Copyright 2017

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 9781520526010
Thank you to Augustus and Jack, for your mentorship, whether you knew it
or not.

Thank you to Jillene, for your understated guidance.

And most of all, to Sierra. Without your effort, patience, and faith, this book
may never have come to life.
 Table of Contents

Forward
Introduction
Hatred: Good or Evil?
The Nature of Hate
Beyond the Self
Fearing Hate
Cutting Out the Heart
Varieties and Criticisms
Conclusion
 Foreword

A political operative in any day and age is required to pay careful

attention to his words. And in a modern, liberal-democratic society, the word
“hatred” is absolutely forbidden.
The exception, of course, is when one is lamenting the hatred promoted
or engaged in by the other side. A Democrat can talk all he wants of
Republicans who hate immigrants, racial minorities, and women. A
Republican can talk all he wants of Democrats who hate America, Jesus, and
freedom.
But if I were to say that I hate traitors; if I were to say that I hate the
financiers and leftists who have sold out my country; if I said that they
deserved the wrath of my hatred – what then?
If I were to say that I hate the jihadists not because of their
radicalization or their unfortunate circumstance, but because they are an
existential enemy that must be annihilated – how long would it be before
every party leader and talking head in America denounced me as a greater
threat to our way of life than the jihadists themselves?
Such is the way of things now. In order to get along in politics, you
must wear that mantle of republican hypocrisy and show all the world how
reasonable and incapable of hatred you are. So it is that to write the Foreword
to a book in defense of hatred is tantamount to political suicide.
At first, Mr. Robertson had asked for nothing more than my
constructive criticism of his manuscript. Having ten thousand things to do at
any one point in time, I decided to speed read the manuscript over breakfast
one morning, expecting to make nothing more than corrections to stylistic
flaws and points of grammar.
Imagine my surprise when I realized that a work of monumental
importance had just fallen into my lap. I still ended up reading the entire book
in a single sitting over breakfast, but not because I was speed reading
something on my action-item list: it was because I was absolutely engrossed.
Mr. Robertson has not just given us an excellent writing; he has done us
all a much greater service. In resurrecting hatred as a virtue of a strong
people, he has restored an essential part of human nature long-suppressed by
the present cultural paradigm.
Hatred as a virtue—“a moral good,” as Mr. Robertson calls it—is
indeed counterintuitive to a people who have been conditioned for
generations to value tolerance as the summum bonum. Needless to say, the
very thought of hatred as a virtue is an abomination to anyone who cherishes
love.
Ah, but only at first blush, Dear Reader. For as Mr. Robertson points
out, hate is born of love.
If you do not hate that which harms those you love, then you do not
really love them. I am reminded of a fire-and-brimstone preacher who
harangued us all on the campus of the University of South Florida. I was
young and stupid at the time and had not yet learned the wisdom of picking
my battles.
So I would argue with him about the text of the Bible, about the
theology behind it, about the morality of Christianity, and everything else.
God only knows what we fought about; it was too inconsequential for me to
remember. But there was one point he made that I will remember for the rest
of my life. In speaking of his hatred of sin he said, “If my child has cancer,
then I hate that cancer. I hate the cancer because it is killing the child I love.”
I have thought about that preacher’s words for about a decade now. But
it was not until reading In Defense of Hatred that this primal sentiment was
finally given a coherent voice and a constructive channel. That breakfast with
this book was a Eureka! moment for me like no other. This is one of those
books that give a framework for something you have felt intuitively all your
life but have never been able to put into words.
For this I am in Mr. Robertson’s debt. We all are.

Augustus Sol Invictus

Orlando, Florida USA
Imbolc MMXVII
 Introduction

“They say you never forget your first love. I can remember my first hate
[…] with real vividness, and the feeling that it was a strong motivator to
write. It wouldn’t be an interesting one to share with you, but I can remember
it very well, and it’s how I learned an important distinction: many people are
fond of saying ‘it’s more important to generate light than heat.’ You may
have heard this wised-up remark made by people. It sounds so judicious,
doesn’t it? Poppycock, of course. I mean there is no other source of light but
heat. Where else could light come from, but heat, if you think about it?
Totally false distinction, just like the people who say that if you’re strongly
motivated, or if you have an investment of that kind in the subject, that you
won’t be detached or objective about it. I think that’s quite untrue too. You
can be in a rage and be perfectly cold and controlled, at least you should aim
to be. I spend most of my time in an extremely bad mood, and I hope it shows,
hoping really just to deprive people of whatever happiness they may be able
to get from living with their illusions.”
—Christopher Hitchens, 1997

A few years ago, the premise of this book was as foreign to me as it

probably is to most people. The concept didn’t occur to me even as the seeds
were being planted in my brain, listening to Christopher Hitchens defend hate
speech at the University of Toronto (you’ll know you are listening to the right
one if he begins, “Fire! Fire, fire, fire...”)1. But eventually the question had to
be asked: why do we seem to unanimously hate hatred? How did we all agree
on that?
The question is not dissimilar from a more specific question: why do
we generally agree that hate speech should be avoided, or even banned?
Because of the similarities and crossovers between the former emotion
(hatred) and the latter action (hate speech), we can expect there to be some
similarities between the justifications for hate speech and the justifications for
hatred itself.
 The question being argued, in Hitchens’ case, was whether freedom of
speech allows for the freedom to hate. The normal arguments were advanced
by the opposition: hate speech begets hateful action, just think of the Jews,
think of the American blacks. Think of the homosexuals. Think of all the
victims. Hitchens’ main argument, distilled into a simple question, was, “who
gets to decide?” Choosing the judge of what counts as “hatred” has always
proven to be an impossible task to complete objectively, and the power of
deciding was often abused by misinformed judges, or even hateful people
themselves.
To add metaphor to analogy, consider the quintessential example of a
proper limit to otherwise free speech. The famous supreme court Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. offered the argument that even the most stringent
protection of the plaintiff’s first amendment rights would not allow him to
falsely shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, on the grounds that it would pose a
clear and present danger to the surrounding public, and therefore ought to be
treated not as speech, but as an action.
The famous “fire in a crowded theater” test comes from a 1919
Supreme Court case—Schenck v United States—regarding the printing and
mailing of pamphlets to eligible draftees, which condemned the draft as a
violation of the rights of citizens, rights which citizens had a duty to defend.
These pamphlets were deemed, by the court, to be a clear and present danger,
as they were printed in a time of war, and potentially adversely threatened the
war effort.
There are three important circumstances to remember about this case.
First, the argument was never literal, but an analogy, and a poor one at
that. Charles Schenck was not in a theater, nor shouting “fire!” nor causing
anything like the “clear and present danger” we imagine in the theatrical
thought experiment. His crime was to have disagreed with America’s
involvement in WWI, distributing pamphlets to young men urging them to
join him in abstaining from the draft. Given that the harms to the United
States, or to anybody else, were uncertain, ambiguous, and suspended
somewhere beyond the moment or the immediate future, it would be
impossible to argue that Schenck’s actions constituted either a clear or a
present danger, let alone both. If America was harmed by a lack of voluntary
soldiers, then surely being in the war constituted an equally valid threat to the
soldiers themselves, a threat worthy of discussion. And the distribution of
pamphlets is itself hardly a fast or decisive action. Present dangers, in theory,
do not allow for free speech because there is not time to reason through the
arguments for and against (like a real fire, in a real theater). So not only was
the Justice’s opinion an argument by analogy, but an argument by bad
analogy. It was, in fact, completely illegitimate by the analogy-maker’s own
standards for it being analogous at all.
Even the true intent of the pamphlets was decided by inferred
insinuation, and not by what was objectively stated in the offending
pamphlets:

It said "Do not submit to intimidation," but in form, at least, confined

itself to peaceful measures such as a petition for the repeal of the act […] Of
course, the document would not have been sent unless it had been intended to
have some effect, and we do not see what effect it could be expected to have
upon persons subject to the draft except to influence them to obstruct the
carrying of it out.

Secondly, the argument was not even an original creation of the

Justice’s. It had actually been lifted without attribution from a less reputable
and experienced prosecutor. If we are reasoning by symbolism, metaphor,
and analogy, then we ought to remember that symbolism works in both
directions. If your foundational argument is a poorly-applied plagiarism—as
the argument against free speech in America is—then perhaps your stance
deserves some reevaluation.
Finally, even Holmes himself was ultimately unconvinced by his own
analogy. He argued for a far more liberal interpretation of the First
Amendment eight months later in his dissent from the Abrams case, saying “I
think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the
expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death,
unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful
and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save
the country.” Despite retaining the “clear and present danger” precedent,
Holmes notably dropped the illustrative metaphor while reversing his opinion
on a nearly identical case. If one of the most famous and respected Justices in
American history can rescind his opinion on the issue, then it may warrant
some reconsideration from us lesser mortals too. The omission of this
historical detail should not escape our notice.
And what if there actually was a fire? As it turns out, WWI was a
perfect example of very literal fire in a very crowded theater (perhaps the
closest the analogy ever came to real-life). It was also a war which, in
hindsight, America could have and probably should have avoided entirely,
but which cost us over 116,000 soldiers, and wounded another 200,000.
Having attempted to awaken America to the danger, Schenck was more
similar to a firefighter than to an ill-intending prankster. In accordance with
the old saying, he was judiciously punished for his good deed.
Looking back, it is easy for us to say that Justice Holmes got the call in
Schenck v. United States backwards. But the wrongness of the decision is not
as much of a problem as the precedent itself, which served to silence
unpatriotic or seditious speech. What appears to be seditious may in fact be
an attempt at protecting the nation, just as the person shouting “Fire!” might,
surprisingly, be alerting theatergoers to a very real fire. And yet the example
lives on in our collective memories: you cannot shout “fire!” in a crowded
theater.
Is sedition itself really so terrible? Our nation would not exist without
some rebellious, freedom-loving—even anarchic—instinct. One could say
our nation’s founding emotion is sedition, that primal feeling of injustice
which prompts revolt, an innate sense that we all have rights and freedoms,
granted to us by nature’s God. When you consider the many paths and
possibilities—all the forks in the road a nation can take when confronted with
creeping assertions by other powers against their liberties—one cannot
actually have freedom without some seditious instinct, and a willingness to
act upon it when the occasion requires it. Yet if asked, most people would
tend to praise the virtues and wonders of freedom without giving that dirty,
grey concrete foundation of sedition its due share of credit.
The arguments against hate speech are all claims to clear and present
harm induced by the hateful speech. However, they are even more vague and
ambiguous than something as visceral as a stampede in a theater. They are, in
other words, worse than a plagiarized bad analogy rescinded by its primary
user.
In a building clearly and presently filling with smoke, speech that might
be attacked as “hateful” can often be more beneficial than kind words. For
this reason, it is better not to dismiss the first firefighter who shows up to a
burning building, literal or figurative.
It is in this seditious spirit that I will now endeavor to defend the one
great evil of the modern age: not hate speech, but hatred itself. I do not want
to cast it as something ugly that we need to learn to live with because it is
necessary or inevitable. Rather, my goal is to show that it is, in fact, an
intrinsic moral good in its own right, and a moral necessity when the time and
situation requires.
Like all emotions, there will be contexts in which it is inappropriate. I
trust that the reader will be intelligent enough to avoid the “not all” fallacy
that has been plaguing modern conversations on social issues: not all of X
does Y, therefore general claims about X doing Y are false. Not all bears will
maul you, but no thinking person is going to walk up and pet one.
So without further ado, I present to you a defense of hatred.

Chris Robertson
January 24, 2017
 I. Hatred: Good or Evil?

“All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they
drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity — and a later, very much
later phase when they wed the spirit, when they "spiritualize" themselves.
Formerly, in view of the element of stupidity in passion, war was declared on
passion itself, its destruction was plotted; all the old moral monsters are
agreed on this: il faut tuer les passions[1]. The most famous formula for this is
to be found in the New Testament, in that Sermon on the Mount, where,
incidentally, things are by no means looked at from a height. There it is said,
for example, with particular reference to sexuality: "If thine eye offend thee,
pluck it out." Fortunately, no Christian acts in accordance with this precept.
Destroying the passions and cravings, merely as a preventive measure
against their stupidity and the unpleasant consequences of this stupidity —
today this itself strikes us as merely another acute form of stupidity.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Hatred as Intrinsic Moral Evil

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness,” said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Nelson Mandela: “No one is born hating another person because of the
color of his skin, or his background or his religion. People learn to hate, and
if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more
naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Attributed to him, among
various others, is the aphorism that hating is like “swallowing poison and
hoping it kills your enemy.”
Mother Teresa followed a similar script: “If you judge someone, you
have no time to love them.” Perhaps judging is not synonymous with “hate,”
but it is certainly a prerequisite, and still frames love not merely as a good,
but as something owed to all.
 And of course, there is Gandhi: “Anger and intolerance are the enemies
of correct understanding.”
Being moral saints of the modern age, these patrons of inclusion and
diversity have set a tone for what our expected relationship with hatred is to
be... or perhaps they are merely a product of that expectation. For us, it makes
no difference. What is important is whether they are right.
We are told that hatred is unproductive, and worse, that it is the source
of the very things we are fighting all around the globe: destruction, violence,
division, and despair. It makes us no better than them. We are told that hatred
is the opposite of love. Compassion, understanding, and empathy are the
solution. War is not the answer. This is the endless message of the media, of
politicians, of school administrators, and worried citizens, eager to show they
are not one of them… “them,” of course, not being known or understood
explicitly but broadly acknowledged as hateful people. Even the Bible—
moral compass and map for many—appears to say that hatred is wrong:
“Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart.”
This belief can be seen on smaller scale, more personal instances too. I
remember growing up hearing “One Tin Soldier” sung to me as a lullaby, the
song from Billie Jack that equated greed with hatred. Of the fairy tales from
Grimm, Aesop, Anderson and the rest, the one I remember most clearly was
Baldwin’s story of Genghis Kahn and the Hawk, in which the king cuts down
his favorite bird with a sword after it saves his life, over a misunderstanding.
The sorry king laments how he has learned a sad lesson: never to act in anger.
It would be wrong to conflate anger and hatred, but we cannot dismiss the
priming of young minds for dismissing an entire emotional reaction as
intrinsically bad. Nor should we ignore the similarity between anger and
hatred, which is obvious even to a pre-adolescent boy.
The tale of the scorpion and the frog, by contrast, went untold:

“A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion
asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asks, "How do I know
you won't sting me?" The scorpion says, "Because if I do, I will die too." The
frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stings the
frog. The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they
both will drown, but has just enough time to gasp "Why?" Replies the
scorpion: "It’s my nature..."

In older times, both stories would have been considered true and
relevant, applicable based on context. The balance would give a more holistic
and true vision of the many sides of human nature and of wisdom. Nowadays,
the choice in emphasis (and omission) attempts to tell young children a
different set of tales, tries to hide the harsher world from children—and
disarm them of the tools necessary to take on that harsh world—rather than
preparing them for it.
Far from being a mere cultural institution, our moral rejection of hatred
is enshrined in various codes, bylaws and government agencies. There are so-
called “hate crimes,” which we are to separate from “crimes.” The FBI
dutifully explains:

A hate crime is a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism

with an added element of bias. For the purposes of collecting statistics, the
FBI has defined a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or
property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race,
religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.”
Hate itself is not a crime—and the FBI is mindful of protecting freedom of
speech and other civil liberties.

For the moment, we still have freedom of speech, however

begrudgingly allowed, and for who knows how much longer. “Hate speech”
is illegal in many European countries, and just within the last few months (as
I write this in August, 2016), police have raided the homes of ordinary
citizens for the horrendous crime of criticizing European immigration policy
on Facebook. But speech is not the primary issue here; it is merely an
expression of the problem.
Hatred bears the dubious honor of being the only emotion which large
numbers of people around the world seem bent upon making illegal. If you
ever believed Orwellian “thought-crime” to be (at the least) difficult to
implement, imagine feel-crime for experiencing the wrong emotions.
At universities, businesses, clubs and groups of all sorts, one can be
expelled for anything that is perceived to be motivated by hate. At the college
I attended in Bellevue, Washington, for instance, “bias incidents” are against
student policy, and are grounds for disciplinary action, potentially including
expulsion. The school defines it as “conduct, speech, or behavior motivated
by prejudice or a bias toward another person that does not rise to the level of
a crime.”
That’s right; something that “does not rise to the level of a crime” can
functionally be treated as one, in the pseudo-judicious eyes of administrators
and academic disciplinary boards. I know this because the school distributes
pamphlets which say so, entitled “Do not let the haters win.” Bias itself is
considered bad. “Biased news,” “biased grading,” “biased results,” all carry a
heavy negative connotation of ethical wrongdoing, just barely short of
illegality.
The big problems we used to discuss at schools—on civics,
engineering, physics or philosophy—are no longer the most important
subjects. Now the primary directive of every college is the eradication of a
universal emotion and expression: hatred.
The problem of hatred is not viewed as universal, however. They seem
to be mostly concerned (perhaps only concerned) with the hatred coming
from whites, males, heterosexuals, conservatives, and Christians. Being four
out of these five, I speak as much from experience as from observation.
Preference, or “bias,” is what anti-hate activists are really challenging
on moral grounds. After all, how can you hate something without a
preference? Hatred cannot be attacked without also attacking the concept of
preference, because hatred only comes from a confrontation between
something you prefer and oppositional forces in the world.
But if you attack preference, does not love itself also come under fire?
Love is an act of elevating one thing above others, and if you attack hatred
via preference, then love is the collateral damage. The preferences of people
that anti-hate activists oppose are the initial targets, but all preferences will
eventually fall to this moral attack, including those of the anti-haters
themselves.
The activists I refer to go by many names: “progressives,”
“regressives,” “cuckservatives,” and “social justice warriors” all might fit
under this category. But their work is often done by more ordinary people,
people who are not “activists” and who might describe themselves as
“liberal” or “conservative,” but who act as if the most important part of life is
to get along with other people. They are agreeable to a fault, but they do not
stop there; they will get mad at you if you are not also agreeable to a fault.
My argument is not that the negative side-effects of hatred are over-
stated. They are over-stated, but that misses the greater moral deception.
Hatred is not evil at all; it is a moral good. It is the proper emotion to act on
when the situation requires it, because it can be a powerful weapon to protect
the people, places, objects, and ideas that you love, including yourself.
Failing to act upon it, in fact, is a betrayal of love, and failing to feel it at all
is a moral shortcoming that ultimately makes you unloveable.
But before going further, let me clarify exactly what I’m talking about
when we refer to the emotion called “hatred.”

Defining Hatred

The Oxford English Dictionary defines hatred as “intense or passionate

dislike.” This is a useful shorthand definition, but there is no precision or
context, and the description is broad. My passionate dislike of asparagus is
not the kind emotion that Mandela, or King, or anyone is talking about when
they explain the evils of hatred.
Merriam-Webster is a bit better: “intense hostility and aversion usually
deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.” Now there is context, a cause,
but this definition is still too broad. Hostility from fear is short-lived, and is
essentially an extension of fear itself. It is not the unique sensation we
normally think of when we imagine “hatred,” and neither is hostility from
injury. This we usually call “anger,” and it is distinct from hatred because it
has a moral dimension, justifying itself by the democratic opinion of others.
It is less intense, less permanent, and despite its reputation, rarely causes
violence or brutality on the scale that hatred can.
The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology gets extremely precise in its
symptomatic description, calling hatred a “deep, enduring, intense emotion
expressing animosity, anger, and hostility towards a person, group, or
object.” Penguin disregards context, but captures the difference in depth
between hate and something like anger or annoyance.
All of these definitions describe the symptoms of hatred, and one gives
us a glimpse of a source, but none of these truly capture its nature sufficiently
for the purpose of moral exploration.
Note that all three of these definitions use the word “intense.” Aside
from Merriam-Webster, they all miss context, and only Penguin gives us
precision. Without grasping the full nature of hatred, we cannot make useful
moral judgments about it. We need something better.
Freud defined hatred as an ego state that seeks the destruction of the
source of its unhappiness. Here we have a cause, and a desired resolution.
Expressions of intense animosity and hostility are natural if something is
making us unhappy. It would be normal for us to want to stop whatever it is
that is doing it, and if there is no way to get away from this animus, or to
persuade it, or to stop it peacefully, then it is perfectly logical to destroy it,
particularly if “unhappiness” might include the impending or threatened
death of our loved ones or ourselves. “Live and let live” is nice, but only if
they are going to keep their side of the bargain.
But hatred does not necessarily mean you want to destroy what you
hate. When Achilles withdrew from the attack on Troy, or when Galt
shrugged the world and withdrew from society, they were not seeking
destruction, though they were certainly acting out of hatred. Destruction is
only one possible expression. You might want to keep the object of hate at a
distance, or to merely get away from it yourself. You can even imagine a
situation where you might want it to survive and to succeed, to better show
others why it is worth hating and staying away from. And for many, calling
hatred “an ego state” begs the moral judgment of the emotion.
“Ego” has become a derogative term for an aspect of the self, packed
full of connotations about poor introspection and short-sighted selfishness. It
leaves no room to account for hatred on behalf of a loved one or a stranger. It
precludes the possibility of deep opposition of principle, and insinuates mere
personal preference of a more superficial kind.
A better and more helpful way of thinking about it can be found by
exploring the nature of two other separate but related emotions: anger and
disgust.

Disgust is among the most powerful emotions we have, and one of the
easiest to elicit. And the reason disgust is so powerful is because it is so
valuable. “Just like fear offers us protective benefits, disgust seems to do the
same thing,” says Cornell Associate Professor of Psychology, David Pizarro,
“except for what disgust does is keeps us away not from things that might eat
us, or heights, but rather things that might poison us, or give us disease and
make us sick.” In other words, it is our involuntary reaction to things that
might harm us. Feces, vomit, blood, rotten food, spiders, maggots, all of these
things are sources of harm, or indicators of harm nearby.
The feeling of revulsion towards these things that compels us to avoid
them is a survival instinct that keeps us safe. Hatred has a similar feeling to it,
being a kind of revulsion. But when we are “disgusted” by a dead animal, we
do not “hate” it. If something is not choosing to act against us, there is no
usefulness in hating it, even if it poses a danger to us. Hatred cannot deter or
intimidate a cow pie, nor would we need to work ourselves to a heightened
readiness for violence and brutality in order to dispose of a puddle of last
night’s undercooked chicken lasagna. A pure revulsion is sufficient to keep
us safe from these things. Hatred, and anger, are more complex because they
deal with more complex causes.
Unlike disgust, anger is always being directed towards a conscious
mind. While we may describe being “angry” at a malfunctioning washing
machine, we are usually just being sloppy with our language, when we really
mean to say “annoyed” or “frustrated.” When a person is difficult to work
with, or bothers us in some way but is not wronging us, they might be
“irritating,” or “obnoxious.” But true anger is reserved for when we are
wronged, and only conscious minds can do that.
 Anger is always directed at people and because of this, is always
marked by its outward expression: indignation at an injustice. It is an appeal
to those around you that some wrong has been committed against you, and
some sort of compensation is owed. Fundamentally, anger is about fairness,
and fairness can only be achieved by showing others that something that just
happened is not fair.
Now, appeals to fairness depend on other people sharing your view of
what is fair, or at least accounting for your opinion in their own. What
happens if the unfairness was not accidental or incidental, but intended?
What do you call the feeling you experience when you understand that your
unhappiness is not a misunderstanding, not an accident, but a matter of the
very nature of another person? What is it when you recognize that you will
never convince the person that is causing your unhappiness that they are in
the wrong? What if the nature of the person, or people, is not just unfair, but
is dangerous to you?
This is both the source and the nature of hatred—disgust towards mind.
Our definition of hatred, then, is as follows: it is the feeling of recognizing
fundamental opposition of nature, unconstrained by time or circumstance as
with a simple grievance or general danger.
The definition of hatred as disgust towards a conscious mind is useful
for three reasons:

1.) It encapsulates what people generally mean when they say “I hate
____.”
2.) It seats the word in the context of its psychological origins, making
it easier to understand holistically than mere descriptions would, and as a
result, easier to judge accurately when we place it under the microscope of
game theory, evolution, ethics, and philosophy.
3.) It is precisely the emotion that people like Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr., Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and the anti-hatred culture are referring
to when they expound upon the evils of hatred.
 We see the essence of hate perfectly captured in literature when
Achilles tells Hector: “Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no
covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one
mind, but hate each other out and out and through. Therefore there can be no
understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between
us, till one or other shall fall and glut grim Mars with his life’s blood.”
Because of whose side you are on, what you have done to my cousin, to
my men, my friends, and what I know you will continue to do unless I stop
you, there is no point in talking. If we were to talk, our words would
themselves be swords, attempting to weaken or destroy each other. We are
enemies.

Like every other definition of “hatred,” this one might sound a little
similar to “fear.” It feels like there might be some overlap. And as a result,
many people have found it convenient to confuse hatred and fear, even
overtly conflating the two. Hatred of gays is “homophobia,” dislike and
distrust of foreigners is “xenophobia,” etc. A more sophisticated reader may
ask why anger and fear were not combined, rather than anger and disgust. At
first, this seems more logical and helpful, since the source of hatred is very
often the source of fear—a sentient threat—while disgust is triggered by
inanimate contaminants.
But they are threats experienced over different periods of time. Fear
wholly and completely exists in the moment. Hatred can only be felt when
someone recognizes that the conflict is in some way eternal, and will not pass
with time. This is why anger and fear cannot be experienced simultaneously.
Robert Plutchik puts anger and fear on opposite sides of his wheel of
emotions, and the degree to which you experience the one, you cannot
experience the other, just as you cannot simultaneously experience sadness
and joy, interest and distraction, disgust and trust, surprise and anticipation.
What inspires fear can later transform into hatred, but only once the feeling of
fear dies away.
Hatred expressed as intimidation, or a call to combat, can easily become
an act of provocation if the other side calls your bluff. Put another way,
manifest hatred requires courage. If someone is fearful, acting with hate
would not be acting on that fear, but overcoming it.
This difference is reflected further in how these separate emotions
appear in behavior. Like disgust, fear only drives us to action (usually,
“run!”). There is no showmanship in fear. We might even be ashamed if we
show that we are afraid. Hatred, like anger, has an expressive side. Anger
says “listen to me!” It is an appeal to the natural social instincts towards
justice and fairness that we all share. Hatred, by contrast, says “fear me,” if it
says anything. When hatred is most powerful, we do not want to show it at
all; when fear is most powerful, we cannot help but show it, and often do not
care that we do. Fear is unthinking and spontaneous, which is perhaps why
we do not like to admit that we are scared. It might also be why the anti-
haters like to conflate hate and fear: it makes hate out to be uninformed and
non-rational, as we imagine fear to be.
Some may object to my definition’s target, saying that you actually can
“hate” an idea, or an object, or a place. I think this is merely hyperbole, and
in many cases, just a thin cover for cowardice. An idea cannot harm you
without people acting upon it, and ideas are the product of people anyway.
Saying that you hate an idea is merely an evasion from saying you hate the
people who create or implement the idea. Indeed, you wouldn’t even be
aware of the idea unless someone was expressing it to you, by word or
action. Because ideas are never the ones acting against you, hating an idea is
as useful as being angry at the washing machine. I promise you, the machine
will not recognize the injustice, and the idea will not fear you.
As for objects and places, “caution” and “dislike” are not synonymous
with “hatred,” in our experience of the feelings or in how we act upon them.
This is because there is no mind behind objects and places. Perhaps someone
might genuinely feel “hate” towards some inanimate object, but we are no
more obliged to take them seriously than we would if they were angry.
A cynical reader might think this definition conveniently primes people
to see hatred as something that might be beneficial. I do not ordinarily debate
cynics, and I especially dislike dealing with criticisms that do not address
whether something is true or false (the philosopher Stefan Molyneux
habitually labels these kinds of points “not an argument”). But in case you
feel compelled to defend this definition from mind-readers, who want to
begin this debate on the assumption that hatred is not beneficial in some way,
you can give them the following analogy:
One of the most persistent myths in pop-psychology is that “we only
use 10% of our brain.” We actually use 100% of our brain. What we do not
use deteriorates, just like our unused muscles, and then other parts of our
brain take over the underused area. One of the prominent theories explaining
the phenomenon of “phantom limb”—in which amputees feel sensation on
their missing body part—is that when one part of the brain takes over the
unused sections that once monitored sensation in the amputated limb, some
neurons have not fully changed over. When the amputee is touched on their
left foot, for example, it might feel as though they are being touched on their
departed left-hand, because the part of their brain responsible for their foot
has taken over where the neurons for the unused hand once were. Efficiency
is the name of the game, because energy is literally the stuff of life, and any
unnecessary use of energy make the challenges of living that much more
difficult.
Evolution is a ruthless pruner, and hatred takes energy. We all know the
feeling of exhaustion after getting particularly angry at a news story, or a
stressful encounter with a rival at school or work, once the adrenaline dies
down. Hatred formed too quickly and with poor information can be costly, in
money, dignity, and freedom. If hatred was an evil emotion, with all these
detriments and no counterbalancing benefits, then why is it here? Why the
high expenditure of energy if hate is bad? To say that hatred is imprudent
would be to claim that all the hundreds of thousands of years spent forging
our finely tuned social instincts and skills went wildly wrong from the
beginning, and to claim it is immoral would, by the same token, separate
morality from our survival.
Now that civilization has advanced, is hatred still a viable emotion to
entertain and value? Surely, liberal democracy and the rule of law have
rendered hatred not only unnecessary, but an undesirable and dangerous facet
of the human psyche. Better to train people out of it, or if need be, perhaps
even genetically prune this character quality away from the species.
Such positions seem to be held explicitly by many of the visionary
architects of some future utopian society, and are tacitly held by a
surprisingly high number of lay people. Yet to view civilization as a
justification for the elimination of hatred is to put the proverbial cart before
the horse. If civilization is of any use at all, it is because it is a positive,
adaptive environment for human beings to thrive in, and human beings have
hatred built into them. The transhumanist position that this part of human
nature should be sliced off views the human psyche as a compartmentalized
structure. We do not know very much about the human brain, and the more
we learn, the more we realize how little we know, but the interconnected
nature of many of our neural systems is very nearly concrete proof that
human beings are not compartmentalized collections of emotions, from
which one or two can be easily or simply removed. As I hope to show in this
book, hatred is quite inextricably entangled with many things of which we
should never, ever let go.
The human being, and not civilization, is the end goal. Whether
civilization, or democracy, or any other social institution is the proper means
for human preservation and flourishing is the question. The question cannot
be “is the human being the best means for the preservation of civilization?”
If hatred truly is incompatible with civilization, and if civilization is—
as it is imagined in the minds of those who advocate it over human nature
itself—the best thing for the preservation and flourishing of humanity, then
we would do better to trust evolution to naturally trim away those whom
civilized society finds to be maladaptive in their hatefulness, rather than
taking proactive measures. After all, evolution is far more trustworthy than
the humans who attempt to “help it along,” humans who are almost
universally wrong about what the future will require of man, and of how man
works as it pertains to the changes they seek to implement.
Needless to say, this is almost never their proposed course of action.
The question then is not whether hate is beneficial, but when. When is
hatred justified? When is it dangerous? How finely calibrated should our
hate-response be, and how fast should it accelerate from 0-60? These
questions require an accurate, precise, and complete definition of “hate” to
answer. The definition of hate as “disgust towards mind” does not answer
these questions by itself. But it does make attempting to answer the question
possible, in a way that Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Penguin, and even Freud,
do not.

Is Hatred Really Inevitable?

Before moving on, let me address the Randian Objectivist and pacifist
critics, who believe that at the bottom of things, all existential opposition of
this hateful kind is an illusion—not the product of real conflicts of interest,
but simple failures of communication. Or perhaps failures of understanding
about what your best interest really is. To these people, there are no Homeric
lions and men, no wolves and lambs struggling in intractable opposition, just
human beings trying to live and get along; all striving towards basically the
same goals. With this view, hatred is irrational.
Although this perspective appears to hold true with most strangers, I do
not believe this viewpoint is helpful when encountering the occasional
exceptions. Without the aid of large governments, the exceptions might very
well be the rule. It is easy to imagine your success in getting along with many
could be extended to getting along with everyone. Maybe one day it could be,
but in the course of a single lifetime, you are not going to be able to share the
light of reason with everyone. History shows us that such crusaders are often
the biggest dangers, and not the answer to the dangers they thought they
could solve. One day we might all get along in love and peace and harmony,
but we would do better to live assuming that people will go on doing what
they have always done.
People have always lived in different groups, pursuing different
interests that come from a combination of resource scarcity and from
differing beliefs about what is good and bad. These differences, as we shall
see, define who you are as an individual. So long as people love themselves,
resources will matter, and will be worth fighting over in a world where there
is not enough to go around. And so long as people’s sense of well-being,
security, and success are affected by the collective action of groups,
disagreements arising from imperfect knowledge will cause opposition
between people.
We can deal with the ethics of a post-scarcity, post-ignorance society
when we get there. But “education” has not shown itself to be the solution, all
platitudes to the contrary. And even if we could move to a post-scarcity
world with resources like food and shelter, that would only shift the variables
without eliminating demand for other limited resources. How will the future
economy account for any given man’s demand—in the market sense—for
attractive women generally, let alone that particular attractive woman?
Limited resources naturally result in conflicting interests, whether it is
fighting over land, power within a group, or the heart of a woman.
There has always been competition and differences of opinion between
people, as there will be for the foreseeable future. What this means is that
contrary to American folk-wisdom, there are no sheepdogs: only wolves and
sheep. Lt Col Dave Grossman speaks of these three classes of people in his
classic book On Killing, describing the peaceful, salt-of-the-earth people as
“sheep,” who are sometimes preyed upon by psychopaths, religious zealots,
and mindless killers: the wolves. Appearing similarly to the wolf, but
protecting good people, is the sheepdog. It is a romantic view, and pastoral to
boot.
Between flocks, however, another man’s sheepdog will look, and act,
like a wolf, at least in the eyes of the next flock.
To stretch the analogy, if all of these sheep were communists,
peacefully sharing the grass on a five-year grazing plan, where no one starved
and all were happy, then the sheepdogs would be exactly as we imagine
them. But if you have two flocks competing for one field, then one side’s
sheepdogs are just wolves by another name. Competition and intractable
differences make “right” and “wrong” as much a matter of loyalty as any
other moral standard.
Does this mean there are no universal “true” wolves? Of course not. But
the vast majority of the people who the sheepdogs kill in wars, or even that
cops kill from gangs, and justify in their minds as “wolves,” are really
sheepdogs to another flock.
It is true that libertarian ideals of treaties and trades are possible, and
are the goal most of the time. But these are not possible when mutually
exclusive groups intermingle, or even come within proximity to each other. It
is dangerous and stupid to pretend otherwise. Our moral beliefs ought to
dwell in the reality that is, not the reality that some people would like to bring
about sometime in the next millennium. Within these conflicts between
groups, some of them will be differences of opinion, or conflicts of interest,
that you will not be able to change by persuasion.
Put plainly, there will be people who gain from destroying you, and
who either cannot or will not reason with you. To reject the morality of
responding with hatred—disgust towards mind—is to reject the validity of
your own existence.

“Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.”

—William Shakespeare, King Henry V

There is more to morality than “what is beneficial to me and mine,” and

the fact that hatred may be beneficial does not establish hatred as moral. But
the origins, nature, and usefulness of the emotion gives us reason to suspect
that it can be moral.
By comparison, what is the support for the argument that hatred is a bad
and evil emotion? “History?” “Racism?”
It is probable—almost certain, in fact—that you would not be here
today, reading this moral defense of your ancestors, if one of them had not
acted on violent hatred against a dangerous enemy. Perhaps those enemies
hated your ancestors because of their race. One day, your great-great-
grandchild may think similar, contemplative thoughts about you, but only if
they are alive to think them.
 II. The Nature of Hate

“What would you say, if I should let you speak? Villains, for shame you
could not beg for grace. Hark, wretches! How I mean to martyr you.”
—William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

The Face of Hatred

So what does disgust towards mind look like?

Titus Andronicus is a demonstration of one of hatred’s more emphatic
forms. In this Shakespearean tragedy of injustice and vengeance, Andronicus
is a valiant and patriotic Roman tribune, with the competence of the ideal
patrician, but without the pathological ambition that so often characterized
that social strata. In the war with the Goths immediately preceding the story,
we are told that he had lost twenty-one of his twenty-five sons, and yet he
didn’t seek any higher office for himself, but judiciously negotiated to
maintain the peace between others vying to be the next Emperor.
In among the captives from the Goths, however, were the queen—
Tamora—and her sons. As a religious sacrifice for the twenty-one lost sons,
Titus kills one of Tamora’s sons, Alarbus. Tamora and her remaining two
sons—Demetrius and Chiron—spend the middle portion of the play avenging
their dead brother.
There was no malice in the sacrifice of Alarbus, and the three remaining
Goths were in fact elevated to relatively high status by the remaining
Romans. But Tamora’s heart is filled with the desire for vengeful anger,
leading to the death and exile of Titus Andronicus’ other sons, the amputation
of his hand, and the rape and mutilation of his daughter, Lavinia. Whereas the
sacrificial murder or Alarbus was a one-time injustice against Tamora, the
directed actions of Demetrius, Chiron, and the serpentine Moor, Aaron, all
represent an ongoing and obsessive drive to the destruction of Titus
Andronicus; retribution far exceeding the perceived crime, and with no
visible end in sight. That is why, when Titus finally perceived their angle, he
reacted with such brutal hatred, killing Chiron and Demetrius, and then
feeding them to their mother Tamora:

Here stands the spring whom you have stain'd with mud,
This goodly summer with your winter mix'd.
You kill'd her husband, and for that vile fault
Two of her brothers were condemn'd to death,
My hand cut off and made a merry jest;
Both her sweet hands, her tongue, and that more dear
Than hands or tongue, her spotless chastity,
Inhuman traitors, you constrain'd and forced.
What would you say, if I should let you speak?
Villains, for shame you could not beg for grace.
Hark, wretches! how I mean to martyr you.
This one hand yet is left to cut your throats,
Whilst that Lavinia 'tween her stumps doth hold
The basin that receives your guilty blood.
You know your mother means to feast with me,
And calls herself Revenge, and thinks me mad:
Hark, villains! I will grind your bones to dust
And with your blood and it I'll make a paste,
And of the paste a coffin I will rear
And make two pasties of your shameful heads,
And bid that strumpet, your unhallow'd dam,
 Like to the earth swallow her own increase.
This is the feast that I have bid her to,
And this the banquet she shall surfeit on;
For worse than Philomel you used my daughter,
And worse than Progne I will be revenged:
And now prepare your throats. Lavinia, come,

Hate induced Titus to act with deceit, violence and cruelty. And it can
do that to us as well: given what was done to his sons, his daughter, and
himself, it is hard not to sympathize with Titus, and to silently cheer him on
as he achieves his vengeance. Yes, we might say that he went too far. We
might even believe ourselves. But it is hard not to be thankful, deep down,
that some people are so vicious in their vengeance, because we know that
other people will be a little bit more reticent to go about destroying our lives
and our families. If you are a sociopath, you might want to take advantage of
people and toss them away at will, but it is hard to know who will roll over
and die, and who will snap and feed your children to you.
Better play it safe.
Hatred is about movement or violence. It can be expressed as a threat,
designed to intimidate others to move or stay away, or it can be directly as an
action. Sometimes, it can be both simultaneously. When Vlad Dracul III of
Wallachia lined the road into Romania with the impaled corpses of 20,000
Turks, the Ottoman general Mehmed II—who had conquered Constantinople
—decided not to push further towards Targoviste, Vlad’s capital city. “Vlad
the Impaler,” as he is known today, spent six years of his childhood as a
resentful hostage of the Turks. His terrifying cruelty served both to destroy
those who had captured and harmed him, and to powerfully deter others who
might think of doing the same.
Clearly, this does not mean that all violence, cruelty, and aggression
comes from hatred. Psychosis, anger, low self-control, and other disorders
can induce some people to act in ways that seem foreign—inhuman—to more
ordinary people. Vlad the Impaler himself was almost certainly a sadist of the
most ruthless kind.
But that is just the point: most people are not delusional, sadistic, or
psychotic. Most people need hatred to summon up the will to act with
violence or brutality, even if their survival or the survival of their loved ones
depend on it. They lack the requisite training or sociopathy to simply take
someone’s life, let alone opposing an enemy who seeks your destruction into
the foreseeable future. Remember, we are not merely talking about the fight-
or-flight flurry of self-defense when we talk about hatred.
By the same token that not all violence and cruelty is the result of
hatred, neither does all hatred result in violence and cruelty. There are many
other varieties, and other forms include intimidation, or if action feels
impossible or the hatred is not very strong, simple resentment. One of the
most common and basic one is avoidance. Just like with disgust, if something
is hateful to you, you stay away from it. These varieties—especially as they
fall into “justified” and “unjustified” hatred—will be discussed more in
chapter six.
Like disgust, and like anger, there is a face for hatred. But that face is
not the rage of anger, or the grimace of disgust. Nor is it the asymmetric
smile of contempt, or the glower of ordinary resentment.
The face of deepest hatred is totally blank and expressionless.

The Physiology of Hatred

On the subject of disgust, if hatred is a mixture of disgust and anger,

why does not hatred feel much like disgust? Disgust feels instinctive,
irrepressible, and immediate. It makes our stomach flip, and turns our head
and body away seemingly without our brain having any say on the matter.
Hatred does not feel much like anger either. While disgust and anger are
useful in explaining the function of hatred, the differences in cause and
outcome between these emotions mean that they will have different effects on
the body. To better understand the feeling of hatred, we should first look into
the physiology of what hatred is preparing us for: combat.
 In his book On Combat, Dave Grossman describes the different stages
of combat readiness on a scale from white to black. White refers to the
ordinary, unprepared stage of ordinary life, perhaps sleeping, or eating cereal.
Yellow is next, which symbolizes a heightened state of awareness and mental
preparedness. Red stage is characterized by accelerated heart rate and
heightened blood pressure, allowing you to lift heavier objects, run faster,
and hit harder, but at the cost of fine motor skills, some vision, and higher
mental processes. You fall back on instinct and training, what you have
programmed yourself to do, or what nature has programmed you to do.
Beyond Red is Black, where the body begins to shut down completely from
stress.
When you are disgusted, no severe change in state is required. You just
need to get away from whatever it is that might contaminate or poison you.
You might feel your stomach churn, in case you need to vomit, but this is not
function designed to deal with an external threat.
Like disgust, anger does not prepare us for serious violence. We may
feel more inclined towards aggression, but people have used violence to settle
their differences since time immemorial. These fights are not over
irreconcilable disputes but slights and violations that are often forgotten
within a few years, if not a few weeks. The intent is not serious injury or
death. If someone says something false and damaging about you, then you
might feel yourself ready to punch them in the face, but completely
unprepared to draw a knife up their torso or smash their head in with an axe.
You might even be horrified by the idea.
Hatred is designed to prepare you for that greater escalation. True
violence—not the posturing and hierarchy-establishing ritual violence of
duels—has no room for restraint or mercy. Mercy can come after the battle, if
it is prudent in the long run, but winning comes first.
Winning means preparing your body for blows and injury without
incapacitating yourself. Vasoconstriction will direct blood away from your
extremities and to your vital organs, to better keep the essentials full of
oxygen for performance, and to keep blood away from the areas most likely
to be hit. Feeling “one’s blood run cold” with fear is to quite literally feel the
blood drain away from potential targets.
 But hatred is not fear. Fear delivers us immediately to what Grossman
calls condition Gray, the point between Red and Black that puts us at optimal
physical performance, but with little to no conscious control of our bodies.
Sometimes, we can even lose subconscious control of our bodies. Condition
Gray is often where people lose bladder control. Fear is a temporal response,
reacting to a threat in the moment with physiological changes that benefit us
in the moment.
Hatred is not so time-constrained. It seeks to position us in condition
Yellow, where we are physically prepared, but can also think. Hatred is cool
and alert; it remembers, processes, scans, and strategizes. You might feel
your “blood run cold,” in moments of deep hatred, but unlike fear, you will
probably have the self-awareness to notice as it is happening, and to feel the
incredible power behind hatred. If the hate is abstract, then in it is place we
feel a moral or social superiority, and anticipation of the more intellectual
battle we might face. In either case, hatred feels good. We’ll discuss the
dangers of this later in chapters six and seven.

In short, hate is a weapon of the mind: first a deterrent, then a

physiological lever, preparing your body for combat, and your mind for
destroying. If you cannot get away from what you hate, as disgust does with
inanimate objects, hate empowers us to persuade the dangerous person to
move themselves. Either the outward expression of hatred deters the
dangerous person, or the feeling itself permits us to act violently, and by
setting an example, hopefully prevents other, similar conflicts in the future
with anyone who remembers your power and cruelty.
 III. Beyond the Self

“We need other people to achieve individuality. For others to play this
role for me, they have to be available to me in an unmediated way, not via a
representation that is tailored to my psychic comfort. And conversely, I would
have to make myself available to them in a way that puts myself at risk, not
shying from a confrontation between different evaluative outlooks. For it is
through such confrontations that we are pulled out of our own heads and
forced to justify ourselves. In doing so, we may revise our take on things. The
deepening of our understanding, and our affections, requires partners in
triangulation: other people as other people, in relation to whom we may
achieve an earned individuality of outlook.”
—Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

The Foundation of Identity in Objects and Others

So far, I have described hatred in terms of biological self-interest. But

anyone observing hatred in action will see that not all expressions of hatred
are selfish. In fact, most of them are not, especially when they are intensely
personal. People become violently angry, or turn cold and vengeful towards
another person or group, over affronts that do not directly involve
themselves. This is because our identities as individuals do not lie solely
within our physical bodies.
While the materialist may take this as a biological, literal claim, and roll
their eyes at this new-age-sounding talk, the concept of viewing people,
places, ideas, and objects outside of your body as a very real part of you is a
perfectly pragmatic perspective. It is not even a particularly spiritual one.
For example, picture a neolithic hunter-gatherer. He might rely upon his
spear to fend off attackers, to hunt game, and to support himself on rocky
trails or in deep rivers. Without his spear, his very survival would be made
more tenuous. If someone were to take away his spear, they may as well be
cutting off his hand. It is a tool designed to help him succeed in his life, and
attacking or removing that tool directly undermines his odds of thriving, or
even surviving. For all intents and purposes, it follows that the spear is a
functional extension of his body, of his will.
In principle, places and objects become a part of who we are no less
than our digits and limbs. The body is a universal tool, because we are all
born with one. The dissolved and forgotten sensation of learning to use our
fingers, now replaced by them simply do what is wanted without thinking, is
not actually a function of the limb being intrinsically a part of “us.” If it were
otherwise, the removal of a few digits ought to make us a fundamentally
different person.
Aside from this universality, however, there is no obvious reason we
can distinguish the various parts of the body from any other tool we may use
to accomplish our desires. The only meaningful difference is that a man can
forget his spear, drop his wrench, or crash his car much more easily than he
can temporarily misplace a finger.
To the master marksman, his gun does not feel like a tool, but like a
part of himself. To an experienced truck driver, the gearshift, the sound of the
engine, and even the texture of the road are not “interpreted through the
machinery,” but felt by the driver himself. These tools of the trade influence
what we do, and how we do it, by extending the range of our sensory
experience. As one becomes more intimately connected with a given object—
from a tool to my tool—that connection transcends what is physical to what is
metaphysically a part of the craftsman while he works. Most of us tasted this
kind of connection when we became proficient operators of spoons, pencils,
and automobiles. At one time, the challenge of using the tool was greater than
the value gained by its use. But eventually, we all eat our soup, write our
sentences, and arrive to work on time without giving a passing thought to the
mechanics of operation, because our focus is on the end goal, the task to be
completed, not to be performed.
Though we all may wish we had a letter opener handy at the precise
moment that we needed one, and may curse its inconvenient absence, few of
us are as deeply sorrowed as the hunter who has lost his spear over a cliff.
Most of the things we use in day-to-day life are expendable and easily
replaceable. We have no Neolithic connection to the things we can easily get
elsewhere and do not rely upon to survive.
Even in this modern age, some people still have this connection, and we
see it because it is not normal. There is something almost mystical about the
connections some people can forge with their equipment when their lives do
rely upon the integrity of the tools of their trade, and this is especially true in
warrior cultures. The Marine’s rifle, the Samurai’s sword, the Spartan’s
shield, all of these are culturally imbued with a symbolic energy and
significance due to them being functional extensions of the wielder. Their
owners and wielders spent hours upon hours training with these weapons, and
knew them better than they knew most people, maybe even better than they
knew themselves. Perhaps this is why the passing down of weapons from one
generation of warrior to the next is traditionally an event of such reverence: it
is a literal transference of a part of you to someone else, a veritable organ
donation. And in this transference, a binding of identity takes place between
the participants.
Thomas Harris captured a facet of this in Hannibal:

There is much tradition and mystique in the bequest of personal

weapons to a surviving comrade in arms. It has to do with a continuation of
values past individual mortality. People living in a time made safe for them
by others may find this difficult to understand.

What we often fail to notice, because of its ubiquity, is that we all have
this relationship with other people. Here, more than with objects, they are
direct participants in our coherent identity. These are bonds that require no
sacred warrior-cult rituals to establish, though often they are strengthened by
such rituals. The biggest factor in who we are is not geography or
technology: it is other people.
In The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford argues that a great
mistake of the enlightenment philosophers was to define the human outside
the realm of reality, apart from the context and even the physics of where we
were born, raised, and lived. This was a new idea, engineered to preserve the
concept of “free will” from philosophical attacks, but it succeeded by
isolating the human identity from its traditional sources. Cooperation and the
division of labor are methods humans have always used to survive difficult
climates, defend ourselves, feed ourselves, and—most importantly—replicate
ourselves. Children are portions of us, and siblings, cousins, nieces and
nephews carry some small part of us with them too.
The people around us, just like objects and places, make us into who we
are. Nearly every person alive has one particular teacher who made a lasting
impression on us when we were younger. A lifetime of lasting impressions,
of sage advice at critical junctures, of kept promises and fulfilled
expectations, are the foundations of our personal growth and character
development. The people with virtue—intelligence, skill, empathy,
compassion, courage, curiosity, beauty, strength, loyalty and wisdom—make
our lives better. They can be trusted to help us when we need help, to watch
our back, to teach us, to entertain us, and in general, to empower us in living
enjoyable, successful lives.
For most of us, spending time with these people can feel like the very
reason for living. Other people are a basic human need as important as food,
sleep and sunshine. Interrogators would not use isolation as a form of torture,
nor would prison guards use it as punishment, were this not the case. The
catastrophic consequences of social neglect on developing children are well
documented. But growing up does not shed the psychological and survival
need we have to be near others. As we age, more is expected of us in return
for companionship, and longer periods of relative isolation are no longer
fatal, but human contact nevertheless remains an essential need.
The good people in your life are a part of your identity. They may be
annoying and irritating at times, and there will always be disagreements, but
when you consider the sacrifices people make to help and to be around
others, we must view others as a bodily staple, as necessary as sleep or
sunshine.

Orienting Values by Identity, and Identifying Love and Hatred by

Values
 Not all change to your life is bad. In fact, most people, places, objects,
and ideas do not really impact your life at all. They’re not a part of it, and
they do not really assist you in your own personal goals. But some number of
these things matter, and a small number matter a lot. They assist you in
moving towards the goals in your life, whether it is security, a happy family,
or merely the companionship of other people. Without direction, without an
object of love whose interest is worth caring about, nothing is bad. Nothing is
an attack. Without an object of care, you become like the invincible Dr.
Manhattan from Alan Moore’s Watchmen, disconnected from everything.
Caring about nothing. Outcomes do not matter, because there is no desired
goal which different outcomes might move you closer to or further from.
In the words of Jack Donovan, “identity is everything that matters.” It is
the context, the why. Without identity, we would have no answer to the
Cheshire cat asking Alice where she wants to go. As you become part of a
coherent identity, all the elements of that identity become who you are.
When other people, places, things, and ideas are extensions of yourself,
then they are more important than other things, just as your own life is more
important than the lives of strangers. Opposition and aggression against those
people, places, things, and ideas becomes an attack against you, just as an
attack on the spear of the Neolithic hunter is an attack on the man himself.
Again, not all change is an attack. Sometimes, change can be an
improvement. You can swap your wooden spear for carbon-fiber. Or
someone might hand you a rifle. But too often, the person promising
improvements is hacking your spear in half and saying that you’ll be better
off without it. You’ll often catch them gloating over their shoulder to their
people about how they disarmed you, how stupid you were to believe them.
We all know the type, and know the difference between change sincerely
attempted for the better, and attacks deceitfully re-framed as change that will
“be better for everyone.”
Since love is the foundation of the positive elements of our identity—
the things we seek out in the construction of ourselves—it is clear that hatred
and love are not opposites. They are two expressions of the same relationship
between your mind and the world outside of it: care. Perhaps this is why the
neural circuitry for love and hate are so similar, and pass through many of the
same regions. If you truly love something, you will want to preserve it and
protect it from things that would destroy it. And when someone threatens
what you love—whether that object of love is another person, a place, an
object, or yourself—the rational thing to desire is stopping that threat.
Perhaps you hope it does not come to violence, but if you are not at
least willing to destroy someone who would destroy your wife, or your
children, or your culture, or your faith, then either you do not really love
them, or you have decided that you love the abstract moral principle called
“do not hate” more than flesh and blood human beings.
Hate is not opposed to love. It is inextricably derived from love, and is
an expression of love. The feeling of hatred is revulsion towards someone
who would destroy what you love, and it is expressed by becoming
something that will inspire fear in the mind of that threat. It is the logical and
necessary emotion to have when an object of love comes under attack.
This means that calling on people to reject hatred is not just wrong, but
a sinister injunction, because to abandon hatred completely, you must give up
on love. Even love of yourself. So why are we told that hatred is evil? Why
are we afraid to hate?
 IV. Fearing Hate

“The heart is like the eye: it is absolutely worthless without focus. And
to focus is to discriminate, to say that this thing is more important than that
thing. In the open field, it’s the charging bear that matters, not the grass.
Without focus, everything would be a blur. Things would appear to be the
same, even when they weren’t.”
—Jack Donovan, The Tribal Mind

The Inconsistency of Militant Anti-Haters

Like hatred itself, the fear of hatred, and of being called hateful, comes
from other people. Legions of activists opposing hatred in all its forms have
arisen since the days of King, Ghandi, Mandela, and Theresa—both formally,
as in the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Anti-Defamation League, and
informally, a la your average college student. But do they really believe what
they are saying? Consider the following analogy:

John is a man who is “anti-gun.” He claims that guns are immoral.

Indeed, they are what is wrong with the world, and that if only we could get
rid of them, we could get on with the joys and difficulties of living, without
the unnecessary danger of lethal violence breathing down our necks.
John also carries a gun.
When asked about this apparent hypocrisy, he vehemently declares that
this does not in any way mean he likes guns, or is not anti-gun. His gun is
only to shoot other people with guns (“or people who support gun
ownership,” he adds as an afterthought). But that is why everyone else owns
guns too, you point out. You are not an anti-gun advocate fighting fire with
fire: in defending the legitimacy of your own gun carrying, you have become,
to whatever small degree, a gun-rights advocate.
 “Not at all,” he says, “because unlike those guys, who just love to carry
guns, I’m doing it because gun-owners deserve to be shot.”

This caricature of an anti-gun-rights activist ceases to be a caricature

when looked at metaphorically. Remember, hatred is a weapon of the mind.
It really is a kind of gun; a fundamentally coercive mental state designed to
intimidate others or to allow yourself to commit violent action of which you
would be otherwise incapable.
What does this mean? It means that John’s manifest position is not
actually ridiculous. What is ridiculous is only his articulated characterization
of himself as anti-gun. He’s not against guns, but against guns being used by
the wrong people, and for the wrong reasons. Stefan Molyneux describes the
scenario in a more literal and political context:

“If you are for gun control, then you are not against guns, because
guns will be needed to disarm people. So it is not that you are anti-gun.
You’ll need the police’s guns to take away other people’s guns. So you are
very pro-gun, you just believe that only the government (which is, of course,
so reliable, honest, moral, and virtuous) should be allowed to have guns.
There is no such thing as gun control. There is only centralizing gun
ownership in the hands of a small political elite and their minions.”

The anti-gun activists bristle with coercive force, using the gun behind
the law to gradually reduce other people’s ability to own and use guns.
In the same way, the anti-hate activists, in all their forms, ooze with
hatred. Like John, they attempt to square this circle by saying that they only
hate “the haters.” Their intolerance is reserved for the intolerant. But this
does not make them “anti-hatred” any more than John’s justifications make
him “anti-gun.”
More interestingly, and perhaps more tellingly, they never bother to
explore why the targets of their own hatred hold the views that they do. Like
John, they just assume that those people are just nasty, stupid bigots. Who
cares if the haters also claim only to hate others who are hateful or
dangerous? Who cares if the haters only carry a gun because they know
someone like John does too? None of that matters: my hatred is valid. Your
hatred is not.
The paper-thin nature of this supposed “anti-hate” position becomes
more obvious when we observe people who actually are anti-hate in practice.
Many Buddhists manage this, as do Christian pacifists, Jains, and others—
religious or secular—who not only shun violence, but the very mindset that
leads to and reciprocates violence. To return to our analogy, they are the
honest anti-gun advocate who does not themselves carry: those who see death
at the hands of armed attackers as a necessary burden to bear in the onward
march towards a gun-free world.
This ideal is almost as unlikely as a world entirely devoid of violence,
but at least these people who advocate it are internally consistent. I certainly
disagree with these pacifists on both their aim and their method, but at least
they are people who can be disagreed with.
Yet in talking to the virulent anti-hater—the Johns of the world—it
becomes clear that they feel no sense of hypocrisy. They feel entirely justified
in utilizing the power of hatred when the targets are threats to their group. As
with disarming firearms, it is never 100% universal.

Charging others with the moral crime of hatred may sometimes be

meant with sincerity. Perhaps it is the legitimate belief of a would-be martyr,
as would be the case of the aforementioned genuine pacifist. Or perhaps the
anti-hater may just be trying to get others to get along, because it seems to
make life easier. They believe that if people would stop disagreeing, the
underlying causes of the disagreement might be negotiated, because they
believe that everything can, in principle, be resolved through negotiation.
There are also insincere anti-haters who are not malicious. Narcissists,
insecure people, and lonely individuals have discovered that they can get the
social validation they crave by saying the right things. They will be told how
courageous, how noble, how good, how clever they are, for saying things that
require no courage, nobility, virtue, or intelligence, either by other people
seeking similar commendations, or by people like John, seeking to disarm an
enemy. These narcissists—whose behavior has recently been labeled “virtue
signalling”—will regurgitate talking points of anti-hatred rhetoric, to prove
that they are good people. They commit harm, but their attention is not on the
enemy so much as it is on themselves.
But in the realm of politics, opposition to hatred is far more frequently a
bludgeon used selectively by those with grudge against groups whose
interests are in the way of the bludgeoner’s goals. Many times, the confused
do-gooder, the self-conscious virtue signaller, and the cowardly get-alonger
are all drawing their anti-hatred rhetoric from the man with the bludgeon. As
for the sincere pacifist, even if they did get their ideas independently, the
idealist’s vision of harmony falls apart the moment that real existential
incompatibility becomes apparent. And when their goals become impossible,
the honest pacifists and other idealists become tools of convenience for the
Johns of the world, just like the social harmonizers and the virtue signallers
always were.
What a powerful tool stated opposition to hatred can be! With this
social dynamic in mind, it is clear that John’s inconsistency is not stupidity at
all. It makes far more sense if his words are understood as deceptive tools to
disarm the listener so that the speaker can remain armed himself—with guns
or with hate—and thereby have an advantage over those who he himself
hates or wants to control.

The Usefulness of False Allegations

Consider the LGBTQ activist. I do not mean your run-of-the-mill gay

person, but the person—as often straight as gay—involved with “the
community.” His vehement opposition towards Christianity is based upon an
interpretation of the faith as being “anti-gay.” It is opposed to who he is, or to
the people he claims to represent. It is a threat, and so he hates the religion.
This makes sense.
To the Christian on the receiving end of this, however, the hatred can be
a bit baffling. By her New Testament reading, as by most Christians’ reading,
the Bible is not so much “anti-gay” as it is anti-homosexuality of action. It no
more condemns gays for who they are than it condemns any other sinner for
their own particular sins, be it murder, lying, or failure to keep God first in
their life. The skeptic might attempt to differentiate, saying that since
homosexuality is a permanent state, rather than a single act, gays receive an
unequal degree of attention and opposition.
But this ignores the Christian premise that all humans are born sinful,
and that all sin, no matter how big or small, constitutes and deserves
separation from God. The argument that homosexuality is a lifestyle, rather
than an act, misses the entire tragic conception of human nature under
Christian theology. Every human is in need of redemption and will always be
in need of redemption in order to avoid the suffering of Hell. Especially for
the evangelical Christian, who believes it would be the most
uncompassionate, un-Christian thing imaginable to allow someone in her life
to spend eternity in the pits of Hell for behaviors that she could have helped
that sinner to overcome.
In this way, we can see that the Christian concern for homosexuals
comes not from hate, but from love—however misguided it may appear to
non-Christians.
Now, rather than being honest and calling Christianity “opposed to gay
marriage” (or, slightly more provocatively, a “threat to the homosexual
lifestyle,” which would be historically and generally true), the LGBTQ
activist does something peculiar: he says Christians hate gays, and then
conflate this hatred with fear.
When I was in high school, a friend of mine had a brother who
overdosed. The family was devout, except for the brother, who was gay. The
boy went through a combination of bad influences, low self-esteem, and a
theologically motivated existential crisis. This in turn led to some poor
decisions, attempted suicide, breaking and entering, theft, and finally, his
death. Even as he committed crimes against his own family, they continued
to love and attempt to help him. To this day, they are extremely supportive
and loving towards gay acquaintances, despite disagreeing theologically with
the lifestyle of most gays. They do this out of natural Christian compassion,
as well as in memory of their loved and lost family member.
 Did religion cause the young man’s death? It is not so easy to say with
certainty. Many young adults go through existential crises, theological or
otherwise, and come out the other side alive. If I were to guess, I would say
that religion was not at fault.
What one cannot say, however, is that his family hated him, or any
other gay. They felt nothing even remotely resembling the disgust towards
mind that describes all true hatred, whatever disagreements they may have
had with their estranged family member. Quite the opposite; they loved him
with a depth and compassion deeper than many straight children will ever
experience from their parents.
This anecdote does not prove that no Christians anywhere hate
homosexuals. But it is representative of a pattern that anyone can see among
mainstream Christians: one of gentle but firm disapproval of homosexual
behaviors, which often comes from a place of sincere care for the gay
individual and the fate of their soul before God. Is it right for Christians to
disapprove of homosexuality? Is it right for Christians to vote against
allocating government money to gay couples who will probably never have
children? Those are excellent questions, and there are intelligent voices on
both sides of the argument.
But why discuss the issue on those grounds, when you can simply
smack people over the head with the most damaging claim imaginable?
It is not that your theology is wrong; it is that you are a hateful person.
Note that the pointed allegation of hatred comes from a place of hatred
itself. It is designed to push away or to destroy. It is a weaponized word, and
it hurts because people—particularly Christians—really do not want to be
seen as hateful. They are afraid of hate.
But this fear rests in a much larger context, now so universally assumed
that people often forget that it is there. They also forget that it was not always
there, and that fear of being a hater is an incredibly modern invention. Why
have we so recently come to fear being labeled as hateful?
In a word, the Nazis.
 The Nazis and Hatred

Whatever hatred the Nazis once held for the Jews, it pales in
comparison for the loathing we hold towards the Nazis today, safely
extinguished as they are. One wonders if we would have the courage to hate
them as we do if they were still alive today. Given the apologia awarded to
the variety of fundamental incompatibilities Islam imposes on the Western
world, I can only assume we would not. This is not to make excuses for the
Nazis of course. Adolf Hitler was the worst thing to happen to Germany since
the Treaty of Versailles, his hubris wrecking Germany through unnecessary
war and subjecting half of it to 40 years of ruinous communism. But it wasn’t
the state of Germany that gave us our relationship with the politics of German
National Socialism. It was their final solution to the “Jewish Question.”
For centuries, German culture has been characterized by the Teutonic
virtues: austerity, punctuality, discipline, cleanliness, efficiency. You know
the archetype. German engineering has a reputation that, arguably, exceeds
the engineering that has been coming out of Deutschland in recent years, and
the butt of nearly every German joke revolves around their tendency for
literalism and the concrete (“How many Germans does it take to screw in a
lightbulb? One: we’re efficient, and have no sense of humor”).
This does not represent an ideal for all nations and cultures. But it does
represent the revealed preference of the German people, one which is as
legitimate as the Chinese preference for social harmony, and my own Anglo-
Saxon/Scottish/American obsession with “freedom.” The origins of these
group preferences—usually held with the seriousness of any love—are
ultimately irrelevant. Perhaps they are genetic. Maybe they are geographic.
Maybe it is some combination of the two, or something else entirely. Again,
the origins of these national preferences do not really matter.
The preferences of different groups of peoples have variously evolved
into coherent and sustaining systems of life that we call “cultures.” There is a
temptation to immediately evaluate them as “superior” or “inferior” to each
other, but biologically speaking, there is only one measure for objectively
calling a culture “superior” or “inferior,” and that measure is sustainability.
 Is the society still alive? Will it be alive in a few decades? A few
centuries? Matriarchies tend not to last. Pacifist cultures tend not to last.
Excessively aggressive and combative cultures tend to succeed for a time,
and then get destroyed, if they do not winnow their own numbers down first.
Expansive, global, multicultural societies tend to dilute themselves into
nonexistence. Empires tend to boom and then bust, as Agent Smith observed
in The Matrix, (and then conflated with human nature itself):

I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I

tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals.
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium
with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an
area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed.
The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another
organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it
is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.

Because humans are genetically very similar across countries, a

common pattern of values emerges. But this does not mean that there are no
differences, or that these minor differences are not important. They are often
so essential to your identity and your relationship to those around you that an
attack on these values amounts to an attack on yourself: worth fighting, and
even dying, to oppose.
There are many ways for people to live in a sustainable society,
thriving, growing, and enjoying their own particular manner of life in
accordance to their unique values and preferences. None are objectively
superior to others, outside of the parameters of our own preferences, but
within those preferences, there are superior and inferior societies for
everyone. Being a freedom-fanatic myself, the social order of China is not
ideal for me, exemplary though it may be for others.
Back to the Germans. The Treaty of Versailles ended the First World
War, and also heralded in the Weimar Republic, a period of German history
starkly at odds with Germany’s historical nature. Characterized by
intellectual chaos, freedom that crossed over into the libertine, and
parliamentary democracy that was relatively new to the hierarchical, Prussian
nation, Weimar Germany was a veritable Wild West for the order-loving
Germans. The universities were championing deconstructive ideas that
further eroded traditional identity in the name of freedom. Herbert Marcuse,
Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and other members of the
Frankfurt school began their work here. In many places, Germany more
closely resembled Las Vegas than anything it had been before. After a losing
war, and suffering the economic fallout of vindictive reparations and the
Great Depression, it is understandable why they were in no mood for the
insecurity that this cosmopolitan, vaudeville culture brought with it.
Many blacks in the United States look on their high rates of
incarceration, violent death, addiction, low income, and generally low
standard of life, and conclude—understandably, if incorrectly—that a history
of white racism is the source of their suffering. In a similar way, many
Germans understandably looked upon the Jews in the banking syndicates, in
organized crime, in the universities, and in successful businesses, all seeming
to champion this culture of chaos and destroying the classical German values
through deconstruction. The Jews, and their culture of critique, were probably
no more consciously conspiring to destroy German culture than White
Americans are today conspiring to do away with blacks.
But if the Jews have a different way of life, perhaps one which they
thought the natives might prefer, and project their own preferences onto
native Germans, we can easily see how the young National Socialists would
have thought that this threatened the “German-ness” which they loved and
with which they identified, and how anti-semitism would build without a
“Jewish conspiracy” ever being necessary.
This is not to justify the Nazis, but to dig away the soil and examine the
roots. And what do we find, if not love? A cherishing of everything
“German” was at the heart of the Third Reich, which by itself is no less noble
a goal than the Latinos, the Blacks, or the Japanese who attempt to maintain
and celebrate their own heritage and values. What is highlighted in the Nazi
mistake is a danger of blinding hatred, and of hubris.
The interpretation Europeans, Americans, and the world have
internalized from the holocaust, however, was more simplistic: Hatred leads
to the war. Hatred leads to genocide. Any nationalism, any love of one’s own
culture (at least if you are white), any expression of frustration with another
ethnic culture, or worse, an expressed view of incompatibility between one’s
own culture and another’s, is antithetical to peace, to civilization, and to love,
despite itself being derived from love.

The Nazis are not the only extinct boogeyman to be paraded out as an
exemplar of moral depravity, with whom association equals social and moral
death. The Ku-Klux Klan is an organization with between 5,000 and 8,000
members. In the context of American political influence, this is extremely
below notice.
And yet the KKK get trotted out every four years as a great and
terrifying danger to the unity of the nation, the malevolent hand directing the
collar of the conservative right in America, and a threat to blacks and other
minorities everywhere. We are left to presume that KKK membership swells
by orders of magnitude every 48 months.

We do not seek to understand the Nazis, because we fear that even

attempting to understand them will be seen as support for them. So, without
understanding them, we hate them blindly because it is safe. Not to hate
them, in fact, is vastly more dangerous. And now every other form of hate
has become amalgamated into an unholy army, marching under a ghostly
Swastika. Hate makes you a Nazi. And Nazis—despite their similarities to
most groups around the world—are the incarnation of evil itself.
And so, the Western world has moved, gradually but forcefully, as if to
eradicate hatred itself. And it was successful in many individuals, who drank
in the corrosive message of anti-hatred like fish in a poisoned pond. Children
have grown up into young adults, and young adults into parents and voting
citizens, believing that hatred was a moral evil on par with dishonesty, lust,
or gluttony.
We do not go out hunting hatred, but we’ve become more
psychologically susceptible to allegations of hatred. The history lessons
drummed into us, stripped of meaningful context, have made us react to signs
of hatred like Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the bell, flinching and condemning
without looking any deeper. This association makes people controllable; they
are so fearful of hatred, or worse, being thought hateful, that they will do
virtually anything to appease someone who claims to perceive them as
hateful. Many individuals and groups have utilized this power of allegation or
insinuation to great effect, and hold enormous sway in politics today.
But why take my word for it? Rabbi Yosef Ben Porat explains the
relationship of the Jews to Germany, and the hatred bred from the conflicts of
identity, better than I can:

Important stories, important facts that clarify things we didn’t receive

in school. We didn’t receive in the curriculum. They didn’t teach them even in
high education. I gave lectures in front of history professors. Why Hitler
really hated the Jews? What did he want from them? How did they bother
him? But it’s all written here in Mein Kampf. This book was published only
recently. It just got approved to be translated into Hebrew. It was forbidden
all these years.
But there is an earlier translation that was made by Yad Vashem. They
were allowed to.
Hitler claims in his book that the Jews are communists. They made the
Russian Revolution. They killed there 30 million Russians. All the intelligent
ones, in a cruel and horrific way, and that’s part of their plan for the entire
world. The next country in line is Germany. They founded the German
Communist and Socialist parties, and it’s true. “If we don’t defeat them now,
they will eliminate us. They will slaughter another 20 million. All the
intelligent people.” And that’s how they went, from country to country. So
eventually the only intelligent ones remaining would be the Jews. And he
repeats it many times, make no mistake.
And he is right. The Russian Revolution was made by the Jews. The
Russian army was built by Trotsky, who was an incredible genius. An Anti-
Semite like no other. He created the Jewish division of the Communist Party,
which members informed on their father, mother, brother, and son. Whoever
owns a Siddur or even a Hebrew learning book—I’m not even talking about
Tefilin and Mikveh—he destroyed everything. Also by the Jews, but for sure
by the Russians.
In the first picture of the Russian government, out of thirteen members,
six were Jews. Who founded the KGB? Jews. So everything is clearly written.
He didn’t hate the Jews because they had “Peos.” He didn’t hate them for
observing Mitsvoth. Because they are Communists, and he writes it clearly:
“They spread in Germany the heresy in G-d.” That’s how he writes. “I feel
like the messenger of G-d, to exterminate the Jews.” Because they don’t
believe in him. He writes this right here.
Now you understand why they don’t teach it in schools? Because who
writes the curriculum? Those same leftists. Of course they will not write that
Hitler wanted to kill the Jews because they are the forefathers of the Left and
the forefathers of Marxism, Communism, and [Leninism]. But that’s what he
writes. They destroyed all the values. Poisoned literature and theater. Who
did it? Torah observant Jews poisoned the German theater? Out of nine
large German newspapers seven were owned by Jews.
There was one of the great composers in the world—Wagner—whose
pieces are still forbidden to be played. Up until now he was banned. Because
he was an Anti-Semite, long before the Nazi era. And I was very interested to
know what he really said. So the Hebrew University published his book,
translated to Hebrew. So I’ll tell you what he writes there:
“I don’t like the Jews. The religious ones, I don’t like them. But what do
I care? The Jews who left the Torah and the Mitzvoth, and look like the
gentiles, I hate. Because they merge into our society and destroy our culture
and poetry, and the German being. Those who converted to Christianity, I see
them as a fifth column. Traitors that are going to destroy the German nation.
If we don’t defend ourselves from them now, they will finish us, because they
are disguised to the Germans, but they are not Germans, they are Jews.” So
do you understand why it is forbidden here to teach about him and what he
says?
Just how everyone hates the Nuremburg Laws without even knowing
them. Nuremburgsaid that a Jew can’t marry a gentile, so for sure the
schools here call it racism. To say that a Jew is different than a gentile is
racism, here in this state unfortunately. Nuremburg just copied what’s
written in the Torah. Wagner just said what’s written in the Torah. That a
Jew is a Jew, even if he wears a mask, even if he converts to Christianity. “A
Jew who sinned is still a Jew.” “You,” he writes, “are merciful people. We
are cruel people. You destroy our culture.” Yes, that’s how Wagner writes.
Therefore his entire book is aimed against the Jewish composer Mendelsohn,
whose father converted to Christianity and baptized him in church when he
was five years old. He writes to him: “Listen, do you think that if you speak
German, and converted to Christianity, you are German? No! Your poetry is
of a crybaby, your music is not authentic, and you poison our culture,
because people think that this is German music. German music is filled with
pride, and you can’t do it. And therefore you are called the enemy of German
culture.”
So isn’t he right? Of course he is right! “You chose us from all the
nations,” true, we are humble, merciful, shy, indeed. This is our source of
pride. So understand that things didn’t just happen, not a coincidence, it
didn’t happen without alerts. “Our sins sent us to exile, out of our land.”
And thank G-d we returned home, and we have to be careful not to
repeat the same mistakes, and re-assimilate right here, and give legitimacy to
that low self-esteem in front of the gentiles, and the will to be like them. We
came to this world to be different, we were created in this world to be Jewish,
and our entire purpose is to be with G-d, and whoever really wants to be with
G-d, G-d is with him. In any place, in good times and bad, here and also not
here, that G-d will say to our troubles “Enough.” In any form, and in any
situation, and in any place, any may we have the merit for the eternal
redemption, and to eternal happiness.

Anti-Hate Hatred in Politics: A One-World Order

Implicit in the modern allegation of hatred is the latent accusation of

Nazi-like bigotry and unfair hatred. But how to pin such a specific crime to
the local guns-rights activist, Christian, or conservative commentator? To
make these allegations stick, the activist relies upon his victim assuming they
are both on the same team, and like a con-man, appealing to her trust and
good faith if she ever begins to question this assumption. Christians readily
fall victim to this, as the teachings of Jesus are easily interpreted as meaning
to love thy neighbor and turn the other cheek no matter who has done the
infraction upon you. Most conservatives in general will fall for this as well,
believing as they do that “we’re all Americans here.”
People most fear being viewed as hateful when they believe they are on
the same team as their verbal attacker.
Like disgust, hatred leads to destruction or distance. Either they will
leave, you will leave, or they will attempt to destroy you. If you are in the
same group, none of these options is attractive. In fact, all of them are
terrifying, especially option three. Grossman calls combat the “universal
phobia,” and even the potential of generating some cause for interpersonal
conflict (such as public speaking) causes more irrational and overpowering
fear than snakes or spiders.
If someone gets upset with you, but they live overseas, speak a different
language, answer to different laws, and worship a different God—that is, they
are not in your group—you probably will not lose any sleep.
But there cannot be hatred within a group, or it will fall apart. If others
view you as “hateful” towards members of the group, you become a threat to
the whole group. The allegation of hatred becomes a threat of social
ostracism, or worse. This is why it is so effective. And in the 21st century, it is
generally believed that we are all on the same team. Even the man overseas,
under different language, law, and liturgy, is another citizen of the world, and
any hatred at all makes us unworthy of civilization in the eyes of the world.
And of course, John’s gun goes quietly unnoticed. The social power of
speaking on behalf of a world-society simply slips into the fingers of those
who claim it: something our ancestors—the unintentional writers of our
social dynamic programming—could never have envisioned. The viciousness
of the anti-hater is missed as everyone follows his pointed finger. He is
secretly thinking of his victim not as a fellow citizen and team member, but
as an enemy to be destroyed, by any means available. And why? Whatever
the reason, it is not because she is hateful. Though that might be the
justification given, or even believed by the anti-hater, it is simply validation
for his own hatred.
What is the purpose, the end goal, for the strident anti-haters? Most call
for diversity, for inclusion, for tolerance and acceptance. It is meant to lead to
a harmonious global future, one in which we are all truly achieving world
peace, and learning from and teaching all people how to be our best selves
while still retaining the best of each of our traditions.
Perhaps we are already one world, or are growing that way through
technology. Maybe these divisions into sub-groups will grow irrelevant in the
very near future? If that unlikely scenario were true, then it may well appear
that the entire premise of this book has been undermined. If there cannot be
any hatred within a group, and we all share this planet together, how can any
hatred at all be justified?
This is the underlying assumption that the anti-haters—the Johns of the
world—are relying upon you to hold. But they clearly do not hold this view
themselves.
The unstated and irreconcilable problem with the one-world-tribe
believer’s proposal is that to be implemented, a monoculture must be
established. There is no reconciliation between a gay man and someone who
thinks that any homosexuality at all will bring about the death of civilization.
There is no way to group an Islamist, who seeks peace through the
submission of the entire world to Allah, with a dedicated atheist who insists
on bowing to no one, let alone to the confabulated delusions of an epileptic or
a fraud.
Someone must be the arbiter of these intractable differences.
In steps John and the anti-haters, who are more than happy to sort the
haters from everyone else. They are not working to purge themselves of
hatred, but to channel it, and to charge others with hatred, real or imaginary.
Even assuming the whole world was one big family, to give in to people who
lie or who go hunting for thought-crimes in others would be to cede power to
the worst among the tribe.
 The members of a group should not give credence to members who use
the leverage of division to seek personal gain. As Dilbert cartoonist Scott
Adams said of the dominant North American ‘tribe,’ “…the worst thing a
presidential candidate can do is turn Americans against each other.”
The reality is that we are not one big, happy clan of humanity. Even
America is not one nation, and technology does not narrow the gap of
differences between groups. Indeed, it may even widen them. Groups are
defined by their commonalities, and while all humans certainly share
common characteristics and needs, the differences in goals, values,
worldviews, and most importantly, of preferences, make some groups of
people at existential odds with others.
For those who espouse the virtues of “diversity,” this vision of a world
of many nations is what real diversity would actually look like. The lip-
service we pay to diversity by merging and combining different groups
within the same borders will instead dilute and destroy them. In a truly
diverse world, cultural enrichment can be achieved by going over there to
where other people have different customs, different values, different
religions, and different preferences, and then coming back with this
knowledge.
Differences are not a bad thing. They are what make the world an
exciting, interesting, and—from an evolutionary-strategic viewpoint—more
secure place. We are right to love and to embrace the things that make us
unique, and it should come as no surprise that differences which lead to
existential opposition are often held so strongly that people would rather die
than give them up. “Give me liberty or give me death!”
And little do the anti-haters know, that a world without hate would also
be a world without love.
 V. Cutting Out the Heart

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil
deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and
destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of
every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

It is clear that preaching anti-hate can sometimes be an effective tool

for one tribe to use against another, if the second is attempting to work under
one roof with the first. Accepting that hatred is always evil, and attempting to
purge yourself of hate, makes you vulnerable to the kinds of dangers that
would otherwise incite you to acts of intimidation or destruction to defend
yourself.
But what if the premise—a unified, hate-less world—could actually be
achieved? Wouldn’t that be nice?
Hatred—disgust towards mind—would be useless and therefore
unnecessary without love. But love itself is actually impossible without the
latent potential for hate.
 Hate as an Expression of Love

Consider the case of Titus Andronicus. As you read how Demetrius and
Chiron plotted and then executed the savage rape of Titus’ daughter, Lavinia,
before cutting off her hands and ripping out her tongue, it would be
impossible for Titus not to hate these two Goths. Even the reader may have a
difficult time not loathing these fictional characters, after coming to enjoy the
gentle and lovely Lavinia, and the fair and just Titus Andronicus. The reader
might even smile with glee as Titus gets his brutal vengeance upon the Goths
and his nation for betraying him.
It is certainly possible for one to be outraged and angry with the two
brothers without emotionally connecting to the protagonist or his daughter.
You have only to think abstractly, to observe the principles violated by the
action of the two, and the injustice it represents. But as previously mentioned,
anger is not hatred. The former is consensus-seeking, and appeals to
principles. The latter recognizes that moral consensus is either late,
insufficient, impossible, or irrelevant, and that principles are a means to an
end, and not the end in itself. With both emotions, it is dysfunctional to feel
one when the other is more appropriate, and in the case of Titus Andronicus,
the correct emotional response is not anger, but hatred.
Attempt to put yourself in the mind of a rapist for a moment, especially
one in ancient Rome. Think of the fates of Demetrius and Chiron, and of the
words of countless fathers around the world, talking about what they’d do to
a man who did not “treat their daughter right.” The hate-inspired actions of a
few, especially when backed up by the perceived kindred spirit of many, has
an enormously powerful deterring effect.
The protection of latent hatred, in other words, is one of the benefits of
love. We destroy those who destroy what we cherish.
But suppose hatred was eradicated. What if you were not allowed to
hate? Or worse, what if you were not able?
 Speaking Truth to Democratic Power

There is an archetype in story-telling of an antagonist with something

powerful to say. Perhaps the author was simply morally careless, but it
always seemed more likely to me that they felt they had some truth to convey
that an audience was not prepared to hear from a winning, likable
protagonist. Better to plant a seed, and let it grow over the years, or centuries
if need be. I suspect these characters are more often constructed
subconsciously than consciously, but that is pure speculation on my part.
Colonel Nathan Jessup from A Few Good Men is one of the more
powerful and well-known cinematic examples of such a character. Jessup
stands accused of ordering a “code red,” a form of vicious hazing which, in
this case, resulted in the death of a marine. The accuser is a young Naval
officer, Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, with no combat experience, something
which Jessup holds in contempt, as it places Kaffee outside the realm of
relevant experience to morally judge something like a code red. Jessup
reveals both his guilt and his contempt in the climactic final court scene,
where he justifies his actions to the court to whom he had been previously
hiding them:

Kaffee: Colonel Jessup, did you order the Code Red?

Judge Randolph: You don't have to answer that question!
Jessup: I'll answer the question. You want answers?
Kaffee: I think I'm entitled!
Jessup: You want answers?!
Kaffee: I want the truth!
Jessup: You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has
walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do
it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you
can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You
have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that
Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while
grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don't want the truth,
because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on
that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like “honor,” “code,”
“loyalty.” We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending
something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the
inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket
of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I
provide it! I would rather you just said "thank you", and went on your way.
Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I
don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to!
Kaffee: Did you order the Code Red?
Jessup: I did the job that—
Kaffee: Did you order the Code Red?!
Jessup: YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I DID!

Although Jessup is a villain, it seems unlikely that an author, playwrite,

or director would give such a powerful moral argument to the “bad guy,”
while putting such an underwhelming response in the mouth of the ostensible
“good guy.” Especially if the response relies upon the same lack of relevant
combat experience for moral judgment in the judicial audience, to whom the
case is being made.
One of my personal favorites among these truth-telling bad-guys is
Henri Ducard from Batman Begins. In one particular scene, he speaks to
Bruce about the self-destroying nature of losing what you love:

I know the rage that drives you. That impossible anger strangling the
grief, until the memory of your loved ones is just poison in your veins. And
one day you catch yourself wishing the person you loved had never existed,
so you’d be spared your pain. I wasn’t always here in the mountains. Once I
had a wife, my great love. She was taken from me. Like you, I was forced to
learn that there are those without decency that must be fought without
hesitation, without pity. Your anger gives you great power, but if you let it, it
will destroy you, as it almost did me.

When asked what saved him, his answer is “vengeance.” In matters of

anger and injustice, all of classical wisdom implores us to move on once a
score has been settled, rather than internalizing, universalizing and becoming
the grudge. But when it comes to true enemies, beyond the realms of decency
or the possibility of redemption, his experience contains a powerful truth. It is
not the hateful rage that is self-destructive. That, as we already know, is an
adaptive response. What is corrosive is the unrequited loss. If you love
something, and that thing is destroyed, you will feel angry, perhaps even
hateful. But if you are not allowed to feel hateful, or cannot meaningfully act
on or express your hatred, a truly curious thing happens: your mind convinces
itself that you didn’t really love that object. The incongruous reactions of
your body and your feelings of loss or pain force your brain to choose which
reaction is the “real” one.
A similar process can be observed when very young children fall over
or knock into things. Often, they will look around first, as if to gauge what
their reaction ought to be. Then, if they see sympathy or perhaps fear, they
will implode into a blubbering mess on the floor. If, however, they see
impatience or disinterest, they will often jump back up as if they felt no pain
at all.
Something peculiar we have learned in the realm of psychology—
backing up the intuitions of Nietzsche more than a century ago—is that not
only are our memories and moment-to-moment moral justifications usually
constructed retroactively, but so too are our feelings themselves. In matters of
sexuality, for example, consent is occasionally retracted after the fact, and in
some instances, is even given retroactively. Perhaps neither of these strike us
as morally permissible behaviors, given the veneration Western culture has
vested in “consent” ever since Locke built the legitimacy of government upon
the consent of the governed. Nevertheless, the retroactive nature of these
feelings remains true, uncomfortable though it may be for our desired moral
system. Even our political consent is, by nature, somewhat retroactive: if a
particular policy, law, or representative works, then we consider it to have
been “good,” i.e., representative of the will (“consent”) of the polity. If it
does not work, then we declare it to be “bad,” and a misrepresentation of the
collective will of the polity.
By itself, this retroactive logic is not actually a bad thing. Sometimes,
real-world consequences helpfully reveal that we actually do not love
something as much as we thought we did. If the baby knocks over a vase that
you really liked, but your first thought is concern for the baby’s safety and
not your own sadness at the destruction of your living room center piece, then
the real-world consequences reveal that your perceived priorities were
slightly out of line. The vase, it appears, was not quite as big of a deal as you
thought it might be.
It is not within the scope of this book to determine which things ought
to be loved and which do not, but it absolutely is within its scope to declare
that for everyone, something must be worth devotion, admiration, and
reverence. If children are raised to believe first and foremost that hatred is
evil and to be avoided, and if it is true that meaningful love will always carry
a latent potential of reactive hatred, then meaningful love becomes
impossible. Affinity, preference, “liking” something, all of these might still
be possible, because they are shallow varieties of love. But they are
contingent and tenuous. They are founded solely in the object’s existence and
proximity, not upon some lasting quality or virtue that the object holds and
which you value. In other words, these kinds of “love” have very little to do
with you and what you like, and everything to do with petty convenience of
circumstance, like enjoying the visual appeal of a plastic katana, because you
are not allowed to own an actual sword. All the things that make the sword a
sword are missing. A samurai deprived of his sword—like the neolithic
hunter deprived of his spear—is critically injured by its loss. A weeaboo
deprived of his plastic replica loses nothing. It is just a weak (and hopefully
momentary) attraction, one that has nothing to do with virtue or ideals, but
upon whim constrained by social acceptability. The morality of anti-hatred is
the morality of a ship with no anchor and no desired destination. Not the
interests of the individual, and the virtues he himself sees, but the currents of
democratic opinion will determine what he will like, because the only
meaningful resistance that comes from sincere love—hatred—is the one
unforgivable sin.
 In the moment, anti-hatred might merely be a dishonest but convenient
moral weapon with which some attempt to dispatch their adversaries. Over
time, however, the believed lies can crush the very passions that really do
lead to hatred: all the things that we love.

Killing Love

A brief digression on love and purpose: Viktor Frankl started his

practice of what he calls Logotherapy—a version of psychiatry—based upon
his observations of fellow prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps. He saw
that many men who seemed otherwise unlikely to survive the grueling ordeal
managed it, while others, who seemed fit and more likely to survive, gave in
to starvation, cold, or simply ceased trying. According to Frankl, the one
most important thing that determined a prisoner’s chances of making it out
alive was whether or not they had something to live for. Sometimes their
reason to live was something deeply moving, and sometimes it seemed
superficially trivial. Whatever the appearance of importance to an outsider, it
gave the prisoner something to hold on and persevere for. Now, love and
purpose are not exactly the same, but it is difficult to imagine a purpose that
is not primarily driven by love. Like love, making something our purpose is
an act of elevation above other things, and like purpose, destroying the bond
of love destroys our tie to life itself. We often do not remain very long after
that severance. Some people even depart voluntarily, taking their own life.
This observation may seem familiar to you. Frankl was not the first to
point out this correlation between purpose and vitality; most people notice it
to varying degrees in their own day-to-day lives. Bear it in mind as we move
forward.

Over the last few decades, there has been a marked increase in
alcoholism, especially among the young. After a decline in the late 80’s,
suicide rates turned around in 2001 and have been on the rise ever since.
Anxiety, depression, ADD, and other disorders that indicate a failure to find
one’s place in society have also exploded, and while some of this reflects an
expansion of diagnoses for a variety of reasons, its parallel to inclining
suicide rates indicate that broader definitions and more aggressive diagnosing
are not the whole trouble. Most notably of all has been the so-called “demise
of guys,” or what Milo Yiannopoulos has called the “sexodus:” young men
simply dropping out of society into video games, pornography, or some
hobby that otherwise takes them off the social map. Many of these hobbies
are self-destructive, most of them are useless, and virtually all of them betray
an increase in cynicism and apathy. While some people blame economic
hardships (which no doubt play some role), the suicide rate was higher in
2014 than it was in 2009, the height of the housing-market crash, and the rate
began climbing well before 2008. Not everything is a matter economics.
Meanwhile, an obsession with “tolerance,” “diversity,” and “anti-
hatred” infiltrates nearly all of our organizations and institutions, the ones we
live our everyday lives within. Schools, businesses, government agencies,
neighborhoods, sports teams, political movements, hobby groups, and private
clubs, all of these have, to some degree, begun espousing and enforcing the
religion of tolerance. Its golden rule: thou shalt not hate. While we would be
wrong to credit this emotional disconnection from passion with all of the
aforementioned nihilism and apathy, it is clear from example after
demonstrative example that the religion of tolerance—of anti-hatred—bears
at least some of the responsibility. If we are being honest, it appears to be a
primary source of the spiritual disease festering among the younger
generation, and not merely a symptom. And why should we be surprised by
this? If we cannot hate, then we will retroactively convince ourselves that we
didn’t really love it. And the danger of unrequited loss by establishing a
meaningful preference, might not be worth it. It might be better to never love.
To wish that what you loved had never existed, so you could be spared your
pain. Without something to love, without something worthy of fighting and
dying for, there is no reason to set goals, to improve yourself, to date, to
learn, to earn, and to make yourself truly great.
Ironically, the ideology of anti-hatred does not even decrease the net
amount of hate, even when it is internalized and practiced seriously. It merely
diffuses it, spreading it more evenly across larger groups of people. This is
partially because in place of physical objects of love like people or places,
abstract things like ideas, codes, and concepts simply stand in for them—not
as “love” per se, so much as commitments and dependencies; ideologies that
poorly take love’s place, not really being able to love in return. Perhaps it is
the Republican party, or the Democratic one. Maybe it is “liberalism”
generally, or “the Constitution.” It is fine to enjoy these things, to embrace
them and fight for them. But when they become the end in itself, rather than a
means to a greater end found in other people, they lose their own intended
purpose, and can even turn against it.
The law against hate is no exception to this rule. There are no
misanthropes so decidedly contemptuous of others as the dedicated anti-
bigot. They imagine a possible world of peace and harmony among all
mankind, predicated upon understanding and empathy, and decide that this is
the most important thing. But they do not empathize with others who have
different ideas, because in their eyes, nothing could possibly be more
important than world peace. And so they see disagreements between people
as necessarily motivated by stupidity, stubbornness, and bigotry. They see
"hatred" all around them. The incorrigibility of man's differences causes them
to lose hope in their ideal, and they descend into a cynical, apathetic,
condescending disdain for the rest of their own species. The anti-hater
becomes the most universal hater.
Anti-hatred does not fix hate. It just polarizes. To the degree that it does
reduce hate, it reduces love as well, which makes us weak, apathetic, short-
sighted and cynical.
It also makes us harder to love.

Power Makes You Lovable

Few writers have more powerfully addressed the entangled relationship

of agency and morality in literature than Anthony Burgess in his classic A
Clockwork Orange. The protagonist, a violent and psychopathic teenager, is
conditioned so that he is psychologically incapable of doing harm. But this
conditioning does not change who he is. He becomes a “clockwork orange,”
a piece of machinery that only looks like a real fruit on the outside. He is not
properly human, and his interests, motivations, and actions are not properly
his.
“Love” from such a being does not feel like love, at least not any more
than love from a computer. Clear agency is required for our love to feel like
love to others. Consider, if a prisoner were released on condition that he find
someone and love them, we would be right to suspect his sincerity, or at the
very least, the depths of his love if he happened to select us. Compelled love
is not love at all. And the expression of agency requires power.
I do not mean power in the zero-sum, tyrannical or political sense. The
politician who we might call powerful might actually be compelled to oppose
things he likes, or claim support for ideas he dislikes, depending on financial
backers or the demands of his party. He wields a fair bit of influence, but it
very often is not really him that is wielding it. His will may or may not be
free.
On the other hand, the love of a drugged-up vagabond, while
superficially charming (or at least a little amusing), is not a particularly
valuable achievement. Like an idiot, he probably loves everyone. Being loved
by people who love everyone is nothing special; it does not mean anything.
What gets our heart pounding is earning the love and respect of people who
we admire and look up to.
Ultimately, power is the ability to enact our will in the world. To make
a broken machine work again requires power, and whether that means
purchasing the time of a mechanic, or putting your own mechanical skills to
use, or simply buying a whole new machine, is ultimately irrelevant.
Influencing people, staying healthy, moving from point A to point B,
educating a child, possessing a castle, or making a crowd laugh, all of these
require power to some degree. The exertion of will requires power, and it
requires there to be a preferred state of things to move towards or an adverse
state of things to move away from, or else there would be no purpose in
action at all. Put another way, action requires purpose, and purpose requires
preferences. Preferences and purpose give us reason to acquire power.
Not all preferences are necessarily love, but love is a particularly
passionate form of preference. At least the preservation of yourself is
deserving of more than mere “preference.” Love is a kind of preference, but
is more than merely preference. Like armies, when forces of will collide, the
stronger of the wills generally prevails. So it is natural that when people are
certain of something—be it the truth of some idea, the loveliness of a woman,
or the vicarious self-affirmation of a child—they will not be content to
merely “prefer” it, but will “love” it. Your favorite peanut butter texture is a
preference. What you are willing to die for, and live for, is love.
What makes something worthy of love is its quality. The steel we like is
very hard, durable, and pure steel. The flowers we like are ornate, delicate,
colorful, and have a pleasant smell. The food we like is tasty, nutritious, and
preferably digests easily. What qualities make a person lovable? This will
vary from judging person to person, but there is a common core of the
classical virtues, which include such things as strength, physical
attractiveness, intelligence, humility, compassion, perceptiveness, empathy,
mastery, humor, truthfulness, loyalty, wisdom, and courage.
The majority of these, including the most important ones, require
agency and power to actualize. Intelligence requires the conscious awareness
to discern what is relevant from what is irrelevant; compassion requires the
capacity to see the suffering of others; courage requires the ability to perceive
danger, and to act in the face of that danger, etc. The man who does not allow
himself to hate relinquishes the power of hate, which is the power to protect
the most important things.
There is a word to describe someone that wants to achieve something
but is powerless to do so: pathetic.
We do not love what is pathetic. We might feel compassion for the
woman who has tragically lost a child in a freak accident, but our hearts do
not go out to the woman sobbing over her dead child she herself left in a
scorching car on a hot day for four hours. We might feel compassion for the
deceased child, but only contempt for the woman, no matter her grief. We
might laugh in amusement at a clumsy kitten attempting a great flying leap
and greatly undershooting its intended landing point, but our amusement
might fade to indifference or even frustrated annoyance if, when the kitten
grows up into an adult, it is still incapable of killing at least a few of the mice
taking over the basement. A man who does not, or cannot, experience hatred,
lacks the power that hate would give him to protect what he loves. It will
either make him pathetic—desiring, but incapable of protecting what is
dearest to him—or it will erode his feelings of love, not least because he
cannot stand to be pathetic in his own eyes or in the eyes of others.
Impotence can lead you in one of two directions: with honesty, it will lead
you back to potency, by reacquiring a capacity for hatred and violence; or it
will lead to learned helplessness, Stockholm syndrome, and apathy.
Translated into more visible symptoms: video games, involuntary but
accepted celibacy, and cynical snarkiness, even on matters of true
importance. There is no reason to take care of your health, your honor, or
your future, and your decisions will reflect this.
Hatred is by no means the sole source of power. But just as all the
wealth in the world will not save you from a hungry tiger, all the kindness,
reasoning, empathy, technology, and honesty in the world will not stop
someone who fundamentally wants something different than what you want.
It cannot stop someone who rejects your values, and is willing and happy to
destroy you, your family, or your country to have what he wants. Hate is the
tool that evolution has given us to handle dilemmas like that. At the end of
the day, love and preference drive action, and when the expression of love
demands a reserve of hatred, the rejection of hatred will eventually force a
man to let down, betray, or reject what he loves. In these three cases—those
of the pathetic man, the traitor, or the nihilist—a man becomes as unworthy
of love as he is incapable of expressing it. He is, in effect, a clockwork
orange. His heart has been cut out.
 VI. Varieties and Criticisms

“To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under
the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to
pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to
break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a
time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to
gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from
embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to
cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a
time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of
peace.”
—Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

“Hot” and “Cold” Hatred

Here, after a defense of the morality of hatred, it is essential to grant

credit where it is due to some of the criticisms of hatred.
It is said that “love is blind,” but if we wanted to be more accurate, we
would say “love blinds.” Fear can also blind, and like love and fear, hate can
blind us too, if we are not careful. This moral defense of hatred, after all, is
not a moral defense of all hatred, but hatred that is “just,” which is to say,
proportional. Disproportionate hatred can make an unnecessary enemy, or
harden an existing one. It can also waste energy.
There are as many sources and expressions of hatred as there are willed
threats in humanity. Within this range, there are two broad but distinct roads
that hatred often takes when people invoke its power. One we call “rage,” the
berserk state that comes when we simply unleash our hate in a raw and
unrestrained form. The other has no name, but we can refer to as lucid or cool
hatred. There may be some game-theory argument for going berserk, but it is
usually a hazardous and ineffectual kind of hatred. Rage is like a freight train:
it moves with tremendous power, but its momentum makes it very difficult to
stop, and very easy for others to predict. It is a state more suited for psyching
yourself up or for fighting against instinctive animals, or against some
difficult task, than it is for facing down intelligent, thinking, and scheming
humans, who can skillfully dodge the raging man like a matador dodging a
bull before gracefully stabbing it in the heart.
In martial arts, good teachers will instruct students on how to punch
without “telegraphing” their move—indicating which hand they are punching
with and where it is going, thereby giving their antagonizer the chance to
anticipate the attack and take advantage of it. A productive kind of hate will
be like an effective punch: unpredictable, sudden, and capable of anything.
This does not mean non-demonstrative, as we discussed earlier in the book.
No one mistakes the bull that stalks around the matador, rather than
immediately charging, as friendly. The stalking animal’s hatred is more
effective. It is more terrifying for its coolness.
The face of hatred is not that of rage—nostrils flared, eyebrows
furrowed, and spittle flying. As stated before, it is the expressionless mask of
blank indifference, and beyond that, no one can know for certain. They can
only imagine the worst.
The model to follow is given by Rudyard Kipling, in “Wrath of the
Awakened Saxon:”

It was not part of their blood,

It came to them very late,
With long arrears to make good,
When the Saxon began to hate.

They were not easily moved,

They were icy—willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
 Ere the Saxon began to hate.

Their voices were even and low.

Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show
When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not preached to the crowd.

It was not taught by the state.
No man spoke it aloud
When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not suddenly bred.

It will not swiftly abate.
Through the chilled years ahead,
When time shall count from the date
That the Saxon began to hate.

Cool hatred is easier said than done. How do we best channel our
hatred, and curb the rage that turns us into clumsy and predictable playthings
for enemies?

Before answering this, there is another important criticism of hatred

worth acknowledging. When we are blinded by hatred, not only is our hate
less effective, but we might be investing energy opposing something that we
shouldn’t be opposing. Our blinding by emotion can not only make us
vulnerable to others, but to ourselves. It can make innocent people
vulnerable, including friends and family members in extreme circumstances.
This blindness has been a consistent source of material for tragic literature,
including the story of Oedipus and Laius, arguably the greatest tragedy ever
written.
In modern form, this criticism has been broadly condensed under the
label of “bigotry.” For better or for worse, however, the term has been used
so excessively and liberally that it has essentially lost all original connotation.
Whereas it once meant “someone who hates another without just cause,” it
now is best understood as “someone with whom I disagree.” The word may
have lost its meaning to sophists and the dishonest—and there is even reason
to believe that the people who most often use the word and its family (racist,
sexist, homophobe, xenophobe) are often projecting—but the underlying
argument remains true. How can we avoid this misguided variety of hatred?
How can we simultaneously grant the legitimacy of the emotion, but check
against its excesses and dangers? What is the season for hatred?

The Grounds for Just Hatred

The answer to both of these concerns is understanding. Recall from

Chapter 1:

It is a recognition of willful opposition.

And from our model, Kipling:

Till every count should be proved,

Ere the Saxon began to hate.

You can certainly hate an enemy without understanding their intentions

or nature. But you will not have truly effective hatred without recognition of
your enemy’s intention. And you cannot recognize intent without
understanding their nature. Remembering this solves the problem of
predictable, wrathful hatred which loses power rather than gaining it, as well
as the problem of hating things unjustly and disproportionately. It does this
by imposing a requirement of knowledge about—even an empathy for—the
enemy, which grows alongside your burgeoning hatred, as in the case of Vlad
of Wallachia. Even in the object of hatred itself, we can see another, more
shadowy version of the innate connection between hatred and love.
Many people of the hatred-is-evil persuasion seem to believe that
understanding is the solution to hatred (and therefore, hatred indicates either a
lack of understanding or stupidity). It is often with this thought in mind that
they’ll say that “education is the solution.” But while deeper understanding
and empathy can sometimes remove false differences and opposition, it can
just as often deepen the divide, and turn mere anger or incredulity into actual
hatred.
A brief personal example: I did not “hate” the progressives whom we
colloquially call “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) for a very long time, even
as I opposed them and their ideas in the college newspaper I worked for. I
viewed their ideas as merely “wrong,” and the activists themselves likewise
as “wrong,” They were not “enemies,” but people who were fundamentally
on the same page, and had the same goals, but who had—for whatever reason
—come to different conclusions. And while I had no illusions about the
universal sanity of all politics, I at least thought that we all shared the value
of “what is best for America.” I thought this bound us together, no matter
what our differences of opinion were.
It was education and deeper understanding that separated me from the
SJWs, rather than bringing me closer.
American Patriots and the Social Justice Warriors do both want what is
best for “America,” but their different views about what America is makes
this supposed point of agreement completely moot. Patriots view America as
a collection of people, one that shares a love of freedom in addition to their
own shared aesthetic about what makes the good life and the good city. SJWs
have a completely different, and mutually exclusive, idea of what “America”
is, or ought to be. They see America as a civic proposition and an experiment,
rather than as a nation more classically defined (a separate and distinct group
of people). It is a proposition characterized by collective moral responsibility,
an obligation that transcends the individual, the nation, even the generation.
To SJWs, this obligation trumps the intrinsic goods of beauty, quality, or the
desires of any particular individual or group. Even if one of these groups
founded for itself and its’ posterity the nation which the SJWs are now
claiming ownership over. Advocates of Social Justice will nominally oppose
all power discrepancies on the basis that because everyone is equal, any
discrepancy indicates that someone, somewhere, at some time, must have
cheated justice. And if equity is the highest goal, then no price is too high to
rectify the cheating that they have deduced from these differences in
outcomes.
America has achieved an enormous degree of power and success in the
world. This means that even if most SJWs enjoy success for themselves, their
appreciation for the wealth of their own country is very often overshadowed
by a belief that that success was acquired by theft or coercion. They have
come to believe that America owes something to the rest of the world, both
for the crimes it must have committed to create the discrepancy, and
intrinsically because of the discrepancy exists.
If you define America as a “nation,” rather than a dream, an idea, or
abstract mental invention, then it is no exaggeration to say that advocates of
Social Justice really do hate America. They do not think that they do, but
only because each side is using the same word to describe wildly different
objects of love. What America represents to classical American Patriots is
destructive to what SJWs claim to love (their philosophical ideal), as well as
to what they actually love (most often their own power and social influence).
This is discernible through the web of inconsistencies, lies, and omissions
that their movements often make.
I do not want to go into details about the nature and problems of SJWs,
which have been addressed in more depth and detail elsewhere. The
principles here, in fact, apply to SJWs as much as they do to people like
myself, who prefer quality to the mutually incompatible value of equality. I
am as much their enemy as they are mine, due to our existentially opposed
systems of values and objects of love. Their successes are my failures, and
vice versa. Education for the sake of understanding the other does not resolve
this impasse, but clarifies and deepens it.
 Resolving the conflict can only be achieved in one of three ways:
distance, destruction, or dilution. It is the goal of hatred to achieve one of the
first two, and it is often the goal of hatred cloaked as anti-hatred to destroy
the enemy by the third. It is therefore based upon understanding, curiosity,
and clarity that hatred is justified, as I believe my hatred for Social Justice is
itself justified. This avoids the dangers of blinding yourself by hatred. It is
worth recognizing that it is this very blinding lack of empathy and
understanding that explains why SJWs cannot win debates, and are gradually
but consistently losing support, political control, and their confidence across
the Western World.
There is a time to love, and a time to hate. Just as the opposite of love is
not hatred, but indifference, the opposite of hatred is also indifference—both
being facets of caring. We should not love blindly, nor should we hate
blindly. As the old saying goes, guard your heart above all else, because
everything else comes from that. Do not let it be cut out, nor let it run wildly,
and the appropriate seasons to love and to hate will become more clear.

Hatred That Traps; Hatred That Self-Destructs

My favorite work of fiction and a great inspiration for this work is

Homer’s Iliad. People often believe it to be a story of the Trojan war, and
indeed, it does take place within it (albeit in only a few weeks out of what we
are told is a 10-year war), but it is not really about the war. It begins with the
conflict well underway, and ends long before the resolution of the fighting.
The infamous Trojan Horse has not even been conceived yet, let alone built.
The protagonist of the story is not Paris, nor Menelaus, Priam, Hector,
Agamemnon, nor even Odysseus, who is to be the hero of the Odyssey. The
subject is quite literally described in the first line, which reads as follows:

Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles, Peleus’ son, the ruinous wrath
that brought on the Achaeans woes innumerable, and hurled down into
Hades many strong souls of heroes…
 The book is about the excessive anger of Achilles, and his refusal to let
it go. Achilles gives us a perfect demonstration of the hatred he is feeling
when he tells Hector, immediately before killing him:

There are no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can
never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out and through.

Here, visible to everyone, stands the impossibility of agreement

between mutually opposed wills. But when this story is looked at in context,
it can illustrate some of the dangers of unjust hatred as well.
In the story, Achilles’ was dishonored by the tactless king Agamemnon,
and the great warrior, responding to the king’s injustice, withdrew himself
and his men from the fighting. This action is not properly hatred; it represents
just anger, being proportional to the dishonor. But when the king sought to
right his error, and Achilles rebuffed his offers of compensation which far
exceeded the damage of the offense, the anger became unjust. One can easily
imagine the lone soldier, stalking the beaches and the rocks as the fighting
goes on nearer to the walls of the city, stewing in his own fury and justifying
it all in his own head in an endless loop, until the righteousness of his rage
could not be satiated by anything. He became trapped inside his own anger to
the point that only the death of his close friend and companion Patrocles was
able to pull him out again.
Hatred unchecked by understanding can make one vulnerable, or
dangerous even to one’s friends. Let it ferment too long, without action of
some sort, and it can also leave you depressed, paranoid, falsely superior,
self-righteous, impervious to new information or reconciliation, and
eventually, exhausted and apathetic. It can trap you in an endless loop,
stealing away all your attention and your emotional energy. You only have so
much time to give attention to things, and you can only love, cherish,
improve, and protect that at which you direct your attention. If hating
something draws away all your attention, you will functionally cease to love
anything. It is in this manner that hatred, while at once an expression of love,
can also overtake and override the very love that drives it.
 Like Achilles, we can spend all our energy justifying our rage, only to
find that we haven’t spent any energy enjoying and building anything that we
love. Fruitless hatred, and hate that ignores love, can ultimately become as
soul-killing and self-defeating as an unwillingness to hate.

I speak from personal experience on this. Like many young Millennials,

I’ve spent thousands of hours online, debating people on social media,
reading headlines and articles, and listening to videos online about current
events, religion, politics, and the like. I do not count the time as wasted: my
writing and debate skills were honed while listening to persuasive speakers,
reading good writers, and getting into arguments with skillful opponents.
But the vast majority of the issues I argued over do not really impact
my life in a tangible way. There’s nothing I can do about a school shooting in
Texas, or ISIS decapitating four people in Iraq. If I was merely informing
myself, that would be one thing. But in my experience, these conversations
always metastasized into an argument, in which both sides would pour out
their souls in righteous indignation about the morality of this, or the injustice
of that, typically with extreme incredulity that anyone could hold a position
other than their own.
Periodically, I would suffer from acute outrage fatigue. Every once in a
while, the frequency and vitriol of these unproductive, directionless, and
unactionable arguments would leave me feeling stripped of caring at all. I
became so obsessed with finishing the argument and trying to sway the
incorrigible that at several points I deactivated my online accounts so I could
detoxify myself from the rampant online sound and fury.
Like the misanthropy of the idealistic anti-hater, the apathy of a tired
hater eats away at love itself. The more you fight about everything, the less
you care about anything. Again, if what you are defending is not something
you love very much, your stamina in the furnace of hateful combat will be
low, and you may soon find yourself wondering if anything is really worth
loving strongly enough to justify the frustration, futility, and fatigue you feel.
And we know where that leads.
 VII. Conclusion

“It’s time to quit worrying and learn to love the battle axe. History
teaches us that if we don’t, someone else will.”
—Jack Donovan, Violence is Golden

Case Studies in History

Boudica had ample reasons to hate the Romans.

In ancient times, the Romans were a double-edged people: generous in
citizenship and the amenities of high civilization, but ruthlessly brutal to
those beyond the circle of their empire. After the Romans had invaded Britain
in AD 43 and conquered the southern region, the Roman historian Tacitus
described the people of the British Isles as being generally amicable to the
Roman occupation in Agricola:

The Britons themselves bear cheerfully the conscription, the taxes, and
the other burdens imposed on them by the Empire, if there be no oppression.
Of this they are impatient; they are reduced to subjection, not as yet to
slavery.

Around AD 60, however, subjection had evolved into abuse, extortion,

and, eventually, insult. In Annals, Tacitus described the fate of one particular
Briton chieftain:

Prasutagus, king of the Iceni, famed for his long prosperity, had made
the emperor his heir along with his two daughters, under the impression that
this token of submission would put his kingdom and his house out of the
reach of wrong. But the reverse was the result, so much so that his kingdom
was plundered by centurions, his house by slaves, as if they were the spoils of
war. First, his wife Boudica was scourged, and his daughters outraged. All
the chief men of the Iceni, as if Rome had received the whole country as a
gift, were stript of their ancestral possessions, and the king's relatives were
made slaves.

The whipping of Boudica and the rape of her daughters were not the
first instance of Roman tyranny, but the pinnacle, and also the final straw. As
word made its way around the country of the outrage, the Britons decided
that they had had enough. Around AD 60, Boudica began rallying the tribes
in revolt against the Romans. The new, massive army seemed to find a
symbolic, vicarious identity in the crimes committed against their new
Queen. Their unfettered hatred drove them forward in an unstoppable horde,
annihilating all Roman forces and burning down settlements along their path,
including London. They seemed invincible, and the Roman governor
responsible for the abuse of the Iceni—Catus Decianus—fled across the
English channel, never to return.
But the Britons under Boudica had not really faced a prepared Roman
fighting force. The Romans had grown arrogant in their domination of the
island and their forces were divided. General Gaius Suetonius Paulinus had
been off quelling a Druid rebellion on the island of Mona.
But now he had returned.
It had been a tactical decision of Suetonius to withdraw from London
which allowed Boudica and her army to raze it so easily, not the force of their
number or their rage. In the withdrawal, Suetonius had padded his own Legio
XIV with auxiliaries from the city and a few extra detachments, bringing his
army to an estimated 10,000 men.
The Britons, bolstered by their successes and by their massive
numerical advantage[2], did not know what they did not know about the
Romans, and charged.
Suetonius had very carefully chosen his battleground, and had arrayed
his soldiers in a series of wedge formations to channel the Britons into close
quarters. There, their inferior armor would make Boudica’s forces vulnerable,
and the infamous stabbing short-sword of the legionaries—the gladius—
would be at its most effective. Before the carnage began, the Roman general
addressed his men curtly and confidently:

"There," he said, "you see more women than warriors. Unwarlike,

unarmed, they will give way the moment they have recognised that sword and
that courage of their conquerors, which have so often routed them. Even
among many legions, it is a few who really decide the battle, and it will
enhance their glory that a small force should earn the renown of an entire
army. Only close up the ranks, and having discharged your javelins, then
with shields and swords continue the work of bloodshed and destruction,
without a thought of plunder. When once the victory has been won,
everything will be in your power.”

The victory was absolute. The well-trained legionaries mechanically

and industriously dispatched Britons, who could not advance against or injure
the Roman formation, but could not retreat, due to their own soldiers pressing
them forward. Tacitus claimed that the Romans lost only about 400 men,
while killing perhaps 80,000 of the enemy.
It is claimed that Boudica poisoned herself soon afterwards. But the
revolution had been poisoned, in a manner of speaking, from the beginning.
The Britons did not truly understand the nature and capabilities of the
enemies they fought. Prasutagus did not understand who the Romans were
when he signed away his daughters and his kingdom to “Rome,” nor the
idiosyncrasies of the politicking Roman governor to whom he was
submitting. And his wife did not understand the equipment or tactics of the
supremely competent Roman general against whom she was fighting. She
was blinded by hatred, justified by righteousness but not justified by
knowledge of her enemy, and the tragic consequences for the Iceni—and all
the other tribes of Britain—were predictable.

Arminius
 There were many other European rebels against the Romans, including
such noteworthy names as Vercingetorix and Viriatus. Both men led
campaigns against the Romans that were surprisingly successful, despite
ultimately failing to hold back the most powerful military in the world.
One commander, however, stood out from the others; not only in his
success, but in the permanence of his victory: a twenty-five-year-old
Cherusci tribesman named Arminius.
The decisive victory took place in a single battle in 9 AD. The Roman
General was a wealthy patrician named Publius Quinctilius Varus, an
inexperienced military leader but effective and ruthless political
administrator. At his disposal, Varus had three legions (XVII, XVIII, and
XIX; between 20,000 and 36,000 men.
At Arminius’ disposal: a rough, underequipped, contingent of mutually-
opposed Germanic tribesmen. Perhaps 15,000 or 20,000 men, though some
estimates range as low as 12,000.
It was September, and Varus was already departing with his entire force
from their summer camp, near the Wesser River, west to their winter
headquarters near the Rhine. At the time he was to depart, he got wind of an
uprising, and decided to attend to one final military action en route before
settling in for the year. The road to the embattled area took them north of
their planned route west, through unfamiliar territory. But a small tribal
uprising would have seemed a minor task to Varus, with a trained and
seasoned Roman army under his control, before continuing along his way.
There was no uprising in the north, and Varus would never reach that
destination to find out.
Arminius began his three-day attack after the Romans had been
marching northwest for a day. Varus’ forces were stretched out long and thin,
with the vanguard building roads and bridges as it went for the rest of the
army. Cassius Dio reported that the Romans “were not proceeding in any
regular order, but were mixed helter-skelter with the wagons and the
unarmed,” as they passed through the narrow strip of traversable land
between Kalkriese hill and a peat bog. This meant that when the Germanic
soldiers appeared at the top of the recently fortified hill and began pelting the
Roman line with javelins, the legions were “unable to form readily anywhere
in a body, and being fewer at every point than their assailants, they suffered
greatly and could offer no resistance at all.”
The Romans fought back as they could, and even attempted to take the
hill, though they were quickly repulsed. After sustaining heavy casualties in
miserable and confusing conditions, the Romans finally managed to secure a
nearby location for setting up camp. There they burned their wagons and
other unnecessary baggage, in hopes of being able to travel lighter and faster,
and perhaps to survive the next day.
The next day, however, turned out worse than before. The road took
them through the woods, and there the Germans had set up yet another
ambush. Varus suffered tremendous losses, and it seemed as if more German
tribes were joining in after hearing of the initial victories.
On the third day, the Romans—tired, wet, surrounded, and exhausted—
attempted to fight back, but to no avail. According to Cassius Dio, Varus
finally admitted his defeat:

They were still advancing when the fourth day dawned, and again a
heavy downpour and violent wind assailed them, preventing them from going
forward and even from standing securely, and moreover depriving them of
the use of their weapons. For they could not handle their bows or their
javelins with any success, nor, for that matter, their shields, which were
thoroughly soaked. Their opponents, on the other hand, being for the most
part lightly equipped, and able to approach and retire freely, suffered less
from the storm. Furthermore, the enemy's forces had greatly increased, as
many of those who had at first wavered joined them, largely in the hope of
plunder, and thus they could more easily encircle and strike down the
Romans, whose ranks were now thinned, many having perished in the earlier
fighting. Varus, therefore, and all the more prominent officers, fearing that
they should either be captured alive or be killed by their bitterest foes (for
they had already been wounded), made bold to do a thing that was terrible
yet unavoidable: they took their own lives.
 Things did not go so well for the other officers or soldiers, who were
butchered or enslaved. Roman officer and historian Velleius Paterculus
recorded the mayhem:

Of the two prefects of the camp, Lucius Eggius furnished a precedent as

noble as that of Ceionius was base, who, after the greater part of the army
had perished, proposed its surrender, preferring to die by torture at the
hands of the enemy than in battle. Vala Numonius, lieutenant of Varus, who,
in the rest of his life, had been an inoffensive and an honourable man, also
set a fearful example in that he left the infantry unprotected by the cavalry
and in flight tried to reach the Rhine with his squadrons of horse. But fortune
avenged his act, for he did not survive those whom he had abandoned, but
died in the act of deserting them.

The body of Publius Quinctilius Varus was decapitated, and the head
was sent back to
Rome in a basket, whereupon Emperor Augustus, hearing of the totality of
their defeat, walked up and down the palace, shouting “Quintili Vare,
legiones redde![3]”
Though two of the Aquila—the Eagle standard used by each legion—
were eventually retrieved, around 16 AD, the legions were never
reassembled. After a fruitless campaign of vengeance against Arminius and
the Germans, the Romans withdrew, never again to expand the Empire north
of the Rhine.

What made Arminius so different from Boudica?

The German commander was no ordinary Cherusci tribesman. The son
of a Chief, he had been sent off to Rome with his brother Flavus, when they
were both children. He grew up as a Roman, became a citizen, and eventually
even became an equestrian. He joined the military, and quickly rose up the
ranks until he became an auxiliary lieutenant to a rather wealthy political
administrator, named Publius Quinctilius Varus.
So close was the young Arminius to Varus that when another Cherusci
tribal elder (and Arminius’ father-in-law) named Segestes came to Varus
before the battle, and warned him that Arminius had planned to betray him,
the Roman commander dismissed him without a thought.
It had been Arminius who organized the various German tribes against
the Romans in secret. It had been Arminius who had invented a rumor of an
uprising somewhere up north, immediately before the legions departed for the
Rhine, and who had destroyed the various Roman outposts in preparation for
the ambush.
Arminius hated the Romans, we may presume. His aspirations and
identity were German, not Etruscan. The way that Varus treated his people—
the Cherusci and the other German tribes—might have angered him. Such
psychological musings are, of course, speculation, but the idea that a
promising young officer in the Roman army would abandon and even oppose
everything he had grown up with, and leap into a comparatively weaker,
tribal nation, full of people who distrusted him, is hard to attribute to greed,
ambition, or boredom.
Arminius acted as a hateful man acts. He did so with patience, deep
understanding, and while keeping his head cool. His hatred was justified in
his understanding of the Romans—their methods and their nature—which
allowed him to evaluate them, try them before the judgment of his fellow
Germans, and then massacre them.

The stories of Boudica and Arminius are not the purest independent
examples of “hot” and “cold” hatred, but they are comparable. Let your
emotions drive your actions without knowledge, and you may fail in
humiliation and defeat at the hands of your oppressors. Channel your
emotions, and pursue their fulfillment with knowledge and discernment, and
perhaps you may get the chance to humiliate and eviscerate them.
It should be said that hot, unjustified hatred is not the worst thing, since
it at least signifies a moral pulse. So long as you are not a nihilist, you are not
dead, and until death, there is always time to improve and grow in your
character. But the ineffectiveness and dangers—physically, emotionally, and
psychologically—of unjustified, hot hatred should be in your mind when
running down the warpath. This is not so that you avoid hatred altogether, but
so that you execute its purpose most effectively and safely for yourself and
those you love.
What happens if you do not righteously pursue those who you ought to
hate? Is it so bad to abstain from hate?
Enter Segestes, the man who tried to reveal Arminius to Varus in 9 AD.
It was known that Segestes had not approved of his daughter Thusnelda’s
marriage to Arminius, and from this we can infer that his attempted betrayal
of his son-in-law was not circumstantial, but rooted in a hatred of his own.
Tacitus makes clear that Segestes preferred Roman rule, and resented
Arminius’ love of German independence and, more crucially, his willingness
to fight for its attainment.
In 15 AD, Segestes took his pregnant daughter away from Germany to
give to the Romans as a hostage, as a sign of loyalty. Tacitus reported his
words as something to this effect:

This is not my first day of steadfast loyalty towards the Roman people.
From the time that the Divine Augustus gave me the citizenship, I have
chosen my friends and foes with an eye to your advantage, not from hatred of
my fatherland (for traitors are detested even by those whom they prefer) but
because I held that Romans and Germans have the same interests, and that
peace is better than war. And therefore I denounced to Varus, who then
commanded your army, Arminius, the ravisher of my daughter, the violater of
your treaty. I was put off by that dilatory general, and, as I found but little
protection in the laws, I urged him to arrest myself, Arminius, and his
accomplices. That night is my witness; would that it had been my last. What
followed may be deplored rather than defended. However, I threw Arminius
into chains and I endured to have them put on myself by his partisans. And as
soon as you give me opportunity, I show my preference for the old over the
new, for peace over commotion, not to get a reward, but that I may clear
myself from treachery and be at the same time a fit mediator for a German
people, should they choose repentance rather than ruin. For the youth and
error of my son I entreat forgiveness. As for my daughter, I admit that it is by
compulsion she has been brought here. It will be for you to consider which
fact weighs most with you, that she is with child by Arminius or that she owes
her being to me.

Despite destroying Varus utterly, and fending off the attempted punitive
campaigns of General Germanicus, Arminius was robbed of his wife and son
by the very people he had attempted to free from ignominious servitude. In
21 AD, his own family and tribe (most likely with the aid and direction of
Segestes) killed him.
Having grown up and served as a Roman, he knew the Romans well,
and he rightly pointed out that his father-in-law did not know the eventual
price of Roman rule:

Other nations in their ignorance of Roman rule, have no experience of

punishments, know nothing of tributes, and, as we have shaken them off, as
the great Augustus, ranked among deities, and his chosen heir Tiberius,
departed from us, baffled, let us not quail before an inexperienced stripling,
before a mutinous army. If you prefer your fatherland, your ancestors, your
ancient life to tyrants and to new colonies, follow as your leader Arminius to
glory and to freedom rather than Segestes to ignominious servitude.

Perhaps Arminius did not understand the nature and intentions of his
own people well enough, to whom he had given his loyalty. This
demonstrates once again that understanding does not always eliminate hatred,
but proves and justifies it, and that the consequences of refusing to hate what
seeks your destruction can be fatal. One can only wonder if, in his love for
his own people, he was afraid to recognize the existential danger that his
treasonous father-in-law posed to himself and to Cherusci independence from
Roman tyranny.
 Hate, Love, Fear, and Theology

I would not have introduced this book with Christopher Hitchens if I

believed its principles to be dependent on the reader’s religiosity.
Nevertheless, I believe that at the heart of modern opposition to hatred sits a
justification found in religion generally, and in Christian theology
specifically. Given the deep psychological roots this subject may have in
many readers, it is worth taking some time to excavate, regardless of your
own religious inclinations. After all, there is wisdom in Homer and
Dostoyevsky, regardless of one’s supernatural beliefs; in the same way at
least, there is wisdom also in the Bible, whether you believe in a God or not.
Christians (or former Christians) reading this book may have already
intuitively picked up on a concept from the Apostles that reframes this matter
in spiritual form. Any pastor will tell you that the opposite of love is not hate,
but fear.

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear
hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.”
—1 John 4:18

What is rarely connected is that the opposite of hatred is also fear. It is

true that the source of hatred and fear are the same: a threat. But that does not
mean that our reaction to them—fear or hatred—are related, or even
compatible. The degree to which someone feels fear is the degree to which
they cannot feel hatred. They may repress their fear, and thereby make room
for hatred. But if they let fear control their mind and direct their actions,
hatred is relegated to the outer edges. Attention given to fear is diverted from
the protection of what we love. Frank Herbert was right: fear is the mind
killer, but only because it is the love-killer, and by extension, the hate-killer.
This brings us to a counterintuitive solution to the problem of the fear
of hatred.
 The answer is not trying to manufacture hatred in ourselves. That is
empty hatred, or at best unjustified hatred. Rather, it is to love, deeper and
more passionately and more honestly. Let sincerity and joy drive out your
fear. Any hate that you may require will arise organically and naturally from
the unfettered love that you hold. Put another way:

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are

honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever
things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue,
and if there be any praise, think on these things.
—Philippians 4:8

It may still be difficult for many Christians to accept that hatred can be
a good thing. They have been taught to believe—rightly—that God is love,
and that we are to love our enemies. Why synthesize something like hatred
into our moral arsenal, when God seems to explicitly command us not to
hate?
There are two theological answers to this.
First of all, the passage which commands us to love our enemies comes
from the Sermon on the Mount, which is intended to supplement the word of
the law with a mindset to hold, not behavioral injunctions to override ancient
and tested laws for action. The full section reads as follows:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an

eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but
whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take
away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.
And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go
with him twain.
Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that
would borrow of thee turn not thou away.
Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love
thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them
that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which
despitefully use you, and persecute you;
That ye may be the children of your Father which is in
heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth
rain on the just and on the unjust.
For if ye love them which love you, what reward have
ye? do not even the publicans the same?
And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more
than others? do not even the publicans so?
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is
in heaven is perfect.
—Matthew 5:38-48

“Even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” sets God as a

standard for behavior, in our relationship towards others. And what a
precedent he sets! This is the God who ordered the slaughter of the
Amalekites, and who utterly destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for their
wickedness. We must assume that God did not do this out of an intrinsic
hatred for the Amelekites, or for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, but out
of a love of Israel. By divine precedent, love and acting out of hatred are not
exclusive. By the example of God, evil must not be accepted, but utterly and
completely destroyed.
 Yes, it is true that God is love. But God is also jealousy, as Exodus
34:14 shows. By now it should be clear that love and jealousy, and acting out
of this jealousy, are no more contradictory than love and hatred. If these two
things appear contradictory, it is only because you are attempting to serve
two masters, and you have not ordered your hierarchy of values clearly. The
contradiction simply reveals the impossibility of attempting to serve two
masters. It says nothing on the theology of hatred.
Secondly, the meaning of the “love” that we are meant to show to ones’
enemies is more nuanced than the English translation implies. The original
Greek word used for “love” in Matthew 5:44 was agape, one of four different
kinds of love[4] in the Greek language. Translated literally, it means
“affection,” with a universal connotation, as in greeting strangers with
affection. It also describes the respect and love shown to the dead. It is, then,
a command to recognize the humanity and the “divine spark” in others, even
in our enemies, because the English word “love”—which is much closer to
the Greek philia than agape—cannot apply to the dead as dead, and is self-
destructive if it applies to the stranger in the same way that it applies to our
family and friends. It is an injunction to universal respect of the other as
being like us, because they too are human.
As we often use the term today, “respect” means veneration and love. It
means we “like” something. But respect used to mean that we recognized
quality in something, whether it is a friend or an enemy. “Respect your
enemy” meant to not underestimate them. “Respect nature” meant to be wary
of storms and wildlife, and to understand the vastness of its power and
unpredictability. In light of the original meanings of these words, “love your
enemy” means you must see the humanity—the power, intelligence, memory,
and in Christian theology, the divine nature—in your enemies.
Such a command is practical, spiritually powerful, and aligns with a
theory of hatred which is justified in understanding one’s enemy, rather than
willfully misunderstanding them. Your enemy is human. To call him a
“cockroach,” a “rat,” or a “cancer” may feel empowering, but it commits the
sin of misunderstanding the nature your enemy, and precludes the possibility
of either justifying your hatred or seeing that he is not, in fact, your enemy;
whichever the case may be.
 This interpretation also aligns with other biblical passages, which
would otherwise appear to contradict Jesus’ teaching on the mount to love
one’s enemies. It was in the same sermon, after all, that he said that “till
heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law,
till all be fulfilled.” Consider, how one could “love your enemies” as it is
usually translated, in light of the following passages:

“Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye
bloody men.
For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take thy name
in vain.
Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with
those that rise up
against thee?
I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.
Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts:
And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way
everlasting.”
—Psalm 139:19-24

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the
heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant,
and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to
build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to
dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather
stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast
away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to
speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?
I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be
exercised in it.
He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also
he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that
God maketh from the beginning to the end.
—Ecclesiastes 3:1-11

One need not be a Christian to see the truth and value in religious
passages such as these, and Christianity is far from the only faith that
supports this notion. A passage from a core text of another religion I have
grown familiar with in recent years grasps the concept as succinctly as any
Biblical passage:

“The mind only knows what lies near the heart, that alone is conscious
of our affections. No disease is worse to a sensible man than not to be content
with himself.”
—Havamal

Sincerity

This book was not motivated as much by a love of hatred as it was by a

deep personal hatred of dishonesty. Deep down, I believe most of us hold
certain people in deep contempt. Often there are good reason to feel this way,
and many times there are not. But it is troubling when people do not allow
themselves to admit that hatred, even to themselves, because they have been
convinced that it is an evil emotion. It does not matter whether their feelings
are just or unjust, hot or cold: lying to themselves about it helps no one.
Acquaintances of mine, who clearly and justifiably hate certain
ideologies and those who practice them, who hate politicians who threaten
their livelihood and identity or academics who would destroy their children’s
minds, will still say “it is not about hate.” Perhaps they mean that in the sense
that it is actually about love, which is certainly correct. Somehow it seems
unlikely.
But there’s a creeping dishonesty and defensiveness in their tone, as
though in appearing to be motivated by hate, they would somehow be
betraying their purpose. Even among hardened and jaded culture warriors
familiar with the language traps and philosophical acrobatics of SJWs,
activists, and gun-toting John, the admission of hatred remains something of
a psychological weakness. This hesitancy to admit feeling hatred induces a
pallid dishonesty, filled with lame defenses that do not convince anyone.
Pointing out the hypocrisy—“democrats are the real racists!”—they are
patently unwilling to embrace their own hatred and justify the foundation
upon which their ideological structures rest.
It is hard to overstate the importance of honesty in pursuit of truth,
wisdom, character, and the good life. But while we peruse platitudes about
the importance of being earnest, we often make excuses for little lies, and the
little lies we tell ourselves are the easiest of all. Lies we tell ourselves have no
external check, no one to call us on our bullshit. And big lies we tell
ourselves can destroy our integrity. They can destroy your Self.

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and
you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that
claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the
validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly
denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And
what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise,
but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two
make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is
unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind,
and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”
—George Orwell, 1984

Lying about hatred is a big lie. It is like saying that two and two make
zero, and the conclusions are just as dire. Without objective truth, without
values that you care strongly enough about that you would be willing to
defend their preservation with violence, then you have no map, no compass,
no orientation to guide you. You cease to have an interest at all, and have no
reason to resist others who would happily use you for their own interests,
whoever those others happen to be.
Perhaps they simply forgot to drop their own preferences, loves, and
hates.
But this book is also for them. I do not want my enemies lying to
themselves. Perhaps they have something important to say, that I can learn
from. I can see the hatred of my enemies—Social Justice Warriors,
Feminists, Marxists, Multiculturalists, and many, many more—and I can see
the psychological damage they are wreaking upon themselves by lying. I
want strong enemies. When I was in debate club in college, I could demolish
liberal students whenever a politically partisan issue came up because none of
them had read conservative arguments, as I had. They were unprepared,
weak. And I was a less skilled debater than I could have been because of it.
Lying to their enemies, I can understand, and would expect. That’s Sun Tzu-
101, and a favor I’m happy to return to them. It is the lying to themselves,
and amongst themselves, that is… problematic.
And is it not simply more satisfying to defeat stronger enemies?
Whether it is in literal warfare, or the more metaphorical variety—politics,
law, culture, or even sports—the strong man never gets a sense of satisfaction
from defeating pathetic, weak enemies. It is only from defeating challenging
enemies, worthy of one’s hatred, that your own strengths can be vindicated
and demonstrated. As Nietzsche pointed out many years ago, it is in this way,
at least, that we can learn to love our enemies.
It is not love of my enemies, however, which motivates me to write this
book. Rather, it is hatred for them, and love for the things and values which
they threaten. I hope that those who share my love of freedom, of beauty, of
justice, will read this, and free themselves from the fear of being “hateful.” I
hope that they will see and understand that we cannot love without the
possibility of hate. I hope they will see that nothing is worth avoiding at the
expense of love. I hope they will see that hatred is love, and is love’s greatest
and last defense.

If, by happy chance, a few of my enemies happen to read this, I am glad

for them and for myself. With luck, their understanding of my arguments will
be clearer, their arguments will be stronger, and perhaps from this they will
find the courage and the ability to put away slander and violence, and once
again make the battle one between ideas.
And if not, the greater the glory for those of us who saw the war
coming in time to prepare.

[1]
“The passions must be suppressed.”
[2]
Dio estimated that Boudica’s army approximated 230,000 men, though Tacitus believed
this to be an exaggeration.
[3]
“Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!”
[4]
The others being eros (sexual love), stergein (familial love), and philia (affectionate,
brotherly love).