Human nature to "hate" something?

Interesting question for this thread.

Here's something I observed in my life. Back in college, I came to hate a person--with what I felt was a perfectly good reason. Anyway, I hated this person so vehemently, with such passion, that I didn't seem to have room to hate anything else. It was as if this person, totally without their knowledge, was some kind of anger-sink for me.

For years, I lived a happier life, simply because all of my rage and hate was focused in a single direction. It's only been in recent years, as time has eroded my memories and anger, that I've allowed rage at other things to creep back into my life.

Hate, although certainly not one of the prettier emotions, is necessary. How extremely you feel it, and how you allow it to control you and shape your actions are certainly important, but I don't think I trust people who can't hate. I don't know that I believe that someone without hate can feel love, either.

My $.02.

:confused:
 
"I don't think I trust people who can't hate"

I would take that statement a step further and say that I don't believe that there are mature, mentally unimpaired humans out there incapable of hatred. IMO, if someone claims that they cannot hate anything, that person is probably merely in denial, running from an issue in their life, instead of confronting it.
 
I think it only proves that you're human to hate certain things.

Hate is just as valid an emotion as love.
Maybe it's like light and darkness--you cannot experience one without the other.

Kamkazmoto said that babies don't hate, it's something they learn.

I don't necessarily agree (although if he's right, then you could also say babies don't love, but are taught to love).

We don't know what babies think.
We do know that they cry when they are in pain--so they probably hate being in pain.
Most babies cry when they are wet and cold--so maybe they hate being wet and cold.

Allen.
 
Man has a lot of choices in life. We can fight evil and always have someone or something to point our finger at, A viable alternative awaits, we can chose to do good and let evil and hate consume those who chose to play that game.

Two great authors discuss this arena, Jampolsky and books on forgiveness and Glasser and his work with reality therapy and choice theory.
 
I hate screwing up, hurricanes, and frizzy hair. And I'm not so sure I like my mother in law that much after 31 years of knowing her. Do people get weirder the longer you know them? I think they do. What a Monday this has been. :barf: Cavelady
 
Cindy, your mother-in-law must have done at least one thing right, or you wouldn't have stayed married to him so long and she wouldn't have stayed your mother-in-law! :D
 
Esav Benyamin said:
Cindy, your mother-in-law must have done at least one thing right, or you wouldn't have stayed married to him so long and she wouldn't have stayed your mother-in-law! :D
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The GUILT factor. Ok, Ok, it's her frigging poodle that yaps and yaps. I don't like eating out of a bowl that she will snatch out of my cupboard and put water in it for him to drink out of :barf: Feeding him bits of scrambled eggs on my couch :mad: and the stupid dog is named after Johnny Cash. J.C. for short. My gawd.
 
Ed Fowler said:
Man has a lot of choices in life. We can fight evil and always have someone or something to point our finger at, A viable alternative awaits, we can chose to do good and let evil and hate consume those who chose to play that game.
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Agreed! I think that a person--at least anyone who considers themselves to be upright, moral, and good--is duty-bound to strive to be the best person that they can. Part of that struggle is the effort to enhance one's best qualities, and minimise the impact of the bad. It is a societal imperative.

That said, however, I stand by my belief that, for a person to be the best that they can be, they must accept that, within every person lies the capacity for hate, alongside of mindless rage. In accepting that fact, they do not give in to it. Rather, it is a case of being forewarned, and thus, armed to resist these baser emotions. In my own case, I found that by being so frothingly angry at one person (who, fortunately, I was able to stay away from at most times), I could focus my temper to a fine edge, and thus not fall prey to the minor points of anger in my daily life. I found that I almost never became angry about traffic, the weather, or any of the other trivialities of life. I just didn't have the bile for it. All of my alloted rage went straight into hating that one person. I should probably find them and thank them for performing such a selfless deed for the rest of the world, but I doubt that they've changed enough to understand me when I tell them.

Oh, by the way, I'm still fighting to bring out the 'forgiving' aspect in my personality!! :D ;) :p
 
Cavelady, get a set of personalized dog bowls with the poodle's name on them -- and insist that whenever he comes to your house he simply must eat and drink from his own personalized bowls! You can get them by sending away to the dog food companies ... or maybe you can find some Johnny Cash decals ... or just any random guy dressed in black; he'll never know the difference....
 
Cumberland Knives said:
Amen Brother, I know exactly what you're talking about. It's amazing how many people, over email at least, are willing to curse, threaten, slander, report, sue, prosecute, or kill over making a mistake, or not doing something fast enough !
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I am opening a soap company and have just today had to threaten the box vendor into action. First, they required half payment to get started on the job (30,000 boxes, a large order), and then the guy quotes me three to four weeks lead time. Well, I talked to his partner/significant other early last week and told her that September 2nd would be four weeks, and could I have the boxes by then? "Oh sure! No problem!" she says. She said the owner would call the next day to get me a firm date. All week goes by, and I don't hear from the guy. I had to call back three times to finally get him and he says "September 2nd? That just ain't gonna happen." Then he proceeds to tell me how they've moved locations, and don't have their printing equipment setup, yadda, yadda, yadda. Then he said he would call today by mid day to give me an update. Midday comes and goes with no phone call. I call his partner, demand that she get him on the phone, and she said he wouldn't interrupt his current conversation.

Long story longer, I have no choice but to conclude that he's dealing with me in bad faith, so I send him an email to that effect and advised him that I would be seeking further remedy if I didn't have a firm date by tomorrow at 1:00 central. I mean, by the way they are acting, I have no idea if they even have the money or resources to complete the job, or whether they even care. He left me a message giving me reassurances that we would have the boxes by our opening, but just let me say that I am quite skeptical. My point is that I think that threatening a vendor with a lawsuit when you have good reason to believe they are dealing with you in bad faith and you stand to lose a lot of money (lack of communication after sending a huge payment, cavalierness, omissions in fact, etc.) is perfectly approriate.
 
Mellow Chaos, just make sure you sue him because you love him, and want him to be the best businessman he can be. :D
 
Esav Benyamin said:
Mellow Chaos, just make sure you sue him because you love him, and want him to be the best businessman he can be. :D
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Beleive me, Benyamin, threatening to sue someone is my very, very last resort. These people have just been nutcases. Packaging accounts for about 25% of what you can charge for an item, if it's done professionally, even though it might only be 20% of your unit cost, so we ARE looking at some serious harm to the startup of my business. If I don't have packaging for my product, the people won't want it. I'm paying rent, and I can't open even though the soap and other products are ready!
 
We are hyperintelligent apes...we got a kickin cortex but kept the emotional wiring/centers of a snake....we do our best to inhibit it, using higher functioning but at heart (or brain) we are wired up in a pretty imbalanced way.
 
RunsWithKnives said:
We are hyperintelligent apes...we got a kickin cortex but kept the emotional wiring/centers of a snake....we do our best to inhibit it, using higher functioning but at heart (or brain) we are wired up in a pretty imbalanced way.
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Speak for yourself.
 
Anthropologically speaking, we are not only intelligent for apes, but we have integrated earlier brain functions with more recent developments, or the entire system wouldn't work. In fact, newer parts of the system, like fine motor skills and language, use parts of the brain originally developed for other purposes.

It is a fallacy to think we "can't control" ourselves. We certainly can, and generally do. But some people are socialized in less inhibited environments than others.
 
Hatred is an exaggerated feeling of aversion. Aversion exists for evolutionary reasons. Stupid animals can't remember eating spotted mushrooms is bad, so those that develop powerful memories of aversion tend to survive to adulthood.

I like to think humans should be smart enough to make rational choices rather than rely on irrational emotions. But humans obviously can't or won't. Entire ideologies have been founded on this emotion. As with all powerful emotions, hate can be channeled into motivational energy. You can artificially piss yourself off and do more than you normally could when more laid back. We all do this, but in the long term it's self defeating. Loyalty, healthy perspective and hardwork wins the long game.
 
Another angle on this most excellent topic is that some people seem to thrive on being hated. Like a child who wearies of trying to get positive attention from it's parents and resorts to destructive behaviour to get any kind of attention - some people seem to live off other people hating them. Many football umpires seemed to have this personality type in my experience.

An old friend of mine, I'll call him Ed, who was a fairly hyperactive character, was driving me home one day and complaining of feeling a little run down and tired. He suddenly swung the wheel of the car and we skidden across the road, right in front of someone coming the other way. Not enough to cause an accident but enough to scare the life out of the driver of the oncoming car (and me). Said driver overtook us a few minutes later and screamed a volley of abuse as he went by - real frothy mouthed, veins at the temple, purple faced rage.

Ed immedietly perked up. He swore by this method as a pick me up and reckoned it was worth much more than several cups of coffee. Getting someone pissed off was a great energizer to him.
 
Cougar Allen said:
Cavelady, get a set of personalized dog bowls with the poodle's name on them -- and insist that whenever he comes to your house he simply must eat and drink from his own personalized bowls! You can get them by sending away to the dog food companies ... or maybe you can find some Johnny Cash decals ... or just any random guy dressed in black; he'll never know the difference....
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Ok I will. And I think I'll use a magic marker that will read "J.C. Walk The Line" on it. :D
 
I have always said that some people ain't happy unless they are mad or hateing. Most of the time it doesn't matter who or what.
There is only one person in the world that I truely hate. But I hardy ever think of him. I belive the old saying "What goes around, comes around" I know one day he'll get what he deserves.
 
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