Why do we hate and destroy?

It is a human defence mechanism to hide from or avoid certain things and events. All of us use diversionary tactics that we have developed to distract us from emotional pain and anguish.

All of us human beings have the capacity to hate - it is part of the human condition and is a function of pride. We can hold ourselves together when we feel completely powerless and helpless, only by hating the people we believe to be responsible for our desperate state. In this way many of those people, dispossessed and powerless, for instance, in major cities, come to hate the police or those living in parts of the Middle East have come to hate the USA and Israel. Similarly some children have come to hate their parents. The first kind of hatred, (by the dispossessed in cities and those in the Middle East) however, may be expressed by forming gangs or groups, attacking those they hate, and feeling virtuous for so doing.

An immediate way of solving this problem, not by mastering internally, but by running away from it, is to flee into activities outside ourselves in the external world. However when we do this we prevent ourselves from developing the safeguards human being have acquired as a guard against their own destructiveness, a knowledge and acceptance of ourselves and the impetus to develop effective methods of managing our hate and destructiveness.

Without these safeguards we destroy those things which we perceive as unconnected with us and as not being human like ourselves. Thus we chop down trees, blow up mountains, pollute the seas and the atmosphere, eradicate whole species of animals, birds, fish because we do not understand that we are connected to everything on our planet, and therefore need to be careful about what and how much we destroy. They may walk and talk and live just like us, but if we do not perceive them as human like us we can bomb and maim them, exploit them, starve them and inflict hurt upon them without feeling shame or guilt. We can perceive other people as being human like us only when we can make that special leap of imagination which takes us from our own internal world into theirs.

We are all born with a capacity to hate and to destroy. We are also born with the capacity to know our internal world and to empathize with others. A child brought up to live and let live and to accept, develops all these capacities and can balance one against the other. Empathy balances the hate and keeps the destructiveness in check. We can feel immense hatred for another person and we can desire to harm him, but at the same time, instinctively, we know how it would feel to be the victim of that hatred and harm.

However the less we value and accept ourselves, the more powerless and helpless we feel, and the less we value and accept ourselves, the more likely we are to use hatred as a defence. If we do not understand that we are using hatred as a defence, and if we see such hatred as justified and virtuous, our hatred becomes boundless and such a part of us that we cannot relinquish it, no matter what peaceful compromises our enemies may offer us. Hence the continuing hatred between some Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, between some Israelis and Palestinians and between some Muslims (Shia vs Sunni) and recently between some Christians and some Muslims – it becomes a matter of them and us; always with us being better and superior in every way. (From “Beyond Fear” by Dorothy Rowe)

Never forget that poverty and riches – however these are defined - are products of our thoughts.

We have to rise above our baser feelings, avoid our fear of change and avoid using diversionary tactics to escape our internal turmoil.

I will end this post with a quote from a speech by Frederick Douglass (an African American former slave, social reformer, orator and statesman) on the 24^th anniversary of emancipation, Washington, DC, 1886, which has great relevance today:- “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” (From “Spirit Level” by Wilkinson and Pickett).