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“Hate” Is a Crutch
I am confident that people who know me in real life will tell you that, while I exhibit at least the usual complement of flaws, odd quirks, and irritating peccadilloes, being hateful is not numbered among them. That’s probably because I’ve been fortunate, and can’t think of anyone who has seriously wronged me or wronged someone I love. Hate simply isn’t an emotion I experience, and the word is not one I use.
I would like to believe that this is true of most people — that they don’t really feel hate much, if at all — and that the word is too casually used.
Certainly, it is overused. It has become a convenience for some to label a difference of opinion as an expression of hate. This hurts everyone, simultaneously undermining the language, denigrating the person or group so labeled, and forestalling any possibility of discussion and understanding.
We can disagree about even important matters without hate being a factor. We can favor open borders or controlled borders, high minimum wages or no minimum wages, legal same-sex marriage or only traditional marriage, socialism or free markets, free abortion or no abortion — any of these extremes or anything in-between. We can vote Democrat or Republican, have Bernie stickers on our cars or wear “Make America Great Again” hats, embrace a rainbow of sexual promiscuity or prudishly advocate abstinence, fully accept the apocalyptic claims of the global warming alarmists or be skeptical of their science or the policies they advocate, be an enthusiastic supporter of the trans movement or think it’s a bunch of faddish nonsense, oppose the private ownership of guns or be a pro-gun fanatic in favor of no regulation at all.
None of these positions requires that someone be hateful, and it’s small-minded, presumptuous, and rude to ascribe hate to someone simply because he or she disagrees with your position on these issues — or, indeed, on the vast majority of issues.
I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t hate: how much of your life you want to devote to hating is your business, not mine. I’m saying you shouldn’t accuse other people of hating based on something as superficial as their opinions on topics about which you happen to think differently.
By far, most of the claims of “hate” I hear and read suggest more to me about the person making the claim than about the ostensibly hateful object of the accusation. I think it most often reveals that the accuser is shallow, lacks self-awareness and empathy, is uncharitable, and/or cynically uses the ugly label to silence people whose arguments he or she is unwilling or unable to engage.
Too readily smearing others as “haters” seems itself almost … well, it certainly isn’t an act of love.
Published in General
Agreed.
It’s not. It’s an offensive Alinsky-style tactic used by the left to 1., create headlines, 2., put their opponent on the defensive, 3., create a media context that looks for examples of hate in their opponents’ history, 4. rally the troops, 5. paint the entire opposing party as both immoral and stupid to have chosen such a position, and 6. present themselves as the obvious moral alternative.
It’s a very effective tactic, so it’s used a lot.
So it’s a mistake to take their words at face value.
‘Fell for it.
It’s a very effective tactic.
I think you are mistaken, and that very few people use the word tactically. I think most people have simply been told that disagreement on certain topics is hateful, and take it for granted.
Most people are normal, even most people on the left. They say what they think, not what some Machiavellian leftist schemer has told them they should say in order to achieve an effect.
Man, I hate you…
You are stifling my growth as I learn to shed my toxic masculinity and get in touch with my feelings. And I feel you are oppressing me with your intellectual supremacy arguments that have obviously become institutionalized in our rules-based hierarchical social constructs.
(Whew. This is hard. But only 80,000 more words in this salad and I can get me one of those PhD thingies.)
Perhaps, but that’s a really good implementation example of my point.
Perhaps, but that’s not at all consistent with observations. It doesn’t take a Machiavellian schemer to note that delivering talking points like “racist”, “white supremacist”, “sexist”, “homophobe”, and so forth, has worked really, really well every time.
Is it consistent with the premise of your posting? That so many people would, all of the sudden, “label a difference of opinion as an expression of hate”. That’s a downright weird thing for normal people to do.
I think there are algorithms that can take care of that for you.
I think both are true. It is an effective tactic and I believe it was deliberately introduced into politics, the media, schools, the Academy and entertainment as an effective tactic to silence people of good will. I also think it has been taken up by like minded individuals who are the targets of the media, education and entertainment who genuinely believe that disagreeing with them is akin to hating them.
Well said.
Add to hate: despising someone for their opinion. It’s hate lite.
If you hate hate, you’re a hater.
Almost fits on a bumper sticker.
I agree with this part, but it doesn’t seem consistent with your “crutch” hypothesis. More like “club.”
Not bad, EJ, but you could make it even better by working in: patriarchal; heteronormative; cisgendered; privilege; historically marginalized peoples; people of color; intersectional theory; genderqueer.
Remember the great Onion video about this, from about 2 years ago?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpzVc7s-_e8
Moderation in all things?
An interesting property of the word hateful is that it can describe an object/person that exhibits hate or that receives hate.
So if I say a given idea is hateful I am saying either (or both) that I believe it is a position worthy of hate or that the position or that the idea is itself filled with hate.
I would suggest that the dual meaning arises from a duality within us, a primitive distrust of the ‘other’ that assumes ill-will on their behalf while generating reciprocal ill-will within us.
They hate our freedoms; I hate them back.
* * * * *
But “contempt” is where it is really at. I feel contempt for certain political positions and that contempt tends to accrue to the holders of those positions. And to people who associate with those holders. And to the horses they rode in on.
I know that a lot of this contempt is contemptible, but there is just so much of it around. It’s in the news media, the twitterverse, the seemingly casual discussion.
Memes are constructed almost entirely of contempt. Our memes about their ideas and about them; their memes about our ideas, about us.
Other people’s contempt for me is hateful.
Thank you for taking the time to write what I think. It’s a word and a concept that I have mentioned here more than once disdainfully, so thanks again. I also don’t think there are many true haters around. Leaders on the Left use the concept and accuse opponents in order to influence those they are trying to convince to follow doctrines that betray the humanity of their fellow humans. Hate, hateful, and haters take their place in the vocabulary of the Left just as so many other words are misused and corrupted. I would rather describe the thoughts and behavior of the Left with a range of other words like bizarre and crazy and to suggest that those who support and/or allow the Left to get away with it are suffering similarly. Not much place for use of the word. Now, a discussion of the word power and those who seek it may yield some benefit.
Goodness, that’s funny
You are a hateful homophone. Don’t even ask me to get into what you sound like.
Yes, funny!
I don’t hate people for having different opinions than I do.
I do despise them for promoting their opinions with dishonesty and unthinking arrogance.
This is bad enough when it comes from strangers online, but it is a betrayal when it comes from someone whom you once trusted.
I don’t like the word “hate.” My family uses that word too casually, and I have started requesting that they knock it off. “Broccoli is too unimportant for you to waste emotional energy on it by hating it.”
In general, being around people who complain all the time is just exhausting. It really shows general a lack of gratitude.
My mom says that when she was little she would be told, “hate’s too big a word for you”.
My grandkids gasp when people use the word ‘stupid’. Not sure when that became a thing, but I’m not too worried about it.
Seems like ‘hate’ could get a similar treatment.
Man, this is so unwoke it is positively catatonic.
It is more tone deaf than a howitzer.
So remarkably unhip it is a wonder your bums don’t fall off.
Got to go with namilliT here.
I don’t think Henry is a hater and he doesn’t need to defend himself as if he were one.
But that is not the point of what the issue of “hate” is about.
It’s been a key standard issue Marxist strategy to pit the lower “oppressed” classes against the “capitalist roaders” and the more successful since the Bolshevik Revolution. Stoking “hate” of the rich, the successful, Whites, the ‘privileged” is what is to drive the ‘revolution” and the overthrow of our largely peaceful Republican Democracy. That is what the labeling of the term “White Nationalist” is all about. It is a slur meant to engender hate based upon really nothing but manufactured perceptions. Even though no group has ever ascribed themselves as “White Nationalists”, and the evidence for a movement of real “White Supremacists” other than a handful of people is non- existent , the Media and the Radical Left without any evidence whatsoever have stoked the perception that a large segment of White Society are really closeted “White Supremacists”so long and so hard that tens of millions of Americans now believe it. And so now, millions of those believing Americans feel justified in “hating” the tens of millions of so-called “White Nationalists ” back because it’s their perception now that these millions of “White Nationalists” are allegedly oppressing them and ruining their lives at every turn.
So the stoking of “hate” engenders more “hate’ in a vicious spiral. This is what the Left wants.
Identifying the other side as “haters” also makes one a better person, because they have given in to base animalistic passions, and you are a clear-thinking savior of society. If the other side is motivated by hate and fear (the preposterous -phobe suffix makes disagreement pathological, and a sign of mental illness) then you’re automatically a better person. It’s auto-canonization.
Just like pointing out how the other side is stupid or illogical is a way of calling one’s own side (and oneself) smart and rational.
Blanket epithets are seductive for this very reason.
Blankety-blank epithets are better though.
The Rich Lowry-Peter Beinhart debate over the funding source for Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib’s attempted trip to Israel on CNN Monday was a textbook example of blinding hate taking over and destroying any chance of having a measured discussion (CNN probably loves shouting matches just for the sake of high decibel levels more than any of the news channels, and their talking head pundits know it helps them gain appearances if they can create ‘buzz’. But I really do think Beinhart was out of his gourd here, apparently because Hanah Ashrawi is still pretty much a revered figure among the anti-Israeli left in Washington, and Peter didn’t want Rich talkin’ about his lady that way).
When Rich Lowry of all people can cause a progressive to lose control like that simply by stating his side of the argument, it gets really tough to find any sort of common ground, because that anger comes out of the belief that the other side’s arguments by their very nature are now outside the Overton window of political discourse and therefore self-disqualifying. Once you narrow down the parameters to where arguments from just a few years ago are now prohibited and those setting the ground rules fly into a rage when they’re defied, about the only way you’re going to modify that behavior is for the public to show in upcoming elections that they don’t like having what they can and can’t think or say in public that tightly restricted.
Some relatives and friends on the left project their local policy views to Washington where those who know better see them as profoundly mistaken, dysfunctional and deeply harmful. The policy views of normal people of the left can make sense locally and can be compromised with by folks on the right. But Washington is disconnected from local realities. The vast bureaucracy has to make matters up because they have almost no information about what matters locally. The country is simply too big and too complicated but we created a Washington bureaucracy, gave them power and money to solve problems that are almost totally local and which vary from town to town and city to city. They have to make it up because they simply can’t know what they must know to act rationally. And if some do know, it doesn’t matter because the collective can’t. They are powerful and we don’t seem able to control them. They control Congress not the other way around and the White House can’t control them either. There is only one solution. Return the task they are supposed to do to the States. Tax payers fund them so the states can fund them. Some rational states will reduce or eliminate most of the programs, others won’t and through time folks will learn. Of course some politicians won’t learn but tax payers in the States can.
I’m currently reading Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. I don’t have it in front of me, but the sections I read this morning were discussing the issue of hate, and how hatred is used as a unifying agent to rally, recruit and retain the frustrated into such a movement (given the era in which the book was written, the common example referenced is Hitler and the Jews). There is hate, chaotic and unreasonable. Then there is organized hate, harnessed by the declaration of a common “enemy” that must be opposed in any and all forms. Tentative allies in WWII, the USSR and the USA very soon thereafter labeled the other as enemy, particularly important in the Soviet Union to ensure total control over their populace. After the cold war, who was our enemy? We couldn’t figure it out, so we disarmed for a while. Then came the Islamic militants – specifically those whose purpose was to foment terror. We made them the enemy. But even that is on the wane in the public consciousness.
We’ve turned our sights inward now. Left, right, radical, reactionary, progressive, conservative … the “we” vs. the “they” in whatever form fits. In this “woke” era, along with the rise of repackaged socialism, new enemies are being declared every day. The manufacture of hatred will quickly turn into its own arms race. Not only that, but the “hate” economy is a profitable one. No side will be immune, nor insulated against this nascent, revolutionary fervor. I hope it fizzles, but we’re not there yet.
I am not sure I understood the post. So to make sure I am recognized as an enlightened intellectual I will now express my disappointment, nay, outrage at you for defending hate. Hating haters is not hate. Therefore, not hating haters IS hate and as much as I hate to point it out, you are clearly a hater. And I hate that.
You clearly edited the post to remove all familiar intersectional terminology after you wrote it which is itself indicative of an endorsement of linguistic patriarchy and the use of supposed ‘straightforward’, ‘common sense’ ‘plain English’ mansplaining in furtherance of the campaign verbal rape that is modern American English.
I would continue but I am pretty triggered and there is no WiFi in my safe space.
It’s probably futile to ask, but would anyone care to take a stab at a definition of “hate” ? I suggest “hate” is the “habit of anger and fear.”
Agreed. Losing self-control and courtesy over something that doesn’t immediately threaten one is a strong indicator.