really hate ourselves by a personal standard, because our personal standard created us and is us. We live or fall according to our own personal standard.
Pascal wrote: "All men naturally hate one another...Self is hateful." Is this not antithetical to any understanding of hate? Hate of one implies love of the other, for love is originary and original, but hate is borrowed and derivative. For as a man prefers pleasure to pain, so too does he prefer approval to hate. For when a man is exhausted, and at the end of his life, he gives up his hates, but he never gives up his loves.
Hatred requires intimacy, and so is only possible as a fruit of love. Since we cannot control what we become intimate with, we cannot avoid hating the hateable. Since we can control the duration and nature of intimacy, we can control the duration and nature of our hate.
Do not shove hatred from your mind. Understand it. Riddles are not solved by shouting them down.
And so do not say simply, “I love you more then I hate you.” For though the one does not exclude the other, no object that is pushed and pulled is single, and no object that is pushed and pulled is the complete object. We do not hate others. We hate our inability to change them.
“Hate the sin and not the sinner,” said Augustine. Pretty words. And therefore seductive and untrustworthy. Hate the fruit and not the tree? Hate the cold but not the virus? Love the gift but not the giver? Where is the dance separate from the dancer? For what being does the sinner have except a dynamo of habits, equations of sin? For no act is a sin except by the nature of her source. An accidental murder, for example, may involve absolutely no real guilt. And indeed, why ought we to hate the sin? What then is the sin? If we dissect the sin and see it as a symptom, must we not thank it for educating us, for representing, perhaps, something good and beautiful in the sinner? Why are we loving the sinner? What in him is lovely? How does it fulfill our heart to love him? How can hate be so impersonal as to focus on an act? Can an act itself be loved or hated? What is the logic of the hate, the love? Why not hate the sinner and not the sin? For it is the sin that directed our hate to the right place, and so has educated us. If the man can only sin, what in him is lovely? And if he does not only sin, why do we call him a sinner? More to the point, what is sin anyway, and how can we hate something that has no objective existence, neither sin nor sinner? The sentiment assumes a certain understanding impossible to a thorough mind. The sentiment assumes shallowness. So let us put it in real terms: hate the crime and not the criminal. But again, the same difficulties all over. Plus it withholds responsibility and integrity from love and hate, thus undermining their purpose. You ar impudent to tell me how to hate, but foolish to tell me not to hate. Love depends on hate.
Hate wishes not to be hated in turn, but to be feared. Fear wishes only to be anonymous. Thus love negotiates with his opposite in fear by touching him with hate. Hate is love, and causes fear.
If you repress your love, you become netted in a vague hate called alienation. You learn to expect utter isolation. In all things. You have friends, you have clients, you have customers, you know many people, you have dozens of names memorized, you even have family, and a spouse who is closer to you than anybody. The great idea you produce, the great inner I that you bring to light, they all despise. Each and every one of them will betray you, hates the real you, unconsciously. They do not want the thing you have, nor do they have it, but that is not the problem. They see that you love what you have, and they want to corrupt your enjoyment in it. That is, they envy, even though they cannot see what they envy.
The great thing you have is a creative capacity, a way of seeing, thinking, talking—at the core of it you have something they do not—and you realize that your words confuse and confute them. So you speak in jest. You thicken your light with seven layers of irony. They like this. You will appear the buffoon. You will make stupid jokes, silliness, and they will chuckle because they appreciate the gesture: you are being a buffoon to appease them. And yet there is intelligence in these men and women. Their inner eye, which does in fact see you for what you are, hates you. It conspires against you. It plots how to kill you, to kill your joy in yourself. But you are extremely intelligent, and you also see them, and you see through their tricks and their strategies. You have gained innerdependence. You do not rely on any of them. And yet you open yourself to criticism, and you pretend to need their compliments. And so they give them to you. Ha! How painful to hear them praise you. They do not know how to praise. Their praising is a sort of hate. They praise in the most generic and stupid terms that you can only hear in their praise sneering contempt.
You realize that you are utterly alone in the world, but that, historically, there have been others like you. These are your brethren. These are your peers. And so you read quite a bit. You delight in their company. You write all your ideas down, to be carried to future generations. That is all.
And yet, you realize in yourself that envy is the noble view. Envy sees the great and desires it. Envy is a realization of our own potentiality, unmet. Therefore: Don't envy. Become. For though envy is a positive emotion, it is perverted by perverted minds. Hate of beauty, exemplified in the hate of beautiful people, is wrong. Of course hate is rarely expressed as such. Rather, the baby is given bathwater before she is thrown out. “I despise the prideful beautiful, the stupid beautiful, the superficial beautiful, the condescending beautiful.” Evidence is planted, juries are rigged. And so it is ignored that the most pious saints are beautiful.
Arrogance and bragging are powerful in exposing the jealous. This alone warrants their use, for if we alienate the jealous, we have alienated most of our opposition, and the weakest part thereof. The man flaunting and haughty, is he not refreshing? Is not self-deprecation a disease? The humble man does not despise bragging––what reason does he have to hate? Only if we hate ourselves do we frown at those who love themselves. Let pride be genuine.
Goodness is the love of man. Evil is the love of the good. A Platonic love is demonic to move beyond personalities to an impersonal good. While the advertisers say that love of man and love of self injures the world, ostensibly, those who believe in the good and the gods are by definition the enemies of man, insofar as, and inevitably, when men get in the way of their “good.” The good is what gathers together, what gathers men together towards improving culture—what is worthy of uniting. Therefore, since good is that worthy of union, “good in itself” is a nonsense phrase, nor is man good, since man is the measure of all things, the purpose of measure, and for whom good and bad matter and without they mean nothing.
I do not deny what the courts claim to do, or have attempted to do; I deny the courts can determine, examine, or even intelligently conjecture what a defendents mental state is at the time before, during, or after a crime, nor can our greatest novelist nor most acute psychologist nor accomplished neuroscientist. At best, they can say, "forethought," or "motive" although I disagree with these as well. The man who gives over to an immediate passion I think no less punishable than one who slowly calculates a crime out; indeed such a person is more valuable to society then a fool who falls into a rage.
The designation of “Hate crime” is mere political posturing. It offers no theory of hate, but only wishes to appease those who wish to make the legal system enforce respect for difficult groups (religions, sexual orientiations, whatever). I am not interested in this. The court is not a basis, a guide, a reference for morality or emotional ethics at all.
Hate is the negative space of love, is equal to love, as hope is the negative space of fear, is equal to fear, and love and fear are polar opposites in their tendencies towards or away an object.
Extra punishment for politically incorrect crimes is ridiculous. This sort of implicit moralizing is coerced due to political posturing rather than a carefully philosophical distinguishing of what is truly good or bad for society, what is most benificial for the victims or the victimizers. I have no respect for a legally based moral system that springs from political fads and posturing.
Evil is a name for a power that we do not control, cannot predict, and may be destroyed by. It means “above the mark,” for it is beyond what we can control and look down on. For a weak man, the world looks evil. Nothing beneath a man is evil to him, it is either politely ignored as good for what it is, or despised if it is cowardly. So we hate the unpredictable power greater than us, we despise the weakness less than us, and for powers on our level, unpredictable, uncontrollable, but defeatable, we nod in wary respect. Thus do we relate to the dangers in our world.
Hate is good, glorious and beautiful---all hail hate! – therefore, hate-speech should be legal. Let us never make it against the law to be offensive. Those who are offended are offendable, and those who are offendable are those who cling to despisable beliefs. Those who make names, words, labels, and gestures illegal are the thought police. They care nothing for the word itself, since words change and mean only what we want them to mean. They wish in fact to make attitudes illegal, to make feelings illegal, ultimately, to make certain modes of thought illegal, to control the huma mind.
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Perfection Is Easy
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