Dear friends,
As I look over this assembly, I don't imagine there are
many of us who could contemplate our theme hate from the inside,
almost as a kind of autopsy, as a state of the soul that we have
personally experienced. We are, rather, uneasy observers of this
phenomenon, and thus we try to reflect on it only from the outside.
This applies to me as well. Among my bad qualities and there
are certainly enough of them there is not, oddly enough, the
capacity to hate. So I too look at hatred only as an observer,
whose understanding of it is not profound, but whose concern about
it is.
When I think about the people who have hated me personally,
or still do, I realize that they share several characteristics
which when you put them together and analyze them suggest a
certain general interpretation of the origin of their hatred.
They are never hollow, empty, passive, indifferent, apathetic
people. Their hatred always seems to me the expression of a large
and unquenchable longing, a permanently unfulfilled and unfulfillable
desire, a kind of desperate ambition. In other words, it is an
active inner capacity that always leads the person to fixate on
something, always pushes him in a certain direction, and is in
a sense stronger than he is. I certainly don't think hatred is
the mere absence of love or humanity, a mere vacuum in the human
spirit. On the contrary, it has a lot in common with love, chiefly
with that selftranscending aspect of love, the fixation on others,
the dependence on them, and in fact, the delegation of a piece
of one's own identity to them. Just as a lover longs for the loved
one and cannot get along without him, the hater longs for the
object of his hatred. And like love, hatred is ultimately an expression
of longing for the absolute, albeit an expression that has become
tragically inverted.
People who hate, at least those I have known, harbor a
permanent, irradicable feeling of injury, a feeling that is, of
course, out of all proportion to reality. It is as though these
people wanted to be endlessly honored, loved and respected, as
though they suffered from the chronic and painful awareness that
others are ungrateful and unforgivably unjust towards them, not
only because they don't honor and love them boundlessly, as they
ought, but because they even - or so it seems - ignore them.
In the subconsciousness of haters there slumbers a perverse
feeling that they alone possess the truth, that they are some
kind of superhumans or even gods, and thus deserve the world's
complete recognition, even its complete submissiveness and loyalty,
if not its blind obedience. They want to be the center of the
world and are constantly frustrated and irritated because the
world does not accept and recognize them as such; indeed, it may
not even pay any attention to them, and perhaps it even ridicules
them.
They are like spoiled or badly brought up children who
think their mother exists only to worship them, and who think
ill of her because she occasionally does something else, like
spending time with her other children, her husband, a book or
her work. They feel all this as an injustice, an injury, a personal
attack, a questioning of their own sense of selfworth. The inner
charge of energy, which might have been love, is perverted into
hatred toward the imputed source of injury.
In hatred just as in unhappy love there is a desperate
kind of transcendentalism. People who hate wish to attain the
unattainable and are consumed by the impossibility of attaining
it. They see the cause of this in the shameful world that prevents
them from attaining their object. Hatred is a diabolical attribute
of the fallen angel. It is a state of the spirit that aspires
to be God, that may even think it is God, and is tormented by
evidence that it is not and cannot be. It is the attribute of
a creature who is jealous of God and eats his heart out because
the road to the throne of God, where he thinks he should be sitting,
is blocked by an unjust world that is conspiring against him.
The person who hates is never able to see the cause of
his metaphysical failure in himself and the way he so completely
overestimates his own worth. In his eyes, it is the surrounding
world that is to blame. The trouble is that this is too abstract,
vague and incomprehensible. It has to be personified because hatred
as a very particular kind of tumescence of the soul requires
a particular object. And so the person who hates seeks out a particular
offender. Of course this offender is merely a standin, arbitrarily
chosen and therefore easily interchangeable. I have observed that
for the hater, hatred is more important than its object; he can
rapidly change objects without changing anything essential in
the relationship. This is understandable. He does not harbor hatred
toward a particular person, but to what that person represents:
a complex of obstacles to the absolute, to absolute recognition,
absolute power, total identification with God, truth and the order
of the world. Hatred for one's neighbor, therefore, would seem
to be only a physiological embodiment of hatred for the universe
that is perceived to be the cause of one's own universal failure.
It is said that those who hate suffer from an inferiority
complex. This may not be the most precise way to put it. I would
rather say that they are people with a complex based on the fatal
perception that the world does not appreciate their true worth.
Another observation seems worth making here. The man who
hates does not smile, he merely smirks; he is incapable of making
a joke, only of bitter ridicule; he can't be genuinely ironic
because he can't be ironic about himself. Only those who can laugh
at themselves can laugh authentically. A serious face, quickness
to take offense, strong language, shouting, the inability to step
outside himself and see his own foolishness these are typical
of one who hates.
Such qualities reveal something very significant. The
hater utterly lacks a sense of belonging, of taste, of shame,
of objectivity. He lacks the capacity to doubt and ask questions,
the awareness of his own transience and transcience of all things,
he lacks the experience of genuine absurdity, that is the absurdity
of his own existence, the feeling of his own alienation, his awkwardness,
his failure, his limitations or his guilt. The common denominator
of all this is clearly a tragic, almost metaphysical lack of a
sense of proportion. The hateful person has not grasped the measure
of things, the measure of his own possibilities, the measure of
his rights, the measure of his own existence and the measure of
recognition and love that he can expect. He wants the world to
belong to him with no strings attached; that is, he wants the
world's recognition to be limitless. He does not understand that
the right to the miracle of his own existence and the recognition
of that miracle are things he must earn through his actions. He
sees them, on the contrary, as a right granted to him once and
for all, unlimited and never called into question. In short, he
believes that he has something like an unconditional free pass
anywhere, even to heaven. Anyone who dares to scrutinize his pass
is an enemy who does him wrong. If this is how he understands
his right to existence and recognition, then he must be constantly
angry at someone for not drawing the proper conclusions.
I have noticed that all haters accuse their neighbors
and through them the whole world of being evil. The motive force
behind this wrath is the feeling that these evil people and the
evil world are denying them what is naturally theirs. In other
words, haters project their own anger onto others. Here too they
are like spoiled children. They don't see that they must sometimes
show themselves worthy of something and if they don't automatically
have everything they think they should, this is not because someone
is being nasty to them.
In hatred there is great egocentrism and great selflove.
Because they long for absolute selfconfirmation and do not encounter
it, hating people feel that they are the victims of an insidious
evil, an omnipresent injustice that has to be eliminated to give
justice its due. But in their minds, justice is turned on its
head. They see it as a duty to grant them something that cannot
be granted: the whole world.
The person who hates is unhappy, because whatever he does
to achieve full recognition and to destroy those he thinks are
responsible for his lack of recognition, he can never attain the
success he longs for, that is, the success of the absolute. The
full horror of his powerlessness, or rather his incapacity to
be God, always will burst through from somewhere -- perhaps from
the happy, conciliatory and forgiving smile of his victim.
There is only one hatred; there is no difference between
individual hatred and group hatred. Anyone who hates an individual
is almost always capable of succumbing to group hatred or even
of spreading it. I would even say that group hatred be it religious,
ideological or doctrinal, social, national or any other kind
is a kind of funnel that ultimately draws into itself everyone
disposed toward hatred. In other words, the most proper background
and human potential of all group hatred is a collection of people
who are capable of hating individuals.
But more than that, collective hatred shared, spread and
deepened by people capable of hatred has a special magnetic attraction
and therefore has the power to draw countless other people into
its vortex, people who initially did not seem endowed with the
ability to hate. They are merely morally small and weak, selfish
people with lazy intellects, incapable of thinking for themselves
and therefore susceptible to the suggestive influence of those
who hate.
The attraction of collective hatred - infinitely more
dangerous than the hatred of individuals for other individuals
-- derives from several apparent advantages.
1) Collective hatred eliminates loneliness, weakness,
powerlessness, a sense of being ignored or abandoned. This, of
course, helps people deal with lack of recognition, lack of success,
because it offers them a sense of togetherness. It creates a strange
brotherhood, founded on a simple form of mutual understanding
that makes no demands whatsoever. The conditions of membership
are easily met, and no one need fear that he will not pass muster.
What could be simpler than sharing a common object of aversion
and accepting a common "ideology of injury" that justifies
the aversion expressed to that object? To say, for instance, that
Germans, Arabs, Blacks, Vietnamese, Hungarians, Czechs, Gypsies
or Jews are responsible for all the misery of the world, and above
all for the despair in every wronged soul, is so easy and so understandable!
You can always find enough Vietnamese, Hungarians, Czechs, Gypsies
or Jews whose behavior can be made to illustrate the notion that
they are responsible for everything.
2) The community of those who hate offers another great
advantage to its members. They can endlessly reassure one another
of their own worth, either through exaggerated expressions of
hatred for the chosen group of offenders, or through a cult of
symbols and rituals that affirm the worth of the hating community.
Uniforms, common dress, insignia, flags and favorite songs bring
the participants closer together, confirm their identity, increase,
strengthen, and multiply their own value in their eyes.
3) Whereas individual aggressiveness is always risky because
it raises the specter of individual responsibility, a society
of hating individuals in a sense legitimizes aggressiveness. Expressing
it as a group creates the illusion of legitimacy or at least the
sense of a "common cover." Hidden within a group, a
pack or a mob, every potentially violent person can dare to do
more; each one eggs the other on, and all of them - precisely
because there are more of them - justify one another.
4) Ultimately, the principle of group hatred considerably
simplifies the lives of all those who hate and all those who are
incapable of independent thinking, because it offers them a very
simple and, immediatelly recognizable object of hatred. The process
of manifesting the general injustice of the world in a particular
person who therefore must be hated is made wonderfully easier
if the "offender" is identifiable by the color of his
skin, his name, his language, his religion or where he lives.
Collective hatred has another insidious advantage: the
modest circumstances of its birth. There are many apparently innocent
and common states of mind that create the almost unnoticeable
antecedents to potential hatred, a wide and fertile field on which
the seeds of hatred will quickly germinate and take root.
Let me at least give you three examples.
Where can this particularizing feeling of universal injustice
flourish better than where genuine injustice has been done? Feelings
of not being appreciated, logically enough, grow best in a situation
where someone has been humiliated, insulted or cheated. The best
environment for a chronic feeling of injury is one of genuine
injury. In short, collective hatred gains its veracity and allure
most easily wherever a group of people lives in a genuine want,
that is, in an environment of human misery.
A second example. The miracle of human thought and human
reason is bound up with the capacity to generalize. It is hard
to imagine the history of the human spirit without this great
power. In a sense, anyone who thinks generalizes. On the other
hand, the ability to generalize is a fragile gift that has to
be handled with great care. A less perceptive soul can easily
overlook the hidden seeds of injustice that may lie in the act
of generalization. We have all made observations or expressed
opinions of one kind or another about various peoples. We may
say that the French, the English, or Russians are like this or
that; we don't mean ill by it, we are only trying, through our
generalizations, to see reality better. But there is a grave danger
hidden in this kind of generalization. A group of people defined
in a certain way in this case ethnically is, in a sense, subtly
deprived of individual spirits and individual responsibilities,
and we endow it with an abstract, collective sense of responsibility.
Clearly, this is a wonderful starting point for collective hatred.
Individuals become a priori bad or evil simply because of their
origin. The evil of racism, one of the worst evils in the world
today, depends among other things directly on this type of careless
generalization.
Finally, the third antecedent of collective hatred I want
to mention here is something I would call collective "otherness."
One aspect of the immense and wonderful color and mystery of life
is not only that each person is different and that no one can
perfectly understand anyone else, but also that groups of people
differ from one another as groups: in their customs, their traditions,
their temperament, their way of life and thinking, their hierarchy
of values, and of course in their faith, the color of their skin,
their way of dressing and so on. This "otherness" is
truly collective. And it is quite understandable that the "otherness"
of one group can make it seem, to the group we belong to, surprising,
alien, and even ridiculous. And just as we are surprised at how
different others are, so others are surprised by how different
we are from them.
This "otherness" of different communities can
of course be accepted with understanding and tolerance as something
that enriches life; it can be honored and respected, it can even
be enjoyed. But by the same token, it can also be a source of
misunderstanding and aversion toward others. And therefore once
again it is a fertile ground for future hatred.
Few of those who move on the thin, ambiguous and dangerous
terrain created by the awareness of a genuine wrong, the ability
to generalize and that awareness of "otherness", can
from the outset detect the presence of the cuckoo's eggs of collective
hatred that can be laid in this terrain or that already have been
laid there.
Some observers have described Central and Eastern Europe
today as a powder keg, an area of growing nationalism, ethnic
intolerance and expressions of collective hatred. This area is
even often described as a possible source of future European instability
and of a serious threat to peace. In the subtext of such pessimistic
reflections, one can sense, here and there, a kind of nostalgia
for the good old days of the Cold War, when the two halves of
Europe kept each other in check and produced a kind of peace.
I don't share the pessimism of such observers. Even so,
I admit that the corner of the world from which I come from could
become if we do not maintain vigilance and common sense fertile
soil in which collective hatred could grow. This is so for many
more or less understandable reasons.
In the first place, you have to realize that living in
Central and Eastern Europe are many nations and ethnic groups
that have blended together in various ways. It is almost impossible
to imagine an ideal border that would separate these nations and
ethnic groups into territories of their own. Thus, there are many
minorities, and minorities within minorities, and the existing
borders are sometimes rather artificial, so that in fact it is
a kind of international melting pot. At the same time, these nations
have had very few historic opportunities to seek their own political
identity and their own statehood. For centuries, they lived under
the shelter of the AustroHungarian monarchy and after a brief
pause between the wars they were, in one way or another, subjugated
by Hitler and then immediately, or shortly thereafter, by Stalin.
The nations of Western Europe had decades and centuries to develop
to where they are; the nations of Central Europe had only a few
years between the two world wars.
Understandably, then, they carry within their collective
subconsciousness a feeling that history has done them wrong. An
exaggerated feeling of injustice -- a condition for hatred --
could quite logically find fertile ground for its birth and growth
here.
The totalitarian system that held sway for so long in
most of these countries was outstanding, among other things, for
its tendency to make everything the same, to control and coordinate
things, to make them uniform. For decades, it harshly suppressed
whatever authenticity or if you like "otherness" the
subject nations had. From the structure of the state administrations
to the red stars on the rooftops, everything was the same -- that
is, imported from the Soviet Union. Is it any wonder then, that
the moment these countries rid themselves of the totalitarian
system, they suddenly perceived, with unusual clarity, their mutual
and suddenly liberated "otherness"? And would it be
any wonder if this long-invisible, and therefore necessarily untested
and intellectually undigested "otherness" did not cause
surprise? Rid of the uniforms and the masks that were imposed
on us, we are looking for the first time into one another's real
faces. Something has come about that might be called the "shock
of otherness." And this has given rise to another favorable
condition for collective aversion, which in the right circumstances
could grow into collective hatred.
The simple fact is that not only have the nations of this
area not had enough time to mature as states, they have not had
enough time to get used to one another's politically defined otherness.
Here we may once more invoke a comparison with children:
In many regards, these nations have simply not had enough time
to become political adults.
After all they have gone through, they feel a natural
need to make their existence quickly visible and to achieve recognition
and acknowledgement. They simply wish to be known, to be consulted
along with the rest of the world. They want their special "otherness"
to be acknowledged. And at the same time, still full of inner
uncertainty about themselves and the degree of recognition they
enjoy, they look at one another somewhat nervously and ask whether
those other nations which moreover have suddenly become as different
as themselves are not stealing some of the attention that is
rightfully theirs.
For years the totalitarian system in this part of Europe
suppressed civic autonomy and the rights of individuals, whom
they tried to turn into pliant cogs in its machine. The lack of
civic culture, which the system destroyed, and the general demoralizing
pressure ultimately can make possible the careless generalizing
that always goes along with national intolerance. Respect for
human rights, which rejects the principle of collective responsibility,
is always the result of a minimum level of civic culture.
It may be clear, from this rather brief and thus necessarily
simplified account, that in our part of Europe, conditions are
relatively favorable for the rise of national intolerance or even
hatred.
There is one more important factor here. After the initial
joy about our own liberation comes the inevitable phase of disillusion
and depression. It is only now, when we can describe and name
everything truthfully, that we see the full extent of the awful
legacy left to us by the totalitarian system, and realize how
long and difficult will be the task of repairing all the damage.
This state of general frustration may provoke some to
vent their anger on substitute victims, who will stand as proxies
for the main and now liquidated offender, the totalitarian system.
Helpless rage seeks its lightning rod.
I repeat that if I speak of the nationalistic hatred in
Central and Eastern Europe, I'm not talking about it as our certain
future but as a potential threat.
We must understand this threat in order to confront it
effectively. It is a task that faces all of us who live in the
former Soviet Bloc.
We must struggle energetically against all the incipient
forms of collective hatred, not only on principle, because evil
must always be confronted, but in our own interests.
The Hindus have a legend concerning a mythical bird called
Bherunda. The bird had a single body, but two necks, two heads
and two separate consciousnesses. After an eternity together,
these two heads began to hate each other and decided to harm each
other. Both of them swallowed pebbles and poison, and the result
was predictable: The whole Bherunda bird went into spasms and
died with loud cries of pain. It was brought back to life by the
infinite mercy of Krishna, to remind people forever how all hatred
ends up.
We who live in the newly created democracies of Europe
should remind ourselves of this legend each day. As soon as one
of us succumbs to the temptation to hate another, we will all
end up like the Bherunda bird.
With this difference. There will be no earthly Krishna
around to liberate us from our new misfortune.