What About Hate?

October 15, 2023 Cognitive Insights, War and Peace No Comments

Weirdly, perhaps, there cannot be hate without love. Yet love doesn’t cause hatred.

Is hate then the reverse of love, or is it love-gone-awry?

Love is a conditional to, not a cause of hate.

Imagine someone without love. That person has no reason ever to hate someone. He would just be indifferent. This includes self-hate and self-love. In every case, the love is the starting point. This can be the love of one person, a family, or one’s country. The hate goes to those who abused or are threatening the loved one(s).

This also means that the energy of hate comes from love. Wow — new to me while writing.

Indiscriminately fighting against hate is thus also fighting against the underlying love.

Please, don’t.

Take, for instance, war.

Some 40 wars are going on globally (20 with 1000+ deaths), including a Ukrainian-Russian and an Israeli-Palestinian.

All wars are just bogus, of course. Viewed from above (such as by some extraterrestrials), wars make no sense. They make humanity ridiculous.

Then why?

Make love, not hate.

Yet hate there is, causing war despite all the love. May there be something in the loving, something we need to take care of?

We may need to love better in order not to make it into a condition of hate.

In my view, this something that is needed is Compassion, basically.

(Please follow this link if not done previously.)

Although closely related to love, Compassion brings a few more characteristics or constraints that prevent the deterioration into hate — crucially: rationality and human mental growth.

Seeing the love behind the hate.

This is another Compassionate endeavor and no easy one. It takes daring to be vulnerable, then also daring to be strong — finding Inner Strength. Not easy, yet it’s needed for so many things.

Such as: to end war.

All wars.

One reason for doing so is to end the own hate that otherwise engenders the enemy’s hate that causes the deaths of one’s own beloved.

Genuine love may bring the energy that ends the vicious circle, the self-enhancing pattern, the whirlpool of hate and counter-hate that eventually is a substantial cause of every war, such as the Israeli-Palestinian one that recently entered a new phase of whirlpool hate.

The challenge is how to take the energy and direct it toward outside the hateful whirlpool.

You see? It doesn’t start with fighting against but fighting for. Fortunately, the latter may be done anytime, anywhere. Unfortunately, it’s very challenging. Fortunately, it’s also very feasible — starting with oneself.

In any case, it’s not the result of a simple decision but a learning process.

No time to wait.

Leave a Reply

Related Posts

More about Rewards (also in A.I.)

A reward is a nudge – with more or less lasting result – into some preferred direction. Anything can be experienced as a reward. Thinking about it as a pattern within a broader pattern is clarifying. Pattern recognition and completion (PRC) Seeing rewards in the context of PRC, a reward is always just a part Read the full article…

Never Change a Habit

Instead, let the habit change you. We’ve been told that to improve our lives, we need to break bad habits and form good ones. The idea seems simple — identify a habit, replace it with a better one, and repeat until it sticks. But anyone who has tried to forcefully change a habit knows how Read the full article…

Against Reductionism

The present carries a danger of reductionism in several domains: mind to body, total self to ego, a kaleidoscope of social diversity to identity politics, or worse. These might be signs of a broader reductionism that seeks to make individuals more controllable by erasing their inherent complexity but thereby undermining the richness of human experience Read the full article…

Translate »