Hate is the new sex

[innonimatu]

I'd like to share an opinion piece I read, that makes just this comparison.
Link http://www.ecosophia.net/hate-new-sex/

The point is that public discourse is just reenacting old mistakes and deceits, only changing the subject. Some quires worth pondering upon:

the conviction that certain common human emotions are evil and harmful and wrong, and the way to make a better world is to get rid of them in one way or another. That belief is taken for granted throughout the industrial societies of the modern West, and it’s been welded in place for a very long time, though—as we’ll see in a moment—the particular emotions so labeled have varied from time to time. Just now, of course, the emotion at the center of this particular rogue’s gallery is hate.

These days hate has roughly the same role in popular culture that original sin has in traditional Christian theology. If you want to slap the worst imaginable label on an organization, you call it a hate group. If you want to push a category of discourse straight into the realm of the utterly unacceptable, you call it hate speech. If you’re speaking in public and you want to be sure that everyone in the crowd will beam approval at you, all you have to do is denounce hate.
[...]
The Victorian horror of sexual desire has been mocked so mercilessly in recent decades, and not without reason, that a lot of people these days have apparently forgotten just how seriously it was taken at the time. During its heyday, people in Britain and America loudly proclaimed exactly the same attitudes toward sex that their great-grandchildren now display toward hate. If you wanted to define anything as utterly beyond the pale, you just had to label it as “immoral”—in the jargon of the time, this meant “sexual”—and the vast majority of people were expected to recoil from it in horror.
[...]
It was also something that all of them experienced. That’s where the comparison begins to bite, because insisting that sexual desire was beastly, horrid, filthy, etc. didn’t make it go away, or deprive it of its substantial role in motivating human behavior. It just meant that people got hypocritical about it. Some pretended that it wasn’t there. Some insisted that in certain sharply defined contexts—for example, within the bounds of legal marriage—it wasn’t the same, no, of course not, how could you suggest such a horrid thing? Some pursued any of the other dodges, and there were plenty of them, that allowed people to pretend that they weren’t getting sexually aroused and acting on their arousal when, in fact, that’s what they were doing.

That’s what happens whenever people decide that an ordinary human emotion is unacceptable and insist that good people don’t experience it. A culture of pretense, hypocrisy, and evasion springs up to allow them to vent the unacceptable emotion on some set of acceptable targets without admitting that they were doing so. That’s what emerged in Victorian society once people convinced themselves that sexual desire was the root of all evil, and it’s what has emerged in our time as people have convinced themselves that hate fills the same role. In a very real sense, these days, hate is the new sex.
[...]

What do you think? Is the contemporary public abhorrence of hate another social folly that future historians will laugh about?

Personally I think that this is actually not a laughing matter for us who are living with it. If hating is something filthy for all the "good" people, those people will not fight for what they believe. For why fight for what you believe to be just except if you hate injustice?
If people take up causes, it is because they have strong emotions about them. And those who have have strong political emotions cannot go about hypocritically claiming that others (who happen to be political adversaries) are bad humans because... what, those (also) have strong emotions (hate something they want changed)?

I'm not worried about some kind of reaction (a Revolution of Hate as the linked piece speculates), I'm worried about how this condemnation of hate encourages apathy or ineffective action in politics now...

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The Victorian attitude toward sex is still with us in a lot of ways. A man who enjoys sex is considered normal. A woman who enjoys sex may be labeled one of many different words, very few of which are positive.

Hate means different things to different people. I've been accused of "hating freedom" because I don't like something some politician has said or done. We even get the "why do you hate America?" phrase thrown around on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) comment boards - which immediately outs the poster as an American, there to spread pro-Trump propaganda (or else they're extremely confused about geography and actually think Canada is part of the U.S.).

In Canada, hate speech doesn't mean something as trivial as "I hate Brussels sprouts." That's something I can utter on any street corner and nobody will report me to the police or even give me a dirty look (unless they happen to be one of the strange people on this planet who actually like those disgusting things).

It means that I can't get up in public and start advocating hate and/or violence toward minority groups. It's why Ann Coulter ended up not speaking at a Canadian university several years ago - she was told that the content of her speech would violate our hate laws, she refused to alter it, and then ran around whining about being "censored." The thing is, we see it as a necessary thing to ensure order. After all, our country's motto is "Peace, order, and good government." We rarely get all three at the same time, but we try.

Hate is a difficult thing to deal with these days. Right now we've got hundreds of Haitian asylum seekers walking over the border from the US to Canada, since they'd rather take their chances with our immigration system than remain in the US to be deported. Over the winter, other asylum seekers - mostly originally from places like Somalia or Sudan - crossed the border. They were afraid of Trump's antagonistic orders regarding Muslims.

So here's the difficulty: I think Canada's diversity is generally a good thing. But I don't approve of queue jumping, which is essentially what these asylum seekers are doing. They're butting in line in front of people who have been on waitlists for years.

On the other hand, these asylum seekers are racing against time. If they're still in the US when Trump's deadline comes to kick them out, they'll be kicked out to a country where they're either in danger or where part of their family (the kids) never lived in the first place.

So which side of this am I on, and which side should I be on? No matter which way, I'm accused of "hating" Canada for one reason or another: diversity vs. the influx of foreign asylum seekers who are jumping the queues and may have criminal backgrounds.


Hate isn't a new thing. We just talk about it more nowadays.

 

[bernie14]

interesting...the link does not work btw.....

first reaction is well, but hate is bad, sex is not....that is a very contemporary thought though.....the second thought is that it is an argument stopper....no more debate is necessary because you are immoral....period.....gotta give it more thought.....

 

[Borachio]

Personally I think that this is actually not a laughing matter for us who are living with it. If hating is something filthy for all the "good" people, those people will not fight for what they believe. For why fight for what you believe to be just except if you hate injustice?
If people take up causes, it is because they have strong emotions about them. And those who have have strong political emotions cannot go about hypocritically claiming that others (who happen to be political adversaries) are bad humans because... what, those (also) have strong emotions (hate something they want changed)?

I'm not worried about some kind of reaction (a Revolution of Hate as the linked piece speculates), I'm worried about how this condemnation of hate encourages apathy or ineffective action in politics now...

You have a good and interesting point, of course.

But I'm not sure "hate" isn't being used in two senses here.

For example, hating injustice and hating a minority group aren't, maybe, referring to the same emotion.

Or maybe it's the object of hate which is important.

I don't know. I'll have to think about this.

 

[Hrothbern]

There are a lot of synonyms for "hate" that enable more nuances.

I am mostly worried about the superlative extreme habit of today.

 

[Borachio]

I agree. It's not a word I use often.

Nor is evil.

Once you've used those words, you've really nowhere else to go to raise the ante, lexically.

 

[EnglishEdward]

What do you think? Is the contemporary public abhorrence of hate another social folly that future historians will laugh about?

I agree that the "we hate the haters" is hypocrisy.

For example, hating injustice and hating a minority group aren't, maybe, referring to the same emotion.

I rather think that it is referring to the same emotion, because human emotions are basic mainly
operating at an animal brain level and can not take into account higher brain intellectual subtleties.

For instance if I am walking about and I suddenly realise that the other person has a missing arm or leg
or facial impairment, it often comes as a shock (my sense of what is normal is compromised with the
under brain shouting danger Will Robinson) often experiencing a visceral sense of being uncomfortable that
result in hate or what is very close to hate. It takes a moment for the higher brain to clock in reminding me that
it is not their fault that they have been unfortunate and that I should of course apply the principle of fair play.

Of course arguing the difference is a convenient line for some of the more extreme SJWS to adopt
who can thereby pretend that they are not hating the haters and thereby not implicitly hating themselves.

I'm worried about how this condemnation of hate encourages apathy or ineffective action in politics now...

In the short term it does.

In the long term it may be counter productive in that suppressing emotions may result in a nasty backlash when they eventually escape.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

If people take up causes, it is because they have strong emotions about them. And those who have have strong political emotions cannot go about hypocritically claiming that others (who happen to be political adversaries) are bad humans because... what, those (also) have strong emotions (hate something they want changed)?

So I'm a hypocrite for hating a high school teacher who preached anti-Semitism to his social studies students for years, and would fail them on assignments if they didn't parrot back all of his incorrect and hate-filled propaganda?

Jim Keegstra didn't want to change anything that was demonstrably wrong or unjust. He wanted to indoctrinate a bunch of impressionable teenage kids to hate the Jews and deny that the Holocaust ever happened. He did this for years, and left a lot of kids feeling angry, confused, and betrayed by someone they had trusted. And yeah, some of them did take to his teaching like the proverbial duck to water. Who knows what propaganda they in their turn have spread over the past 30 years?

Keegstra is dead now. Only his family misses him, and any of his friends who shared his disgusting views.

For example, hating injustice and hating a minority group aren't, maybe, referring to the same emotion.

They are considerably different.

 

[Hrothbern]

I rather think that it is referring to the same emotion, because human emotions are basic mainly
operating at an animal brain level and can not take into account higher brain intellectual subtleties.

For instance if I am walking about and I suddenly realise that the other person has a missing arm or leg
or facial impairment, it often comes as a shock (my sense of what is normal is compromised with the
under brain shouting danger Will Robinson) often experiencing a visceral sense of being uncomfortable that
result in hate or what is very close to hate. It takes a moment for the higher brain to clock in reminding me that
it is not their fault that they have been unfortunate and that I should of course apply the principle of fair play.

agree
A Dutch psychologist and evolutionary biologists wrote a nice book: "the tears of the crocodile", explaining that emotions are in that animal part of our brain functioning more or less the same as for example a crocodile.
In our brain development, we had no gradual expansion of that animal part, but got several new layers on top during our brain evolution.
The big setback being, that we have no integrated unity in our brain.

Our emotions come at the lightning speed of the lower brain close to our spine.
But because there is no integrated unity, our consciousness and social talents kick in later.

Reflecting on that, simplifying our language to the basic emotions is then somewhat identical to eliminating our human gift of constructive social behaviour.
and not much more than solist selfexpression

 

[innonimatu]

interesting...the link does not work btw.....

first reaction is well, but hate is bad, sex is not....that is a very contemporary thought though.....the second thought is that it is an argument stopper....no more debate is necessary because you are immoral....period.....gotta give it more thought.....

Fixed the link, thanks.

 

[Hygro]

The comparison between that part of the cultural left and Victorian moralizers is an old one, and an apt one.

I agree with the author that we are healthier flexing and stretching a full range of emotions.

 

[Bootstoots]

John Michael Greer is one of my favorite people on the internet. He, like you, has positions that are extremely original, orthogonal to most ongoing 1-D political debates, and quite well thought-out. There's no political label besides "environmentalist" that can plausibly be applied to him. E.g. he's a Sanders-Trump crossover, somewhat reluctantly on the second count, in large part because he wanted to see some nonzero chance of substantial change to existing US power structures. Trump did a decent job of signaling that this could happen, although of course in reality it didn't, instead just making them more naked - while Clinton was predictably going to continue and slightly exacerbate American imperial tendencies while mollifying liberals.

As someone who actually likes to read different opinions that may not fully agree with my own, I'm glad you found him. I've been following his blog for years. Both you and he are substantial influences on the way I think.

 

[bernie14]

I agree that the "we hate the haters" is hypocrisy.

.....I rather think that it is referring to the same emotion, because human emotions are basic mainly
operating at an animal brain level and can not take into account higher brain intellectual subtleties.

For instance if I am walking about and I suddenly realise that the other person has a missing arm or leg
or facial impairment, it often comes as a shock (my sense of what is normal is compromised with the
under brain shouting danger Will Robinson) often experiencing a visceral sense of being uncomfortable that
result in hate or what is very close to hate. It takes a moment for the higher brain to clock in reminding me that
it is not their fault that they have been unfortunate and that I should of course apply the principle of fair play.

Of course arguing the difference is a convenient line for some of the more extreme SJWS to adopt
who can thereby pretend that they are not hating the haters and thereby not implicitly hating themselves.

In the short term it does.

In the long term it may be counter productive in that suppressing emotions may result in a nasty backlash when they eventually escape.

can that visceral sense be considered an affront to the self?, is it a warning of some type?, does it invoke hate or fear?, I would say both...thing is, in order for that to occur, our psyche is accepting, unconsciously at least, that "yes....I am the normal one, I am the good one, I am the moral one.....that other one is the bad one, inferior, amoral (which is pretty damn normal)". one could argue that an insecure person cannot accept another's pov, simply because of the threat to their fragile ego, BUT we can also argue that a person with a "good/considerate??" (for lack of a better word) moral compass should be secure in their logic and decision making.....how can we tell who is who?

agree
A Dutch psychologist and evolutionary biologists wrote a nice book: "the tears of the crocodile", explaining that emotions are in that animal part of our brain functioning more or less the same as for example a crocodile.
In our brain development, we had no gradual expansion of that animal part, but got several new layers on top during our brain evolution.
The big setback being, that we have no integrated unity in our brain.

Our emotions come at the lightning speed of the lower brain close to our spine.
But because there is no integrated unity, our consciousness and social talents kick in later.

Reflecting on that, simplifying our language to the basic emotions is then somewhat identical to eliminating our human gift of constructive social behaviour.
and not much more than solist selfexpression

the limbic system is an victorian immoral woman!!!!

reading the article.....is there a desire for hate??....regardless of historical period, humans have always had desire for sex...jeez captain obvious, it is the essence of any (sexual) living organism. probably the MOST hardwired of all biological processes, but then again, so is survival, as the wish to maintain literal physical integrity...is this were hate comes from? suspicion, defensiveness...."hey other, I can't read your mind...whatcha coming at me for with your differentness"?

still, there is a difference, sure, animal in nature but sex would be a desire, while hate would be a defense...

EDIT: perhaps the desire for hate may have it's roots in self preservation

 

[Kyriakos]

Emotions function on a very different level than thought, as was noted. Furthermore, it seems that strong emotions are sort of a fixed and triggered will to have a progression of their own, while thoughts allow for multiple stops and ends. If you are urged to go from A to B, you can resist or do so, but thinking can allow for all sorts of other outcomes, including reflection on what is going on.

It is possible that emotions exist due to our prehistoric self not being able to rely on actual thought, and thus instinct to fight or flee was the important binary choice. I am not sure how this develops, yet i heavily suspect that ultimately our emotions are not tied to anything they may be attached to in the external world (any triggers, etc). They appear to me to be an unconscious will/urge to run a distance and arrive to a set outcome.

 

[Perfection]

First rule of hate club is you don't talk about hate club.

 

[metatron]

The comparison between that part of the cultural left and Victorian moralizers is an old one, and an apt one.

This.
It's a moral panic.
The US has one roughly once in a generation.

I don't mean to belittle the phenomenon. The outcomes will be terrible.

 

[Borachio]

Really?

Doesn't it show a degree of self-awareness and reflection?

And isn't that a good thing as long as one doesn't go overboard?

 

[Hrothbern]

EDIT: perhaps the desire for hate may have it's roots in self preservation

I also think so

I think that also connects our current hate hype with the victorian moralisers.
Without articles to support, in laymans terms, just brainstorming on it:
As first some general considerations

• Assuming that hate towards threats of your selfpreservation, to ready agression at any moment, is a natural position of your reptilian (instinct/survival) and mammalian (emotional/primitive communication) brain that bypasses your human/cortex (consiousness/social culture) brain and is easily amplified in groups by ingroup love and outgroup hate.
• Moderation of too strong emotions is good for a culture. The seven sins, Plato argued that love directs the bonds of human society. Spinoza stating that bondage relates to the human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions, etc.
• The antidotes for hate are compassion for others and peace with yourself even when threatened in self preservation by agression of others.
• Social bonding outside the parental bonding, outside the direct primary group, the social bonding of a society is helped by compassion outside your group (like the Samaritan charity) and selfless life (like the original Japanese culture).

The victorian moralisers defended, I think, primarily the distinctions between the classes, as selfpreservation. Needing a complex system of clothing, jewels, manners, traditions, etc to mark the differences. Passion and the follow up sex were a risk, compassion was a risk (replaced by philantropy).

Looking from there on this hate hype and the hyped responses of the establishment.

The hate groups are composed of people that were not exposed too much of the social bondings described above and react with hate on all the threats they feel to get their piece of future with a nice comfort zone.
The establisment, feeling threatened by those hate groups, feel threatened as well, and do not react with understanding and compassion, demonstrating the greater good of a social society,
No, nothing of that...... they soundbyte hate the haters.

Just like the anti-communist hype in the 50-ies, the anti beatnik/hippie/peace hype in the 60ies, etc.
I see that as both a moral as an intellectual incompetence of establishment leaders.

EDIT
perhaps all the gruesome pictures of human suffering in far away countries have eroded our practical ability for compassion and other social bonding features a society can have.
In effect being an overstretching of our classic society toolkit by the globalisation and the subsequent collapse that then also affects our smaller societies at regional and country scale.
Which causes a hard reset of our society scale to areas/groups smaller than we "managed" in recent history at nation/country scale.

 

[innonimatu]

John Michael Greer is one of my favorite people on the internet. He, like you, has positions that are extremely original, orthogonal to most ongoing 1-D political debates, and quite well thought-out. There's no political label besides "environmentalist" that can plausibly be applied to him.

I just found his site the other day and was indeed impressed. But environmentalism is one think where I part ways with his view: I don't believe industrial society will collapse. The sheer complexity of it scares me, I mean, take just the fact that we can talk here in a web site over the internet, all the technology that is required for that to be possible... it's something that depends on a huge number of systems, and institutions, and specialized knowledge to keep working. Yet it endures, and keeps developing. And where it suffers setbacks (I'm thinking those countries and societies devastated by wars), it gets rebuild as soon as some kind of political/social stability returns. People find new resources, new techniques, when we have to - the industrial system itself, which is the society of most of the world's population by now, has a huge inertia to it. People need it to keep going, and have always found ways.

It's a moral panic.
The US has one roughly once in a generation.

I don't mean to belittle the phenomenon. The outcomes will be terrible.

I hope it won't. there is usually a reaction against something that was dislocated too much to end of the spectrum. And the piece noted that risk: an outpouring of repressed hate? But if this is anything like the anti-communist hype, to use the comparison given above, an extreme reaction won't happen.
The current "establishment", though, is burning whatever remains of its credibility and won't get it back I think. May be for the best.

perhaps all the gruesome pictures of human suffering in far away countries have eroded our practical ability for compassion and other social bonding features a society can have.
In effect being an overstretching of our classic society toolkit by the globalisation and the subsequent collapse that then also affects our smaller societies at regional and country scale.
Which causes a hard reset of our society scale to areas/groups smaller than we "managed" in recent history at nation/country scale.

I do believe that several important social institutions fail to work effectively in big nations (empires, in practice). Democracy and those things it was supposed to enable: social cohesion, judicial equality, some degree of material and social equality... if we "globalize" the means through which we live ("the economy"), we retain far less control over out lives than if we keep that dependence local. Developing a sense of irrelevance and fatalism that is not healthy.

 

[metatron]

I hope it won't. there is usually a reaction against something that was dislocated too much to end of the spectrum. And the piece noted that risk: an outpouring of repressed hate? But if this is anything like the anti-communist hype, to use the comparison given above, an extreme reaction won't happen.
The current "establishment", though, is burning whatever remains of its credibility and won't get it back I think. May be for the best.

No, no. I don't mean anything like an opposite reaction, backlash or any of this pressure valve logic.
I mean unintended consequences.
Like, one of the previous moral panics in the US was about crime, pedophiles and milk cartons (apparently), leading to the dystopian reality that the semi-supervised childhood and youth that was "normal" in the US before and still is in Europe has been rendered, well, virtually illegal, imposing massive costs on the working class, particularly among minorities.
And just as the first generation of these permanently monitored and disciplined children grow into adulthood in the US they throw a massive fit, behave thouroughly age-inappropriately and display an unprecedented incompetence in basic skills in rhetoric, conflict resolution, pluralism etc. feeding right into the next moral panic.
This one is worse, arguably on par with Prohibition and McCarthyism.
It's hard to tell what price will come with it. But the opposite reaction (Kekistan or whatever) will be the least of their problems.
There will be a price though. These things don't come for free.