The Roots of Hate

Hatred is big in the news these days. They hate us, we hate them, we hate each other. It has to make us wonder why, if we humans are as wonderful as we tell ourselves we are, we seem to want to devour each other with only the slightest provocation.

Hate, I think, is rooted in what we know about ourselves, though we'd never tell anyone - that we are flawed, that there's something desperately wrong with us. Like chickens with their pecking order, we have to maintain the fiction that we are all right by identifying those who are less all right. If I can steep myself in disdain and rejection of those around me, then I can tell myself that, comparatively speaking, I'm close to perfect. Kimveer Gill, the killer at Dawson College in Montreal, hated everyone, it seems. He practically lived on the Internet, feeding his impression that the whole world was locked in some evil conspiracy against him. One can only imagine the personal demons he was fighting, but his rampage of shooting was surely his last attempt to make himself feel right.

This, of course, is a pretty superficial explanation. If we were to go deeper with it, we'd have to ask what it is that is wrong about us, what it is that turns our own inadequacy into hatred. We'd have to look at the way we dehumanize our opponents to justify hating them, how we convince ourselves that they deserve nothing from us, how we come to believe that anything we do against them is justified.

The picture that emerges is pretty dark. We could argue, I suppose, that only a few people are afflicted like this, but the seeds of it are in all of us. There is an answer to it, buried deep in the pages of the Bible, but first we would need to admit that all of us share the roots of hatred. In that admission we can find the pathway out. If you want to find it for yourself, read my posts starting July 3, 2005.