These days it’s in vogue to refer to someone who demonstrates inappropriate behavior, mean-spiritedness or venomous rage as a “hater.” Indeed, such a name is not entirely misguided. The hater mentality is too often condoned in our World4 culture, as unfairness, greed, or ideology is used as a justifying cause. In truth, there is no excuse for hate. There may be rationalizations for it, but in the World5 culture, it’s inexcusable. Sadly, with the rise of Trumpian thinking, hating has been normalized on the right of our political spectrum.
Few people consider themselves to be malevolent. Most haters imagine themselves as only doing what’s required, feeling caught between a rock and a hard place where hateful behavior is the only option. With less than ideal letting go skills, the hater finds it difficult to maintain balance. Little issues can become intolerable in their minds, but hate is hate, and it is a form of intolerance that must be abandoned.
To abandon hate, we must first understand it. Hate, like other negative emotion/thought patterns, is based on fear. This fear often takes hold early in life, where we are taught that we are somehow unworthy or not good enough. Parents or caregivers driven by ideology as opposed to love are often cause.
This disquieting sense of self then tries to ensure that others are equally unworthy, striking out at them to prove their unworthiness. But the victim of hatred cannot ever truly be reduced to such unworthiness, as they share the same Life we do. Still, because hating is pathological behavior, it will continue to be acted out until the root cause is addressed.
We note that in spite of the poor lessons many of us learned about our worthiness, the fact that we are all children of Life gives us a credibility and worthiness that no one can take away. Our very existence gives us good enough status, but that is hard to see if we come from a background of abuse.
If we are berated and abused enough, our fears become codified. Our fears, our rage and our anger slowly, over time, harden into hate. We are trapped into unhappiness by our hate. When this happens on a personal level a parent, sibling or peer becomes the target of our hate, or we learn hatred of others and other groups that share different values than we do.
The old adage says we hate what we do not understand, and there is truth in it. This holds particularly true with ethnic and religious mores. One of the great failures of World4 culture is the way hatred is portrayed as having redeeming value if it’s directed toward another tribe, religion or nation-state. Hatred has long been justified as necessary and normal in this circumstance, and it has led to the twentieth century being the deadliest on record, with the twenty-first showing no signs of abating that pattern. Hatred literally kills. We tend to exhibit this sort of unsound behavior when we don’t see that our religious beliefs or national origins are merely an accident of birth.
We abandon hate just as we do fear and anger, though hatred is more difficult to let go of. Not because hatred is different in nature from fear, but because the pattern of hate is so deeply seated within us. Yet letting go, or forgiveness, remains the primary tool in abandoning hate as it is for all other forms of fear. Regardless of what may have been done to us, hatred condemns us to unhappiness even as it serves to show our intense displeasure with another.
Perhaps we’re reaching a tipping point where the absurdity of the right-wing emotional content becomes clear, and large numbers of formerly hostile white suprematists recognize that we are all here together in Life, and begin to act knowing this truth. I certainly hope so…