Hatred (7 page)

The social revolution of the late 1960s and the 1970s, with its Nietzschean “reevaluation of values,” shook up the working class. To make matters worse, the Great Society, with its rising concern for the rights of minorities, led to welfare programs and affirmative action that seemed to preclude that class. Even worse, the sympathy that the liberal community expressed for the minorities seemed in contrast with the contempt it had for blue-collar tastes and values. White middle- and working-class people were feeling the same injustices that minority groups had been experiencing for years, stemming from the lesser share that they were expected to accept, although for different reasons. They had earned their proper share—not through the “dole” or special consideration, but through their labor and diligence—and now the value of that share was suspect. Somehow or other the promise had been broken. The just rewards for labor had not been meted out. The rules of the game had been changed.

This sense of injustice, of a tacit agreement revoked, continues to feed the mass resentment and rage that led to the many Christian militias formed in the latter half of the twentieth century. The recruits felt that they had paid their dues and had been abandoned and denied by the government they had served in war and peace. They had been betrayed.

The difference between feeling deprived and feeling betrayed is often only a matter of one's identification. We are deprived by “others” who have the power. We are betrayed by our own kind.
The white middle class began to feel deceived and cheated. They had been seduced by promises not kept, and then they were abandoned. They had been “led down the garden path.” They had “kept the faith” and had still been “delivered into the hands of the enemy.” Worse, they had become the enemy. These feelings and phrases are all part of the language and definitions of betrayal.

We have different expectations of those we love and those we serve than we do of strangers. When those we depend on betray us, we are outraged. Such betrayal will evoke the most fundamental fear of childhood, abandonment by the powerful parental figures.

The fear of being abandoned is compounded by the severe blow to self-esteem that betrayal produces. In life, the indifference and disdain of the impersonal world of strangers is balanced by the concern of those who love us. When that love is trivialized or denied, the balance is dangerously dislocated. If those who we had assumed value us most abandon or discard us, what actual worth can we possess?

A peculiar example of perceived betrayal occurred in the 1930s with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency of the United States. Roosevelt was a member of the elite by every definition. Wealth, religion, and family position marked him as an aristocrat. That is why the egalitarian policies of Roosevelt's New Deal were seen by the wealthy as a stab in the back by one of their own. The wealthy hardly suffered during the depression. If anything, the pool of cheap labor allowed them to maintain their estates and mansions for still another generation. Many historians would later perceive Roosevelt and his policies as being the savior of the capitalist system. Still, the hatred for Roosevelt in the establishment was astonishing in its malevolence and rancor. In a typical display of displacement, the greatest vitriol was reserved for the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, a
feminist before her time and an uncommon humanitarian. Contempt for ambitious women, an emerging threat to the male oligarchy, added another dimension to their fixation on Eleanor. This was true hatred, as evidenced by their obsession with her and her role in influencing the president's policies. The cruelty extended beyond her actions to her very persona.

Betrayal thus manages to join the fear of rejection with the humiliation of having been deceived. Even when the deceit is a self-inflicted wound based on false assumptions, it will carry with it all the pain and mortification of expectations denied. A betrayed person feels unloved, unsure, and used.

When a significant segment of a society feels betrayed, an environment ripe for anarchy and revolt exists. The rage at the betraying authorities will be compounded by the self-anger one feels for having been accomplice to the deception, for allowing oneself to be duped. The excesses of revolution, the bloodbaths and guillotines, are all testament to the hatred that may be unleashed, particularly if a paranoid element can convince the masses that this betrayal was a calculated humiliation. Germany in the 1930s is a paramount example of a country humiliated, impoverished, and ripe for hatred.

On an individual level, betrayal is most acutely felt in the sexual area. The spurned lover has all the ingredients for hatred at his command. The attachment is there; he need only reverse the emotion from love to hate. Then rage is compounded by the metaphoric meaning of sexuality. For both genders sexuality is a measure of worth and power. Men in our culture—as in most—are taught to see their sexuality as a direct measure of their manhood. Manhood carries the mantle of power. Women, at least traditionally, were taught to view their sexual desirability as the instrument for enlisting the powerful men to aid in their survival. For both men and women, an attack on their sense of sexual worth is a strike at the core of their security. Sexual betrayal can
lead to the same viciousness and brutality one sees in suicide bombers. When a body is discovered with a single blow to the head or a single stab wound, an intruder or a stranger may be suspected. When there are twenty or thirty blows, one is likely to be dealing with a frustrated or spurned lover.

Disapproval, deprivation, and betrayal exploit our inner feelings of inadequacy. Unsure of our own capacities, we feel our survival threatened when the value and esteem in which we are held by powerful authority figures or their representatives are brought into question. There are, in addition, direct assaults on our self-worth, direct affronts to pride and confidence. Exploitation and manipulation deprive us of the special status inherent in being a human being. When we feel “used,” we feel our very personhood is assaulted.

The ultimate, rawest, and most outrageous use of people is found in the institution of slavery, which is why it is universally condemned in theory if not in practice. In slavery the person is stripped of all rights of humanity and converted into a machine. But to be used in any sense is to violate that basic imperative of moral behavior set down by Immanuel Kant as at the heart of his ethics: Never use a person as a means rather than an end, for in so doing you erase the distinction between person and thing.

We go through life exposed to a continuum of circumstances in which we can never be sure whether we are valued for our services or for ourselves. Since our services are inextricably bound to that which we call our “self,” a direct request for services can often be seen as honoring that which we can do and, therefore, that which we are. When lying and deceit are involved,
we know that we have been manipulated, used as a means to someone else's end. This explains our anger in the face of even well-intended manipulation. Paternalism is one example of this. Paternalistic medicine, even when practiced for reasons of compassion, came to be resented during the latter half of the twentieth century. When physicians attempted to shield patients from the most malignant implications of their diseases, the patients felt “patronized” and took offense. Truth telling took priority over beneficence. Patients implore doctors to give them the unvarnished truth, but most will resent it if a doctor responds by telling them that they have an incurable cancer.

Still, doctors should honor the truth, while trying to offer some latitude for hope and comfort. When we try to control or influence our patients by means that bypass their rationality, will, and volition, we diminish their autonomy. We reduce them. When they sense this, they will respond with rage.

Anyone or anything that makes us feel less whole, less powerful, less useful, and less valued will make us feel endangered. We depend on others and the respect of others to support our self-esteem. If others indicate their contempt or indifference to us, we feel vulnerable. But it is not just in our relationships with others that we can be made to feel inadequate. Our self-confidence is equally founded on ourselves and our own performance, particularly as measured against an ideal imposed from within ourselves as well as from the environment. Anyone exposed to frustration in attempting even a minor task is aware of how quickly our irritability level can rise. And how rapidly we can convert our dissatisfaction with ourselves into anger with some other. This
conversion is a step that we all experience and is crucial to an understanding of the mechanism of scapegoating that will be presented later in the book.

My own personal frustration tolerance is at its lowest when performing fine hand movements, at which I am particularly un-talented. Small parts in fine works are my particular nemesis-the tiny screw that must be positioned into the small opening under an extended ridge that is protected by a delicate filament or wire that must definitely not be disturbed. It is a situation that even in anticipation is sufficient to get my hands trembling with anticipated rage and frustration, and the trembling in turn is sure to disturb the wire that must remain inviolate for the mechanism to survive. Even in movies I find myself most anxious in those clichéd scenes where if a bomb is not defused, the good guys will be destroyed and the bad guys triumph. Such scenes inevitably produce in me a frisson of terror. It is the wise person who knows his own poisons and avoids them.

I am most tempted to enter my danger zones when dealing with electronic equipment, either in its assembly or repair. If what I am diddling with were an attempt to install or program a DVD player, the frustration that I experience has nothing at all to do with the typical image of frustration, that is, a frustrated
desire
. The desire to watch a movie is irrelevant. It is the evidence of my own personal ineptitude that threatens and, therefore, angers me.

What disturbs me is my knowledge that others can handle these matters quite well and that I seem to be particularly inept. The feeling of being all thumbs is not far from the feeling of having no hands. What enrages, because it frightens, is the emerging awareness of one's own inadequacy in relation to others—relative abilities, or lack thereof, in a competitive world.

Most of us are not frustrated by our inability to climb Mount Everest, accrue a fortune, or play golf like Tiger Woods. It is dealing
with the computer glitches, fixing the plumbing, or roasting a turkey that triggers frustration. The apparent simplicity of these tasks suggests that others can do them easily. Philip Roth, in his marvelously honest book
Patrimony,
reveals his barely constrained rage at his irritable and demanding father, rage that breaks out when his father, in a tirade against his self-sacrificing girlfriend, complains that she cannot even pick out a decent melon. Roth's fury spills out, since he, like me, is obviously frustrated at his own inability to “pick out a decent melon,” a task that others seem to manage. Our failure is more dramatic for being so relative. If I am incapable even here, where others succeed, what does that say about the worth and reliability of myself?

We can guard against a sense of impotence by deflecting the anger from the self to others, concentrating on who created the problem rather than who it is that cannot resolve it. If the example is audio equipment that a child tinkered with and damaged, one could divert the stream of anger from oneself to the child, withdrawing the attention from one's own inadequacy by finding a convenient, culpable target.

A more rational way to protect our self-esteem would be to avoid involvement in such trivia. Much of this is choice. Play football instead of golf. Don't play games at all. As for the handyman or household maintenance stuff of life that confounds us, we can admit defeat by hiring someone to do it. There is no disgrace in that. We live in a world of specialized work. We don't make our own clothes, grow our own vegetables, or hunt for our own meat. For most men “bringing home the bacon” is a metaphoric phrase that does not even involve their making a trip to the supermarket.

But what happens when we leave the world of the relatively trivial and avoidable? The learning-disabled child cannot avoid schooling, and at a time when we were all unsophisticated about
such disabilities, she was expected to keep up. This is but a paradigm for that category of frustrations that may be imposed by unreasonable and unattainable standards. In a society where white—and only white—was beautiful, a black had few options except to attempt to transform himself into something approximating white, a hopeless, frustrating, and humiliating set of maneuvers.

Much has been made of the frustration of menial, unrewarding, unchallenging work that has no beginning or end, no product or pride, work that leads nowhere, with no hope of surcease. Still, there remains the honor, worth, and pride of fulfilling our responsibilities to ourselves and our dependents. When we are deprived of our capacity to work, that is a different order of things. The mass unemployment that exists in some areas of the underdeveloped world prevents people from finding the means of survival while at the same time denying them the sense of pride that work offers. When such frustration is imposed from outside, as occurs in the Palestinian refugee camps or the underdeveloped countries, the resulting diminution of self-pride and self-respect may be perceived as the product of an assault. Someone has invaded the repository of their dignity and robbed the people of the instruments of self-respect. But often it is the wrong someone who is blamed.

Frustration will always be most malignant when it involves those aspects central to the purposes of life. Because the frustrations we experience do not generally test us to our limits, most of us are not driven to the extreme of rage that leads to murder or suicide, the hatred that supports torture and inflicts suffering. In the privileged world we occupy, our frustrations are more likely to involve the luxuries and peripherals of life. When the areas that are frustrated are as central as work or sex, the anger that emerges is immense, evil, and ugly. Violent cases of frustrated rage are increasingly evident in the world today. I have not had
personal experience with torturers or terrorists, but I have dealt extensively with similar hatred expressed in crimes of passion.