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Hate Is A Complete And Total Surrender Of Personal Power…to people who can’t or won’t change anyway.
There was a time in my much younger life when I hated one or more persons. I think at one point, it was a sort of searing, visceral hate. There were things that I dreamed about doing to the other person, but could never bring myself to do him or her. I couldn’t do those things because I kept thinking through what would happen to me.
I’d be embarrassed. I’d feel bad for the other person. I’d go to jail. I’d be ostracized by everyone who knew me. I’d regret it for the rest of my life.
Yet, those things that I thought of, that I fantasized about, they were obsessions. They took up space in my brain, time in my day and life away from me. Hate made me tired, so tired. And my hate required other people to change. But at that time in my life, I was not willing to change. My unwillingness to change made me tired. I ran in circles in my brain, trying to enjoy the hate and make the other person change more to my liking at the same time.
All along the way, people I knew and who knew me could see that I was suffering and they kept telling me the same things:
“You can’t change people.”
“Those people are never going to change.”
“You are filled with resentment. Resentment is like drinking poison, waiting for the other person to die.”
But no one ever told me that hate is a surrender of personal power to someone else. I had to figure that one out for myself. I had known this intuitively for a long, long time, yet had never articulated it. Now I see that I live in a culture that is filled with hate, with mass shootings being a major symptom of that hate, and I know what hate means to me now.
When I look at racism, I see people who hate other people for the color of their skin. That skin color is never, ever, going to change. There is no therapy, no cure, no magic available to change the color of the skin. Yet, day after day, I see headlines for mass shootings, hate crimes, threats, and protests against people of color. For the racists, I have to wonder, why hate people with brown skin when you know that the color of their skin is never going to change?
Then there are the Trump haters. I understand their pain, their sense of urgency, and their motivation. But Trump is never going to change. His job is not to make you happy. He is only interested in making his base happy, and if you’re not in that set, forget it. Move on. Focus on something that makes you happy.
I don’t actually hate Trump myself. I know the trap of hate well. The problem I have with hating Trump is that I don’t actually know who Trump is as a person. I’ve read reports of Trump visiting people in a hospital and they said he was warm and friendly, even personable in private. That is in complete contrast to the reports I read of his rallies. So I really don’t know who Trump is. And if I don’t know him, then it’s reasonable for me not to hate him.
And not hating Trump != supporting Trump. I don’t support his policies, and I don’t support him as president. But I don’t hate him. I don’t have enough knowledge about him to hate him, nor do I have the time or patience to hate him. I’m not sure, but perhaps I’m apathetic about him. I don’t really care what he does.
What matters then, is what I choose to do in response to the people in my life who may be irritating, high maintenance, or that lack the skills or capacity to do better.
When I hate someone, the focus is on them, not me. When I hate someone, since the focus is on them, that means the object of my hate is required to change in order for me to be happy. If they changed more to my liking, would my hate decrease or stop? Would I stop hating someone who changed in response to my hate? I don’t think so.
There is a region in the brain called the amygdala. That is the part of the brain that is responsible for identifying associations between objects in our environment and pain and pleasure. Most people have trained themselves to see someone like Trump and respond with pain, anxiety or displeasure, even hate. Hate is a learned behavior. Babies are not born with hate. Even racists learned to hate from someone, and they train themselves, their amygdala, to feel hate when they see someone with a skin color different from their own.
There was a time in my life when I hated mustard on my food. Instead of spending my time obsessing on how I hated mustard, I stopped putting it on my food. I did something else. I changed. The mustard was agnostic, so to speak. Mustard doesn’t have to change for me. Whether or not it has any consciousness is debatable, but for sure, I can say that it’s not the job of mustard to make me happy. The mustard didn’t change, I did. Much later in life, I developed a taste for mustard, but either way, I made the change. I exercised my own power.
When we hate something or someone, we are giving up our power. When we hate someone, we surrender our personal power completely and totally. That is because, when we hate someone, we are not considering our part in the hate. We may not have considered the possibility that hate is a choice.
When we hate someone, we are completely focused on the other person, our hate is dependent on the other person changing, in order for us to be happy. And I can tell you from personal experience, it is not possible to be happy and hateful at the same time. Try it sometime. You will find that hate and happiness cannot exist in the same room at the same time.
I have seen firsthand, the power of hate and how it disabled me. I guess then, that hate is a disability. Hate is a disability to love. Hate is a disability to do anything about my circumstances. Consider this in the context of racism. A white person hates a black person. A white person goes to public gatherings to express his hate for black people. Is the white person making anyone’s life any better by expressing his hate? He’s not working to make money, he’s not being of service to anyone, even the god that he purports to love. Hate doesn’t satisfy any human need that I can think of.
Therefore, hate as a verb is a complete and total surrender of personal power. Hate satisfies no human needs, it displaces one from a state of peace, it displaces self-awareness, and it’s addictive. Addiction is the pathological pursuit of reward. The reward in hate is the endorphins released when one is engaged in hateful behavior. Shouting epithets, marauding in groups or packs around the target of hate, protesting, writing hateful things, posting hateful pictures, memes, violence, and threats of violence, they all cause the brain to release endorphins. Those endorphins get us high, like the runner’s high.
When people start recovery from addiction, the first step is to admit complete and total powerlessness over the addiction. Most people who hate are loathed to admit powerlessness. Hate assumes the power to make other people change when that power doesn’t actually exist. The only purpose of hate then is to feel those endorphins, to feel the rage, to displace oneself from one’s own pain, and one’s own power.
So I avoid hate. I notice when the temptation to hate presents itself and I do something else. I write. I use the phone. I interrupt the thought pattern and think about something else. I think about what I could do differently. I think about the other as a person, with feelings like I have feelings. I think about the other person with needs like I have needs. I make the other person human. I assume that it’s not the job of the other person to make me happy. And I figure out how to make myself happy without any help from the other person. Those are habits, and I have done those habits for so long, that I don’t actually hate anyone now. Hate is not a part of my life anymore.
When I really want to grow, I figure out a way to be of service to the person that caused pain, irritation or inconvenience, however briefly. This doesn’t mean that I have to support the other person for their counterproductive behavior. I can be of service to that person in a very general sense by promoting peace. By meditating, by writing, by considering the other person as someone with unmet needs, without hate. Or maybe I can find a way to help that other person with his or her own pain. People who hate are usually in pain. People who cause pain to other people are usually in pain, retelling, recreating their own painful experience and imposing their fate upon another.
But whatever I do, I don’t take what others do personally, and I make it my job to find my own happiness. I make it my job to love others exactly as they are. I make it my job to be the change I want to see.
I do not surrender my power to hate. I retain my power to love, for love is the antidote to hate.
Write on.
medium.com/swlh/hate-is-a…
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