"HATE"

I got involved in a bit of a discussion over in "the Other Place" a couple of evenings ago.

It concerned the concept of hate and where it all comes from, and the discussion emerged from the rather kind comments made in response to my own little rant about the stater of the world after I'd felt angry and frustrated about some of the horrific things that are currently going on in the world.

Of course, you could argue, and quite correctly, that there's always something horrible going on in the world, but there does seem to be more than humanity's fair share of it going on at the moment, even though it seems that human beings are pretty much behind it all and we've brought a lot of it upon ourselves.

You might want to suggest at this point that "human beings" is a relative term when it comes to some of the perpetrators of these acts, but that is, of course, the language of hate, and precisely the sort of thinking that's getting us into these various messes in the first place.

But you may disagree with that kind of liberal-thinking nonsense, and it is, of course, your right to do so… but I'm asking you to try not to simply hate it, because it's such an extreme place to immediately go that it leaves you with little in the way of wriggle room.

Disagree by all means. Be irritated at the very idea. Actively dislike it if you choose, or tell me that you "Can't stand" it…  but please (please!) at least try not to go immediately to hating it, even if you're just throwing down the word to make a point.

After all, the whole notion of hate is a human construct, and an extreme state of being, and such an extreme term isn't something we should bandy about no matter how tempting it may seem.

So where exactly does all of this hatred come from…?

As I'm sure you know, there's a lot of research that clearly says that it's learnt behaviour, but I don't imagine that you really would like to set off on that particular debate in a place like this. Sometimes it comes from being young and frustrated... Sometimes it comes from being old and bigoted... Sometimes it's cultural… Sometimes it's simply a belief based upon ignorance... or inaccurate information... or self-interest... or… or… a thousand and one other things which are essentially human failings.

Most of the time it's just down to a failure to communicate, but that's not necessarily so easy to rectify as we sometimes like to hope.

Meanwhile, and because of such thinking, it has become a word that I am personally trying my best to avoid using in any context (You know, as in "I h*** rice pudding!" and so on) because it is such a powerful and emotive term. Sometimes the word does slip out without thinking, of course, but that is just a failure on my part and merely proves that I must try harder...

My own preference is "dislike" (you'll spot it regularly here in Lesser Blogfordshire, although that other word seems to be featuring rather more than I'd like it to today), but, of course, merely substituting one word for another is fundamentally philosophically unsound too, I suppose…

If I say "dislike" when I mean the other word, doesn't that make the substitute word just as bad…?

Because, if you SAY "Oh fudge!" it doesn't mean we don't know what you really meant, (or so my mother used to say). Actually, I used rather a lot of proper swear words around my old mum as we both got older, but there you go…

I'm the one who has to live with that.

Also, just saying "The 'N' Word" and calling it that, doesn't mean that everyone isn't completely aware that you really mean, well, the 'N' Word, either… This is, of course, an interesting example of an offensive term that has been reclaimed by those it was once thrown at as an insult, much like the disparaging words once thrown at homosexuals have also been.

I believe that Germaine Greer once tried to do much the same thing with The 'C' Word a few years ago, although it seems that the world wasn't quite ready for that one yet.

Perhaps that might be one way to go… reclaim the word "Hate" and it might lose it's power to invoke hatred, but somehow I don't think that's going to work, even if it is just a word when all is said and done.

Although it's funny how that old adage ending with "...but words can never hurt me!" could actually be so VERY inaccurate after all, really...

Words on the page can be very open to misinterpretation, too. It is sometimes extraordinarily difficult to get that "arch twinkle" that you're hearing in your mind as you writer into cold, hard type when it's read off the page... 

You see, I go through life just assuming that nobody takes me seriously at all, and that they will assume that I'm just being flippant about pretty much everything, so it's quite horrifying to occasionally discover how somebody has sometimes interpreted something meant in a completely different way…

For example, I actually got into some trouble a few weeks ago for picking someone up on using that word that I'm trying so very hard to avoid using again in this piece.

"It's just an expression. I didn't mean anything by it…" was the perfectly understandable response that I  (quite rightly) got for coming across as such a pious git.

Although...

Don't you just really dislike it when that sort of thing happens…? ;-)