Hatred…hold on, don’t run off, I have some ruminations about this, but the safeties are on.
I used to think hate was simple; emotional charge around loss, mix in some significance fear, self-pity, and la! Hatred. Just Love’s absence? An empty heart? Love’s twisted visage? Most treatments I’ve seen minimize it that way, marginalize it, neuter it…wishful thinking I feel. Now, a little more well-acquainted: Powerful and motivational, leaches the bearer and destroys everything it touches but oh so seductive, warm balm when you don’t like your outcomes. It has its own living bloom, it’s not like spiteful apathetic hurts or cynicism or contempt or rage or resentment…parts of the whole, but it’s the sum of those that rears up as a composite new driving force. Folk pretend to it, but screaming fear isn’t even a meaningful part of what we’re talking about.*
Driving…soft way to describe the navigation and liberation hate allows, probably its evolutionary purpose. Boundaries? fuck ‘em. Ethics? those too. Limits? suspended, possibilities without fear’s weaker face; all offense, you just need one chance to cut. Consequences? You’re the bearer of consequences, the subject not the object. In the full flood of hatred, a new/different/exclusive fund of power is available…you can deny that if you want, but you’re naïve as hell and are dismissed from any defensive position…if you don’t get this you don’t know what you’re doin’ on the wall.
So take all that, add imagination, focus, strategic filters, capability, and what do you get? A Nightmare trotting forward, waiting for a little knee pressure to drive the charge home. Think of it this way, if you could create a living intelligent tangle of eager hating thorns, bright and black with poisonous horror, edged and barbed to stab/rend/tear, a remorseless/ growing/wrapping/biting/strangling/killing urge that had one compulsion…how terrible would you be when that rooted in the loam of your consciousness/heart/center/soul? Fed and stretching out for what it sees, what it wants? Hungry, willing, cunning, nurturing, patient, explosively energetic…sounds like a winning formula for a horrific trial.
Lots of material out there on this from humanist fiction to lab studies. David Kupelian treats it well, but that stuff is usually about a childhood inculcated religious or social intolerance, anti-Semitism, women-hating, etc…not the intimate personal kind meant here Note: he seems to be a little preoccupied with the Islamic folk even though hate has no language or flag. There is a tacit acceptance of the pleasure-inducing qualities of relaxation during heightened emotional states hovering around the clinical treatments; if pleasure and pain are the foundations of our behavior…you do the frictional math on Iago's purpose.
It’s a lot like lust I think. Channeling the initial urge, encouraged and supported by dark whispers/visions that visit in fantasy in the deep sleepless night…eventually that urge is a welcome, warm companion, always ready to come to you and burn doubt and inhibition away for a while, insinuating into emotional habits and muscle memory, laying the foundation for a few seconds of unconscious movement that will resolve everything (that seems to matter till you’re done), promising smooth and effective execution of purpose. It’s not easy, not at all simple to sustain; you have to avoid collapsing the state vectors early and wasting it, keep the side-effects under wraps (surprise matters)...the key to that old black magic is deliberation, to be deliberate, rituals of exponential 'not' until providence shows her teeth.
Anyhoo, don’t touch yourself there, you’ll go blind.
*“To enjoy the things we ought, and to hate the things we ought, has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.”
-Aristotle
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