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Aug. 9, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:15
365 The Joy of Hatred
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Good afternoon, brothers and sisters.
Hope you're doing well, it's Steph. We are going to, on this fine August the 8th day, 2006, at 17.04 in the afternoon, we are going to take a little dip in a tasty little vat of human energy we call hatred.
So we're finally getting to the topic, which has been circling around for the last two podcasts, and we'll see if we can't try and tease out Some rational or sensible approaches to the problem of human hatred and our own capacity for hatred.
And I may use the word hatred so much that it'll be like when you repeat that word to yourself over and over again.
It starts to sound really weird.
So it'll be kind of like that, but with a slight accent.
So... Hatred is, of course, when you look at it at a basic level, hatred is antipathy for an opposite value.
In my humble opinion, this is the framework that I will work with.
Now, hatred, as defined as an antipathy for an opposite value, is not bad, right?
If your value is, say, living, then you will perfectly justly, and in my view legitimately, feel hatred for somebody who's trying to kill you.
If you love your wife and somebody attacks her, you will feel hatred for that person.
If you value freedom and the non-aggression principle, then you will justly and with a great deal of energy and value feel hatred for somebody who comes to take you away to prison for some innocuous thing that's not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
if you value human life, you will justly and in a valid and healthy way feel hatred towards those who destroy human life.
If you value the protection of children, you will feel hatred towards child beaters and pedophiles and so on.
So there is nothing whatsoever that is negative or evil or corrupt or problematic in the term hatred itself.
As I've mentioned in a medical metaphor a couple of dozen times in a previous podcast, you want your immune system to hate an illness that is invading your cells.
You want your autoimmune system to hate cancer to the point where it kills a dead.
You want there to be a significant value judgment.
Not that your antibodies have value judgments, but if you could make them angrier, then you would.
If you could make them hate that which is killing you, then you would.
So hatred is simply the flip side of love.
And hatred can also be the flip side of hatred though, right?
So we'll sort of work at delineating that in a little bit.
But there's nothing innately wrong with hatred.
Just as there's nothing innately wrong with anger, there's nothing even innately wrong with rage, as long as you don't act it out in an abusive manner.
But there's nothing wrong with any human emotion.
There's nothing wrong with any human emotion.
Human emotions are value-neutral and incredibly helpful if they're true self, or true self-generated.
Human actions are subject to evaluation and judgment.
The worst that could be said about human emotions is that they can be corrupt, but it's very hard to think of them as evil.
So, if you avoid the pain of your own sexual abuse and instead try and normalize your own sexual abuse by If you're acting out on abusive desires towards other children, a priest, then your emotions are corrupted by your choice to not deal with your past, but rather to normalize it by re-abusing children around you, then that's a pretty corrupt emotion.
The desire for a sexual rape of children is a corrupt desire, but it's not an evil thing until you do it.
If you're driving past A girl guide troop and you're saying, boy, you know, I'd really love me some of that.
It doesn't do any harm to the girl guides.
But the moment you start acting on it, and acting on it can be something as seemingly innocuous as eyeing a girl guide or an altar boy with a coldly calculating and desirous stare, which is definitely going to freak him out, then you are starting to do some bad, corrupt, and evil things. But the emotions themselves are not evil.
In my formulation, right?
This is not syllogistic.
This is just sort of... Stuff that makes sense to me.
We'll call this series of podcasts Stuff That Makes Sense to Steph.
And I guess if it makes sense to you, I don't need to argue with you.
And if it doesn't, I'm not going to close the case.
I don't think no matter how many syllogisms I brought to bear on the problem.
So, hatred is a perfectly natural shadow of your values.
Whatever you value, you are going to hate the opposite.
So, if you value conformity, you're going to hate independence.
If you value faith, you're going to hate rationality.
If you value human life, as I mentioned before, then you will hate those Who create circumstances or directly perform actions which undermine, cripple, and destroy human life.
If you value rationality, then you are going to hate people who preach unreason.
So, hatred is a perfectly healthy and valid human emotion.
Now, a question that was posted on the board, which, like most questions on the board, is excellent, excellent and brilliant stuff, with the exception of my posts, which sometimes are not.
But, the post that was put on the board is...
Do I hate ideas or do I hate people?
Well, that's a very interesting question.
Logically, ideas don't exist without people.
I mean, this is sort of the basic idea that concepts are subjugated to instances.
So, if you hate irrationality...
You can't hate it in the abstract, because there's no such thing as Lucky Pan, the god of irrationality, dancing around and screwing around where your house keys are located when you're in a rush.
There is only ideas that are contained within people.
And if you hate irrationality, then...
You are going to have a different relationship with somebody who is irrational than somebody who's rational.
Now, of course, there are all these different degrees and different kinds and blah, blah, blah.
So somebody who is irrational is not irrational all the way, right?
I mean, for instance, you know that they're irrational because they say crazy, stupid, corrupt, and irrational things.
Like, serve the state, soldiers are heroes.
And so you're going to have a different relationship with somebody like that, and it's not going to be because they're purely irrational, because they have actually formulated sentences according to grammatically comprehensible sequences which have communicated to you that they are in fact irrational.
So if I say soldiers are heroes, I don't mean pass me the spinach, and I'm just pronouncing it incorrectly, unless it's Esperanto, in which case that could be possible.
But you're going to know that somebody is irrational because there are aspects of them that are rational.
Hitler was far more rational than he was irrational.
He rose, he put one foot in front of the other, he breathed.
He dressed himself. He had goals and he worked very hard to achieve them, even though they were.
You know, he was a very rational guy in very many ways.
And, by the way, this whole thing about him chewing the carpet, that he gets so angry at various...
So, for instance, when Rommel stopped the tanks before Dunkirk...
Not Rommel, sorry, I can't remember who was in charge of them.
Stopped the tanks before Dunkirk, let the Allies escape, that when he heard this, he was so angry that...
It seems to be sort of a mistranslation, just by the by, of a German phrase for munching the carpet, which just means you're really angry, but it doesn't mean that he's actually biting the carpet, right?
I'm so angry I could spit doesn't mean that you have to get a little umbrella.
So Hitler, yeah, what was irrational?
Well, you know, he's a collectivist and an insane and evil anti-Semite and all these kinds of things.
And so, yeah, that's all irrational stuff.
But overall, you know, he's far more rational than he was irrational.
So saying that, well, somebody isn't totally irrational is not any criteria by which...
You can forgive them or absent yourself from the tangible emotional feeling of hatred.
So, yes, there are going to be, say, I think this was in regards or in the context of a Christian.
So the Christian is going to debate and this and that and the other.
But the question is, what is your emotional relationship with that Christian?
Well, I'll sort of tell you what my emotional relationship is to Christians, but I'm going to basically staccato it in a Morse-like series of Chihuahua Bucks.
But my relationship is that if a Christian starts talking with me, I will simply assume that they don't know that they're supposed to be killing me.
Right? And Christina.
And most of my friends on the Freedom Aid radio board, in fact, most, if not all of them, and just about everyone that I value in history should be killed, right?
Dig up Socrates and piss on his skull.
So, I will simply assume that they don't know this.
And so, when I start talking with them, they'll say this, that, or the other, God, ethics, New Testament, Jesus is all about the love, he's an anarchist, blah, blah, blah.
Well, I'll simply assume that they don't know what the Bible says.
And if I then point out to them and say, you know, your holy book says that I should be put to death.
If they say, yeah, I know, infidel, you know, swing, out comes the knife, then yeah, I'm going to hate them.
Hate them and fear them, but hate them a little bit more than fear them.
And if I point it out to them, and they say, basically, after a certain amount of prevarication, that the Christian then says, yeah, well, you know, there's some bad stuff in every text.
I'm still a Christian. Well, then I'm going to kind of hate them, right?
Because they're not saying, huh, there's something fundamentally wrong with a religion or a belief system that openly advocates the murder of innocent people.
Who are doing no threat or no harm to me.
And selling your daughters into sexual slavery and slavery itself and stoning to death of women who are accused, even accused of infidelity.
All of this kind of stuff.
If they don't, like if they would rather cling to their pathetic fantasy about some all-loving, all-knowing God and rather than have any kind of shame or doubt or hesitation in the face of having texts pointed out to them that say that they should go around killing people and of course then if they're upset about the Muslims that's even funnier, right? It's just the Muslims are more serious about their religion and actually are acting with more integrity than most Christians and Jews as well and other religions as well.
I just sort of focus on the big three.
And so, no, I don't hate a Christian, but once I point out that a Christian is morally obligated to murder me, and if I think that they might, it's from a safe distance, like a podcast, but if I sort of say to them, well, you're supposed to be killing me, and they say, well, that's no good, and they say, well... Then you're just kind of rejecting pretty enormous significant sections of the Bible, which means that you're not really a Christian.
You're just kind of picking and choosing your own preferences and calling them religion, right?
And so then they say, well, yes, but the Christianity that I've been taught and blah, blah, blah, and this and that, it's like, well, is this a holy text or not?
Because this is the same text that says Christ is born of the Son of God.
You believe that, yes. But then you don't believe that I should be put to death for not being a Christian.
No. So you kind of like some stuff in the Bible and kind of don't like some other stuff in the Bible.
But if you believe that Jesus is the Son of God and Jesus also said, put the unbelievers to death, drown them in the river, burn them in the fire...
So, if Jesus was the Son of God and you believe that, and that's what makes you a Christian, rather than a Jew or someone, if you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, then, of course, one of the ways in which you would be able to judge God's morality is by what Jesus says.
So, if Jesus says that unbelievers should be killed and blah, blah, blah, then it's sort of hard to understand why you're worshipping God as a good God, because that's not good to want to put innocent people to death for their beliefs or their different beliefs.
So, if the Christian is sort of willing to stick around with this kind of debate, and if they say, holy crap, you know, you're bringing up some points that, frankly, I can understand why you're offended, right?
I can understand why you might have problems with the belief system, which, you know, hundreds of millions of people believe that you should be put to death.
Or at least believe in a book, the divine commandment of which is inspired, that I should be put to death.
Whether they're actually going to put me to death or not doesn't matter, relative to the fact that they should want to, by their own belief, put me to death.
As I've said before, if people listen to me calling for the wholesale slaughter of Christians...
They would probably not say that I was born of God and represented the ultimate and highest moral standards in the universe.
They'd probably say, what a lonely, weird freakazoid.
Well, that's...
Why should we have different standards?
Blah, blah, blah. You know all of this sort of stuff, so I don't need to go over it with you.
So, no, I don't hate a Christian until a Christian proves that the Christian is a hateful coward who would rather cling to genocidal beliefs than act with any kind of integrity.
Then, I'm going to hate that person, full-on, white-hot, with the light of a thousand suns.
I'm going to hate that person.
Now, does that mean I lie awake, tossing and turning, trying to come up with ways that I could hurt them?
No, of course not. I actually feel very little hatred in my life.
But I fully feel permission to hate whenever I feel like it.
And to hate strong, and to hate good, and to hate angry, and to hate with contempt, and to hate with scorn.
Absolutely, I fully and totally have the right to feel that.
Because what the hell would it mean to say that I don't have the right to feel it?
Right? I'm going to feel it anyway.
I can either feel it and understand the emotion, or I can reject it as a bad emotion, in which case it goes underground and I act it out in self-destructive ways.
I can either be honest with myself about what I feel and refuse to label my feelings positive or negative, but simply be curious about them, or I can say, well, these feelings are good, and these feelings are really bad.
Let's give them a spanking, and let's repress them and push them under.
Does that really help?
I don't think so. I think it just makes it worse.
In fact, there's very strong documentary evidence, as one psychologist has said.
There's not a lot of proof.
Things that you can take is absolutely proven in psychology, but the fact that repressing feelings causes emotional and health problems is one of those things that you can take as a gimme.
That's a taken-for-granted fact proven beyond all doubt.
And of course, I need to understand my own values, and the best way to understand your own values is to look at what you love and look at what you hate, and not have some external value or some external silly standard which says, hatred is bad.
Hatred is bad. I think that if you look at this statement, and we've all heard it before, and we've all heard it a million, million times, and we all want to rise above hatred and anger and vengeance and pettiness and so on.
Actually, drop pettiness from that list.
We certainly do want to rise above that.
But we all have this sort of fantasy, and I'll talk about it with anger for a moment, just so you get a sense of what I mean.
We have this kind of fantasy. At least I do.
And people I've talked to have this kind of fantasy.
Maybe it's because we saw one too many Remington steals.
I don't know. But we have this kind of fantasy like there's this situation.
Like somebody comes into your office and starts yelling at you.
And it's totally unjust.
They've got it totally wrong and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Don't we all have this fantasy like we're going to sit back and give a little superior, a little smile to them.
Maybe superior, maybe not. A little smile.
Let them have their rant.
And in the end say very calmly, are you through?
And when they say, yes, I say, well, let's take it from the top.
First of all, you're incorrect about this, and then you're incorrect about that, you're incorrect about the other, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And also, I'd really appreciate it if you didn't come in and yell at me, blah, blah, blah.
In a perfectly common and rational manner.
Don't we all have that fantasy that this is how we deal with someone yelling at us?
Well, I do. And certainly people I've talked to as well.
Maybe you do as well. You can let me know.
Well, that is a complete fantasy.
And it is, in fact, a sort of sociopathic fantasy to think that you can have someone be overtly aggressive towards you and not have a fight-or-flight mechanism is to be a sociopath.
So if you can sit there and stare with a slight smile at somebody who's yelling at you, and then say, are you through?
Are you done? I mean, that is a sociopathic fantasy that, I don't know, maybe rap videos and action movies put into our minds, but it is completely ridiculous.
I mean, that is how a sociopath would respond, and it's fundamentally kind of manipulative.
Now, does it mean that you jump up and yell back at the person?
Maybe. Maybe.
I've certainly done that in meetings when people start yelling at me.
I have no problem raising my voice back to them because it's like, yeah, if you want to play that way, fuck it.
Let's play that way. I can't think I've done it more than two or three times in my career.
But absolutely, yeah.
I am not going to roll over.
I am not going to be one of these ethicists who's all gentle and nice and, oh, I must rise above that and be Buddhist and forgive the other person and be calm and rise above my passions.
No. No.
I do not think that goodness and virtue is served by repressing the feelings and passions which are the only things that give rise to virtue and the desire for it in the first place.
To me, that's entirely contradictory.
And I don't want to be one of these people.
Can't we just have good people who don't roll over?
And I say this as somebody who's not a fair amount of rolling over in my life, and not in the kind of way that's enjoyable.
But I've sort of made that decision, and I'm trying to stick to it, that I'm just not going to be one of these good people who apologizes and rolls over and tries to be hyper-rational and not offend everybody and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
No. I think goodness deserves a sword and a temper.
Frankly, I think that's the way that I'm going to try and approach it.
Every other ethicist that I know of has tried that hyper-rational, ah, that's interesting, you know, but I'm actually going to draw a sword and knit my brows, when necessary, and not just sort of on a whim, but when I think that it's important.
Because I do hate evil.
I do. Like with a white-hot temper, I hate.
I hate evil.
And I won't stand for any philosophy which says that I'm not allowed, or not supposed to, or it's bad, to hate evil.
Because I'm pretty sure that evil hates me.
Certainly you see some of the emails I get.
I'm pretty sure that evil hates me.
Although evil tends to be a little bit more sucky than aggressive, and maybe that's the leftover of the Enlightenment, I don't know.
I'm sure that wouldn't be the case in, say, Iran, where I would just get killed.
But... I absolutely reserve the right.
You may or you may not.
It's up to you. I can't tell you what to do.
I'm just talking about what works for me and what I think sort of makes sense.
I absolutely reserve the right to get angry at and to hate evil, destructive, corrupt, violent, vicious, nasty, passive-aggressive, petty people.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
And people have the right to get angry at me.
I can call them on it.
I can say, as I've done in podcasts recently, that this is what I'm getting from your anger at me, and then people can put their own podcast together or whatever, or flame me, or get mad at me, or post intelligent rebuttals on the boards, or whatever.
And all of that kind of stuff is perfectly valid.
But I absolutely reserve the right to hate.
Corrupt, evil, and destructive people.
And I would suggest that you do this as well.
That you allow yourself to hate and full-on hate as well.
And I'll tell you why I think that's important.
I was sort of going to get to it this morning, but I didn't have to sort of get around to it.
But the reason why the violent imagery worked so well for me in terms of helping me get rid of my family is that it kind of activated my mental immune system.
If you repress your anger, if you repress your hatred, if you repress the things that inform you that your treasured values are being attacked, which could, in the long run, will end up with you getting killed or people you love getting killed, right? That's what happens when corruption wins.
You end up with this Soviet or fascistic-style dictatorship or theocracy.
So, if you say, okay, well I'm not going to allow myself to feel those things, then people walk all over you.
You know, to your grave which they dig and then throw you in with a bullet hole in your head in the long run.
But people will just walk all over you.
And you won't have the strength to push them away.
You won't have the instinctual strength to push them back.
You won't have the integrated gut-level reaction response to push bad, corrupt people away.
And so when you get that gut-level response, people can smell that from a distance.
So I don't have... Corrupt people don't really talk to me very much anymore.
I mean, except through email and post where it's safe.
But people who are corrupt don't really talk to me Anymore because they kind of sense this about me.
And they sense this about me because I have perfectly given myself the permission to get angry and to hate.
And the way that I gave myself that permission was not to repress violent imagery that was going through during a process of extensive psychological growth for me.
And so, because I allowed myself to fully picture and inhabit images as violent as taking a baseball bat to my mother and to my brother and to my father, and cudgeling them, yea, verily, unto death it seemed at times, because I gave myself the permission to experience that level of anger, because I gave myself the permission to experience that level of anger, rage, hatred, and destruction, it kind of activated my immune system
Again, I totally know this is subjective, and I got that this is not a syllogism, and in fact it probably wouldn't even show up on a brain scan.
But when I allowed myself to get this angry and to fully inhabit these violent images, I didn't act on anything.
Of course not, right? I'm a pacifist.
But what it did do was it kind of activated my defense mechanisms from a psychological standpoint.
So then when people really screwed me over, I was able to act in a much more positive and naturalized way.
I didn't sort of get paralyzed and then later say, should I have done this or should I have done that or whatever.
I was able to very firmly and sometimes very assertively and one or two times aggressively in response to aggression...
To actually act in a coherent way relative to my values, because I had already gone through this process of accepting that my temper and my capacity for aggression was valid.
Not actually being aggressive, my capacity for aggression was valid.
And that was a very important and healthy phase for me.
So one of the things that you want to do is you want to, like if you get sick a lot, right?
If you want to make sure that you kickstart your immune system, right?
So the autoimmune diseases like AIDS, right?
This is when you no longer are producing antibodies, can't fight off infections.
Then you've got to kind of live in this bubble and every time you go out you're in danger and so on.
This is what happens when your body's immune system gets out of whack and dysfunctional and stops working.
Well, the same thing is true for the mind, right?
You have a moral autoimmune system.
Which involves anger and hatred.
And it involves love and it involves loyalty and so on.
But you have an autoimmune system for your virtues and your value and your soul.
And it's called reason and logic and the passions.
And if you cut off your capacity for hatred and anger, then you actually just depress your autoimmune system to the point where you can't fight off other people's craziness.
So you get in debates with people because you can't get angry.
You end up second guessing yourself, you get paralyzed, and you're open to aggressive people screwing you over and screwing you up.
So if you're in a debate with someone and you end up in this situation where you're not aligned, you get irritable and you're like, oh, well, it's not mature to get irritable, it's not mature to get angry, I'm going to repress that and be hyper-rational.
Well, all that happens is they walk all over you and you end up doubting yourself and you end up running to the boards and I'm posting questions about should I this and should I that.
And I understand all of that. I'm not making fun of anybody.
I'm not denigrating anybody.
That's a perfectly natural reaction.
Because we're all taught, you can't hate, you can't be angry.
Those things are bad.
Mature people don't do that.
And of course, everybody who disagrees with us will tell us if we get angry, oh, well you're getting angry because you're being defensive, or you're getting angry because you're wrong, or you're getting angry because, because, because, in some way that makes you look like a mentally unstable lunatic from the planet Insanity.
But once you get comfortable with your anger and with your capacity to hate and your capacity to fight back against people who are really attacking your values, then you can get angry at people in a healthy, productive, and positive way.
And the great thing about it is it gives you the armament that you need to defu, to get rid of your family of origin, which is absolutely essential, and to have the strength so when the phone calls come you can just get angry.
And it also gives you the capacity to eject other kinds of negative or unproductive relationships from your life.
And it also gives you the autoimmune shield that keeps crazy people and corrupt people out of your life in the future.
They know what's going on.
They can smell this kind of defense coming off you, right?
They bump up against these shields and get a red nose and don't come back.
And so I would say that hatred and anger are absolutely essential, positive and productive emotions.
You don't act them out. You don't humiliate people, right?
As I said before, you don't want your autoimmune system to humiliate a cancer and make it angry.
You just want it to get it out of your system.
So that's, I think, the approach that I would take if I were you.
And the first thing that I would do is start, if you're angry or frightened of someone, just start working with violent imagery.
I know this sounds really bizarre, and you keep me posted about whether it works for you.
It certainly worked for a couple of people that I've talked about with.
So I would say give it a shot.
And again, I'm not prescribing any pill I haven't already taken myself in considerable doses.
But yeah, start with the violent imagery.
Let yourself get really, really, really angry.
Let yourself get violent within your mind's eye and see what happens, right?
I think it's going to kickstart your emotional self-defense into gear and be really, really helpful in terms of both getting corrupt people out of your life and preventing them from coming in through the window.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
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