Hate

There are certain ideas and ideologies I obviously find contemptible. Anyone who had read all of the opinions I’ve expressed in this blog and my previous blog would see this. Certain ideologies are particularly detestable to me… for example, monarchy, theocracy and authoritarianism.

But when it comes to the matter of hatred… well I think the word is thrown about a bit too lightly.

Yes… I detest the ideologies. But the people who espouse them are a completely different matter. If I’ve ever lowered myself to ad hominem attacks… well I’m not perfect and I’m definitely wrong to be doing that, and I try not to do it. It is not necessary to destroy a person to discredit any bad ideas they may possess. And there may be a couple of good ones mixed in there within their minds that don’t deserve to be thrown out with the bath water.

Anyway… as I said… the word ‘hate’ is thrown about too lightly… especially on the Internet. It doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to find a flame war somewhere… of course some people do believe in their ‘hatred’, whereas others are just trolls fishing for attention. It is impossible for a person to be able to rationally say to someone ‘I hate you’ or to say ‘I hate Group X’ when talking about a particular group (ie. race, religious sect, political persuasion).

Hatred is by its very definition an irrational state. Its natural to hate an idea that you see as inherently ‘evil’ or ‘destructive’… for example I’d consider authoritarianism to be a type of psychosis. But should I therefore hate the authoritarians? If I did, I’d have to hate just about every politician in this country and others… and I’d have to also hate the people who follow their ideologies and anyone who sees the coercive power of the state as the ultimate solution to all of society’s problems.

As you can see… it would take an extremely hateful person to be able to hate so many people. And it is quite a broad cross-section of people. I mean the point about people who see the coercive power of the state as a universal solution to everything have many different ideas as to what the government should or should not do.

What’s more is that many of these people… particularly those who self-identify as ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ have hearts in the right place when they approach the matter of what the State should or shouldn’t be allowed to intervene in. Even some self-identified ‘conservatives’ have their hearts in the right place to an extent as well… they see any attempt to change the system as inherently dangerous and want to preserve the status quo as a kind of security blanket against possible negative consequences of the changes that are so often proposed.

So obviously… there’s no point in hating the authoritarians and statists. I just happen to disagree strongly with what they believe in. Their values do not coincide with mine. And when put that way its probably not that helpful to hate the ideology either, much as doing so is perfectly natural. I really have no answer here… I mean I look at the coercive and sometimes violent power exerted by the state, and the fallacy with strict rules followed ‘by the book’… and I see what suffering and anguish comes out of such things. I see people who could be smart enough to figure out why they ought to voluntarily behave themselves discouraged from finding these answers with the tension and resentment that comes out of being coerced into such behaviour.

Its not easy to avoid hating such a system, much as I can see why some people believe it to be the ‘necessary evil’ that holds us all together as a society.

~ by Jeff Engert on October 19, 2009.