How to Hate

Good moods always seem to lead to ruminations on bad things with me. Christ knows why. Whatever it is, it's doubtless Freudian.



It's been a while since I sat down to vent my spleen into one of these rants. A new lady in my life has meant that I'm full to bursting with the milk of human kindness; I'm so obscenely in love that most of my friends are convinced that they're seeing the first stages of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. And so, my mind being the fun-packed, "Glass half full" thing that it is, it seems entirely appropriate that I spend a little time considering the nature of hate. Because, y'know, I'm Iike that.

Hate is rather an odd emotion. We will frequently hear the old wives saying that it is nothing more than the flip side of the coin to love. We may also be informed that to hate someone, you must have loved him or her first. But is there anything to back up these sayings? And regardless of whether there is or is not, is hate always the negative thing that we think it is? Or are there any circumstances where hate is acceptable? Or even desirable? And what exactly defines hatred anyway?

So is hate just love in reverse gear? Well, to a certain extent I think it is. If one is in love with someone, then one is willing to do anything at all for that person (although it seems that anal is not included in that criteria, and God knows I've tried...) to the extent that one will put ones own hopes and desires on the backburner in the name of doing whatever it is your loved one desires. If one hates someone then one is equally willing to do anything at all to hurt or damage that person in some way, to the point of ruining one's own life if it means causing pain to the object of your hate. Love and Hate are two very extreme emotions, and the actions they inspire are equally as extreme.

But the thing is, how can we tell if we hate someone? I'm sure you've talked to friends who have agonised over whether they really love a particular partner. Maybe you've done so yourself. Yet we don't seem to have any difficulty in knowing whom we hate. You'll hear the phrase "I hate him/her" FAR more often than you will "I love him/her". Does that mean that we're an emotionally bankrupt bunch of hatemongers? Or are we confusing Hate with mere Dislike?

In an unusually optimistic move, I'm going to say it's the latter and I'm going to do so for a reason of personal bias. Despite being a worryingly good example of a bilious and generally vitriolic chap, I can count on one finger the number of people that I truly hate. On the other hand, I'd need more digits that the decimal value of Pi to count the number of people and things that I dislike (and did I really just make a maths joke?). Whilst we all seem to recognise the value of Love and are sparing in committing to just who and what we do love, the distinction between fiery hatred and lukewarm dislike is much less distinct in our heads.

It's worth diverting our attention for a moment to consider something else; does hate just apply to individuals? It's seems entirely possible to hate a group of people, or an organisation (as that happy-go-lucky cluster of ignorance known as the BNP proves rather well). Is this the same as the Hate one may have for an individual? Hating a group of people is, without any exceptions, an example of unthinking, blind hatred. However, as one can be unthinkingly and blindly in love with someone, this doesn't really work as a distinction.
However, you rarely (if ever; I know I can't think of an example of this) hear of someone being in love with a group of people (despite what some unfaithful partners might protest!). So if we agree that Hate and Love are opposites, we cannot define this group hatred as being Hate in the truest sense. It could be an educated and considered dislike (something only appropriate for hatred of organisations, e.g. an animal lovers hatred of vivisectionists, a Labour activists hatred of the Tories, everyone's hatred of Manchester United, etc), or it could be an empty headed loathing of a racial group (anti-Semitism, the Gunmen who attacked foreigners in Saudi over the weekend, and xenophobic hatred of asylum seekers being the best examples here).

So then; we can perhaps accept that Love and Hate are indeed opposite sides of the same coin. So does that mean that one has to have loved someone to hate then? Absolutely not; if we accept this logic than that would mean that it's only possible to truly love someone if you've hated him or her first, and that is ludicrous. It is of course possible to hate someone whom you've previously loved, and vice versa (the chap who is the object of my hatred is a former friend for example) but it's not exactly compulsory.
Just as love is, to an extent, indefinable then so is hate; you may find yourself thinking that the person or people in your life whom you love have 'a certain something' about them that you love, as well as all the doubtless huge number of more concrete reasons for your warm feelings toward them. By exactly the same token, although we may have good reason to hate the object of our ire, there will almost certainly be 'a certain something' about them that makes you want to smash them in the face with a shovel. These two different types of 'something' are completely independent of each other, and so there is no reason to suppose that we must have one to have the other (though I do accept that perhaps you have to have experienced one to fully appreciate the other).

So having looked at what Hate is and it's relative relation with Love, can we find any circumstances where it is a positive thing? To be blunt, no. If one is, as per my earlier definition of hate, willing to destroy ones own life just to hurt someone, then this is surely not a good thing. I've even found myself working on trying to downgrade my venomous loathing of the lucky chap that I hate to some sort of simmering discontent on the basis that I don't want to ruin my life over that cockwasp. Both Love and Hate are selfish emotions, but whilst an expression of love is designed to make someone else happy as well as making yourself feel good, that selfishness is entirely forgivable. Hate has no such get out clause.

I can, however, see circumstances where the hatred of organisations could be seen as positive (and I'd best tread carefully here; can we all assume that I believe any form of racism is a particularly awful thing so as to forestall the cries of "You're a fascist!"? We can? Jolly good...). Some types of group hatred stem from the following assumption;

"This group is trying to destroy something good. I do not want it destroyed, and will fight to protect it".

I would contend that this type of hatred is a good thing in theory, if not always in practice. If someone hates injustice, then one is naturally inclined to try and fight it. We can accept that as a good thing. That said, I suppose whether or not you consider it a good thing will depend on your own views and outlook; I hate the current US Government for their blatant greed in launching the land grab in Iraq. Others would disagree, and say that they hate the defeatist and appeasing attitude of people opposed to a war that was fully justified. But then, the world would be a boring place if we all had the same opinions, and some of the most interesting discussions I've ever had have been with people who's hatreds are diametrically opposed to mine. I don't hate these people, and I'm pretty sure they don't hate me. The trouble with this form of hatred only arises when we confuse it with hatred of an individual whose beliefs differ to yours. When that happens, we're back to being unpleasant bigots and that is the kind of thinking that I never want to be guilty of.

And that, in a long and rambling nutshell, is what I think of hate. I shall now return to being a doe-eyed and gooey lump of blissed out happiness and think loving and lustful thoughts about the wonderful lady in my life. If that sentence doesn't make you all hate me, nothing will.