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What is Hate?
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by Carl Baydala
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Hate can be described as a reaction to something that you dislike or are offended by. It can also manifest itself as a human emotion that one experiences when one lacks the power to achieve an objective, such as for example, the attainment of something that one has determined to have great value or importance. You cannot describe hate adequately unless you have experienced it; you need to feel it. Hate, therefore, is much more than an abstract thing. It is a powerful emotion and a way that a human being can experience something like anger. A condition emitting hate needs to be felt in its entirety before you can give it a proper name and meaning. And, I think you will find, that upon examination, that hate can truly be an individual thing in term of its meaning.
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Hate can be an expression against an idea or a person. Hate is also a form of human weakness or, as stated above, an indication of a lack of power. The feeling of hate may even involve simple misunderstanding or ignorance. One hates when one does not understand or is powerless to achieve an objective, such as for example, the love of another person. Weakness is also attributed to hate in the sense that one is not able to understand the origins of his hate. An individual may not have taken the time to analyze why he feels the emotion of hate. But, weakness is also evident in a discussion of hate when one is not willing to confront his emotion of hate in any kind of reasonable manner or to take steps to remove the hate or anger from his life.
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It has been stated that hate is the opposite of love. These are both emotions which appear at the opposite poles of one another. If you have studied philosophy you will have discovered that much is explained by studying opposites. A fuller meaning of something, for example, is gained by knowing what it is not, as well as what you think something is. For example, our notion of love leads us to believe that it involves considerations of well-being, while hate would involve some form of misery and something unpleasurable. Therefore, one could surmize that after studying love and its attributes that love is a good thing, while its opposite, hate, is something bad.
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How might enmity arise in the life of an individual you may enquire? As a child you may have hated your parents for depriving you of something that you desired. Or, perhaps later on in life you took on the feeling of hate when someone did not return their love to you - a love that you desired but could not obtain. You were struck by hate because you were powerless to achieve an objective. Therefore, the person you actually loved may have become an object of hate. But, this is not always the case of course, that hate as we have come to know it, is the necessary result of not receiving desired love.
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Perhaps, sometime in your life you encountered a person or an idea that you felt uncomfortable with. Maybe some religion or a person of another race had a negative effect upon you. This abstract thought or this real person became a source of enmity for you because they did not agree with you or because you thought you were better than them, or perhaps they thought they were better than you. There arose an intense conflict between you or an idea. And, the problem remained unresolved because you rejected the idea as inappropriate or inadequate or just plain old wrong. It went against your idea or understanding of things. Hate entered the picture because you knew that you did not have the power to alter another person's view, or you did not have the power to make someone else like or even accept you. The emotion of hate was the reaction that you experienced through disagreement and lack of resolution. It also occurred because you had a desire to be in a winning position which was not obtainable.
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So, hate is a human weakness that has its roots in power. The question arises of course: how does one achieve power to achieve one's objectives if that is what one would like to do? Some people know intuitively that the power that they seek is not achievable, but continue to seek the unattainable, and live a life of misery, and perhaps even one filled with hate.
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The other option of course is to accept the fact that the object of desire is not possible, nor worthwhile achieving; it is simply not worth the effort. Therefore, one may decide to accept this lack of achieving an objective and live with one's weakness that is related to this object of desire. I believe that this is the course that most people take when they are confronted with a situation that involves power that cannot be achieved.
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Realistically, they know that it is not worth the effort of attaining something that is not really attainable. That could be the love of another individual or the acceptance in society of another person of another race or religious affiliation. Most of us have been rejected by the opposite sex and we simply accept the circumstances and move on. Another example of acceptance might be a situation where one is involved in a road rage situation or any kind of argument in any number of social settings. Most of these conflicts involve hate that is quickly evaporated because each party knows that it is not worth the effort to continue on in a hateful situation. Why bother?
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But, there may arise a situation in one's lifetime that involves hate that is not so easily manageable. I am thinking of conditions that involve unrequited love or the ongoing racial hatred of groups or of those who are on opposite sides of religions or political viewpoints. These things are not so easily fixable because the roots and the winning or gaining the upper hand in them are so important to the participants. They love what they love and they know that these things are not attainable. Yet, they still desire them. Or they want their viewpoints to prevail over others. But, the condition is the same: one will not let go because of the overwhelming importance of the objective and prize involved.
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You may want to ask yourself at this point a couple of questions. Why does one hate another race or believe so strongly in some religious or political point of view? What are the true origins of the conflict? Why racism or religious dogmatism or steadfast political views? Why continue to love someone who does not love you back? Why continue to do things which cause hate and are not resolved by you alone? Why get involved in things which are so powerful that they cannot be controlled or brought into your domain of manageability? I refer again to the notion of weakness. I believe the person afflicted with hate is essentially weak, weak in the sense of not accepting the fact that not all things in love or in disagreement are possible or achievable. You cannot always get your own way and not everyone thinks the same or is interested in the same things. Life would be so simple if things were this easy now wouldn't they? You simply sit someone down and explain these kinds of issues to a person and all the problems are solved. Except we know of course that life is not so simple. And, that is because some people will not accept reality as it is presented to them. Now, it is easy to condemn, but the asute observer will recognize that we accomplish nothing by doing this. We simply alienate the person who we are trying to explain things to; that person who we would like to help with the elimination of his hate. We are trying to teach him understanding through reason.
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The problem with hate, however, is not so simple. Hate means different things to different people as I have hinted above. Most likely the person to whom you are talking to already knows the things that you are attempting to explain to him. So, this is not the right approach at all. Remember, he is fully aware of his weaknesses and his lack of power to achieve his objectives. This is not the issue at all. Now, you might both agree to let bygones be bygones and all the rest. Religion is religion and so is politics; it is a many faceted thing, loaded with all kinds of different believers. And, similarly with the races. They are different and some of them rub certain people in certain ways. Some people will always hate certain people I believe, perhaps because it is not in their interest to understand or accept other persons or other cultures. There is no harm in trying of course. Sometimes, however, all we can do is to separate these people and hope they do not interact with one another and cause each other harm.
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But what about the problem of love; the desire for something which is not attainable? Our subject knows that he is weak and is operating with little or no power. But, he accepts his fate because of the overwhelming desire to achieve his objective of mutual love. He lives with his hate, which is not really hate of course, or that is how he rationalizes it anyway. It is just an expression of his reaction to his non-receipt of love. He lives with an emotion that has transformed itself into something completely different from what we commonly know as hate. It may in fact be a brand new emotion. A mixture of something that occurs as a result of his unique experiences. What we have determined of course is that our subject is actually a rationalist, so he may not be the weak person that we think he is. And, we will most likely come to the very same conclusion as our subject; that is why his condition will persist because it is not solvable in the traditional way of solving things. He has determined to solve this problem in his own way. He has turned his hate, if it ever was that of course, into simply: an acceptance of non-love. That is his way of making it more palatable and more manageable.
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In a way, he has already accepted the reality of the situation. It is not a totally unrealistic approach that he has taken. He may be weak to allow his negative emotions to continue, but he has accepted this condition. Can we not surmize then that it is not really a form of weakness at all, especially when you consider that his hate is not really hate, but simply his expression and reaction, and acceptance, to that thing that he calls: unachievable love? And, could we not further assume that what he is feeling is more the condition of love and not that of hate? And, that is how we would describe his emotion to a foreign observer if we were called upon to do so? I believe that this is a condition that we should consider as valid, and that we should use this analysis to further our understanding of the word hate and how it is interpreted in different ways by different people.
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What I have attempted to outline for you here are my thoughts on hate, and, more specifically, how I feel that the experience of hate is a very individual thing. I believe that a person's character or personality plays a role in how he confronts and manages potential hate in his life. In the personal example of love I attempted to show that love is a greater force than hate especially when that emotion is paramount and of vital importance to an individual. Hate takes a back seat as it were and becomes a non-issue. That means, of course, in the situation that I provided, the exerience of hate is not all that troublesome at all, especially when we see how it becomes subservient to the more powerful emotion of love. I think this is easily explainable though. Man would rather experience pleasant things over the less pleasant. So, if a person finds someone that he truly loves the issue of hate becomes manageable for him. And, as I have tried to point out, there may not have been any real hate evident in the first place. It becomes merely a topic for discussion, as it were. If a person did not truly love someone, then I am suggesting that the results regarding love and hate may prove to be different for different people. And, a person's character and background would most certainly enter the picture as a consideration.
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I think the same principle can be applied to other forms of hate as well. People may be very much opposed to a certain political party or religious group in their community. The emotion of hate might come to the fore for whatever reason. But, I would suspect that an individual's character would have a lot to do on how he manages his potential hate regarding something that upsets him or her. Depending on the amount of hatred, that a political party can emit, for example, would be an expression of how much power a person felt he had to try and do something about the thing he did not like. He might simply feel that he has no power to affect change and therefore would eliminate this emotion from his life by simply forgetting about it. But, if the person is idealistic and hold values dear then the emotion of hate might not subside so easily. But, since he is most likely not in love with his political enemies either, his hate is not going to transform into anything nearly as equal for his love of someone that he desires. I would say that his hate, although most likely manageble, would take the form of something akin to a desire to see the end of his political enemy if one way or another. The emotion would be more closer to hate than to love in its expression, I believe.
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