Mike: The world seems to be in such a mess, not just because of Covid. I cannot make sense of why there is so much hate, especially online and especially in these trying times. What is hate, and how should I respond to it?
Sundari: If there was such a thing as a hate-o-meter, I am sure it would be a fairly accurate assessment of how much fear, extreme rajas and tamas, are expressing in society. But hate is love too. Someone only hates something or someone because it suits them to do so. Everything we do or don’t do is an attempt to love ourselves. Love is paying attention and hate is paying attention, only in a negative way. Hating does not negate the fact that our nature is love, which is true even if we hate ourselves or ‘others’. This is true of everyone, even for terrorists. People are not born haters. Hating is a learned response to life, usually taught by primary caregivers. Being programmed from childhood, ingrained conditioning is doing the hating. Our likes and dislikes, fears, and desires, do not come from outside of us. They bubble up from within us, from the unconscious or Causal body.
They are born of the ignorance of our non-dual love nature and contaminate our ordinary everyday mind when they emerge from our subconscious mind. Many haters are not conditioned to hate but become haters because of damage done to them in childhood. They are susceptible to the lure of belonging when they find their way into what feels like a tribe. Haters usually require company to reinforce their deep sense of grievance and lavish great approval on new recruits. Take for instance the man who videoed his massacre of over 50 innocent people in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was lauded as a hero by his hating tribe. What was he looking for? Love, acceptance, attention. And he got it. As bizarre as it sounds, to him, what he did was an act of love because he was looking for the Self. He believed that by ruthlessly killing all those people, he would find what he was looking for, self-acceptance. Fortunately, not all haters resort to such extreme violence, though some do.
Hating takes the form of personal animus, an identity. It offers its tribe of disenfranchised misfits a social bond, a shared grievance currency. Sociologist and experts on the subject say that haters tend to bond and create their own social club, a way of being accepted and seen. Haters want simple black and white answers to complex personal, social, or political problems. At its core hatred is an unconscious sense of helplessness so haters have a desperate need for validation, visibility, and purpose. Hate can even be a cure for loneliness. It is a substitute for the lack of opportunity to take action against real or imagined personal or social forces by externalizing deeply buried pain and projecting it onto a chosen victim. Far-right racist or religious extremism is the most obvious hate-projection, but it can be onto anything or anyone. Haters have found even James and I good targets for their grievances.
People who are drawn to the hate movement have an acute desire to make sense of their place in the world. There is a complete disconnect between who they are and who they think they should be, what they have, and what they want. They have an irrational sense of entitlement and want to seize or regain what they believe is their rightful status which has been taken from or denied them. They want empowerment with minimal effort and hate seems to offer that. Social media is the ideal breeding ground for hate because it offers instant cheap thrills but more importantly, it provides anonymity. Haters are cowardly bullies, losers dressed up as pretend warriors, hiding behind a creed of false slogans adopted by their group. They owe their phony bravado to a collective group mind. All you need to become a member of the group is to bond with the shared identity of people who feel righteous discontent.
Hating is not new, though it does seem to be more acute and visible now thanks to social media. Perhaps more people than ever will emerge from 2020 on the side of equality and peace, who knows. I would not hold my breath, knowing how deep ignorance is. There are those who will turn to hate even more, finding it, perversely, to be a kind of balm in these ridiculously polarized and uncertain times. Hate is the ultimate futile attempt to control outcome. It is more prevalent now because now more than ever it is clear that there is nothing anyone controls. Hate, which is a combination of projection (rajas) and denial (tamas), always exists and poised to exploit grievances and fears. But it tends to surge during periods of social upheaval when there is a huge discharge of rajas and tamas, offering the usual racist or conspiracy theories for seismic change.
There are no easy answers to stopping hatred. While tech companies and social media platforms certainly can and should do more to identify and ban hate speech, sadly, this process inevitably becomes a game of Whack-a-Mole. Bringing the law to bear on hate speech and crimes while necessary, is at best, remedial. Nothing can vaccinate the world against the duality of denial and fear which is what gives rise to fear, the parent of extremism. Only Self-knowledge can do that.
On the personal level there is no way to respond to hate except to ignore it. Anything you do to respond to it only feeds it because haters need a reaction to feel good about themselves. Hate is quintessential duality so trying to help or reach out to it is a waste of time. The hater needs to hate. Hate must run its course until it has discharged its fuel, which it always does. Can you imagine what it must be like to live with that kind of mind? It is hard to sustain and eventually runs out of energy. The only real solution is to see hate from the Self’s point of view as the deepest darkest side of ignorance and have compassion for the one afflicted with it. Haters are extremely damaged people in a lot of pain.
Love Sundari