Disgust And Hatred

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Continuing the conversation started long ago about emotions, feelings and experiences, I turn to the side of, unfortunately, current experiences: disgust and hatred. Over the past week, I have read a lot of wishes for death: my country; murderers of journalists from a French newspaper; journalists of a French newspaper; blasphemers in general; non-patriots. Well, and besides wishes of death - just gloating and hopes for a worse fate to opponents of all stripes. Hatred blooms and smells, but what to do with it is a question …

At the same time, hatred does not belong to the elementary emotions of a person (such as fear or joy), it is a cocktail of several emotions, which, in a certain combination, gives out one of the most powerful and explosive human experiences (and the behavior corresponding to it).

The foundation for hate is disgust, one of the primary emotions. Disgust has a pronounced physiological component and the task is to protect a person from contact with a harmful (poisonous) object, it is not for nothing that nausea and vomiting are frequent companions when faced with something disgusting (like excrement, decomposing organic matter, mucus, etc. - each will select for himself …).

So, the main function of disgust is to reduce contact with an unpleasant / dangerous object to zero, in disgust we freeze or run away. Therefore, by the way, people often confuse fear / fear with disgust - they are similar in appearance, but still have a different purpose: fear is a contact emotion (we are attentive to the object of fear), while disgust (as this word itself says) this contact helps to nullify (as much as possible). When the disgusting object disappears from the field of possible contact, we calm down. Psychological disgust ("secondary", as opposed to "primary" physiological) is associated with completely unacceptable values for us or the behavior of other people, acting as an analogue of poison in the natural world. It tells us in the language of emotions: “If I become like this person, I will be poisoned, I will die for myself as a person. And he is already poisoned, he stinks of terrible thoughts / values / behavior. " The natural reaction to psychological disgust is the same as to physiological, that is, withdrawal, the maximum increase in distance. We simply move away from contact with people who exhibit behaviors that come into violent conflict with what we deem acceptable.

If we add a few ingredients to disgust, we get hatred. More often than not, hatred is born from a combination of disgust with fear and disgust with resentment, spiced up by the inability to move away from the object of disgust. This is a very important point: with hatred, a person seeks to destroy what causes hatred, because coexistence in the same space with the object of disgust is impossible, but it is also impossible to eliminate, therefore, there is only one thing to do - to destroy. This feeling is characterized by the posing of the question "either I, or he / she / it", there can be no intermediate options in hatred - being an extremely strong experience, it burns out all semitones. Disgust puts the question differently: "do what you want, but don't get caught in my eyes, and don't bother me!"

For example, a person thinks gays are disgusting. If he is simultaneously afraid that these "terrible creatures" can threaten his world, and there is no salvation from them ("they are everywhere, they want to make everyone gay, and generally corrupt the young !!!" - then anger is born from this mixture, growing into hatred that requires an exit Hatred of parents is often born out of disgust and resentment.

How to generate hatred where it seems to have not been observed before (and there is no objective threat)? The recipe is clear: put some people (or a group of people) with disgusting moral traits (Jews drink the blood of Christian babies; all Muslims are terrorists; Russian barbarians can do nothing but drink and rape …) and add fear / remember offenses: “they are coming to you, they will make you live your own way! " or "do you remember how they humiliated you ?!"As a matter of fact, the nationalist cult of historical grievances, which is very popular in the world, especially in the post-Soviet space (the Baltics, Georgia, Ukraine, Russia …), is the most fertile environment for the formation of hatred, you just need to add disgust to the appearance of neighbors (and if the neighbors really serve for this reason - so generally a fairy tale …). It is very important to suppress empathy, because the ability to see the good in a disgusting person greatly interferes with hate.

The more limited and narrow the worldview of a person / community of people, the more reasons he has for hatred. And then hatred further narrows the picture of the world, riveting attention only to that which causes disgust - and so on in a vicious circle. In order to destroy the hateful, one must come into contact with the ugly. And thus you are poisoned.

A useful function of hatred is the release of energy to destroy a deadly threat from which you cannot fence yourself off. The problem starts from the moment deadly threats begin to multiply where they do not exist. A person obsessed with his own fears and weaknesses is most susceptible to hatred, but, due to weakness, he will not realize his hatred himself, but will join the one who still dares. Then the hatred is accompanied by schadenfreude in the style of "and the neighbor's cow is dead" or "they deserve it, they deserve it!" And tolerance becomes a dirty word - what kind of tolerance can there be in a world where there are only monsters, and you are a weak trembling creature?

I am personally very familiar with the feeling of hatred when I once realized that one group of cultists was determined to make an attempt to grind me up / discredit me using the methods of information war that disgust me. I entered into opposition, responded with blow for blow, but gradually it became clear that the forces were unequal, and I definitely would not be able to defeat the sect. The combination of hatred and impotent rage as a consequence of the impossibility of destroying the enemy is a poisonous cocktail …

"She insulted me, he hit me, she defeated me, he robbed me … In those who harbor such thoughts, hatred will never fade away … For never in this world does hatred stop with hatred …"

The lines from the Buddhist Dhammapada came in handy. If you cannot win and come together in a powerless clinch with the one you hate, you can endlessly wish the enemy trouble, but this will not make him worse. At the same time, hatred, as I realized especially clearly, connected me with those whom I hated, almost with the same strength as love (which is why I do not consider love to be the opposite of hate) - I followed and read what my friends wrote.”(And this is a frank and disgusting dregs) - and, it seems, did it with no less zeal than they did. I got poisoned and read, the gag reflex was suppressed by hatred. They had much more resources, and only a weakly expressed intellect made it possible to somewhat equalize the chances J)))))))).

I managed to escape when, immensely tired of the clinch, I simply focused on what I was doing myself. And let disgust take over anger and fear, drag me out of this field and turn my back on it.

As long as we are focused on the "enemy", his actions and failures, we are in close connection with him. In a real war, this is justified. But in virtual wars, where damage is measured not by corpses, but by nerve cells, the winners, as a rule, gain Pyrrhic victories.