Bad things happen. People mean to do well, but hurt others in the process. Words are misunderstood, and actions are committed rashly. All of this can lead to varying degrees of hatred.
Many Western cultures treat the emotion of hate as a negative concept. You are supposed to love your neighbor as yourself, turn the other cheek, and let bygones be bygones. Those who create these social concepts have ulterior motives as they showcase hate as a consuming poison that must be eradicated.
Social control is the main force driving this anti-hate campaign. If you choose to control a society, for instance, then you need that society to be as complacent as possible. Hatred can lead to anger, and anger can lead to violent action, and violent action is the opposite of complacency. Thus, harboring the emotion of hatred becomes socially unacceptable and religiously immoral.
Hatred, I would argue, is a necessary emotion for human existence. Nevertheless, allowing hatred to fester in your mind and heart can lessen your quality of life and lead to excessive and unnecessary despair.
When we experience true hate, it is an immediate flow of rage that encompasses every aspect of our being. How we act as a result of our hate depends on our nature. It is best not to bottle up the rage. Likewise, letting out your wrath by hurting others or yourself can lead to negative consequences down the road. Instead you must find a balance that allows you to control how you physically and verbally act upon the emotion.
As an event occurs that causes hate to capture your body, allow yourself to truly feel that darkness inside you. Attempt to understand what is causing the hatred to rise, and verify what outside stimulus is increasing your scornful spirit.
Sometimes you will not be able to think clearly when you are in a moment of animosity, and you will only be able to understand your hatred after the fact. Nevertheless, try to give in completely to experiencing the emotion when it happens, even if you must excuse yourself out of fear of violence. Not allowing yourself to feel the hate will only increase its power over you, and make it that much harder to understand and cure.
Realize that hatred is an extreme reaction to conflict. Every action, whether internally or externally, can lead to some form of conflict within our lives. It’s part of what makes us human.
Experiencing anger from conflict gives us an opportunity to know ourselves better. For instance, if a particular action suddenly causes you to loathe another individual, examining the situation can truly determine your personal beliefs and views of individuals and society. Refusing to investigate the reasons behind your hatred wastes a life experience and can only lead to a lesser understanding of yourself.
After hitting the climax of hatred, coming down from that high should give you ample time to confront your hate. Only when you have time to understand the exact reasons behind your hatred will you be able to seek out closure and/or a remedy to cure your anger.
As long as the hatred is fresh within you it can be analyzed and removed. When you ignore your hate or refuse to confront it, then it becomes toxic bile within your system causing you to change your regular actions to accommodate your new state of hatred and intolerance.
Even if you manage to identify every reason for your hateful thoughts and every outside cause of your anger, you may not be able to find closure or a cure to alleviate the matter. Your personal beliefs and morals are your own, and you cannot force others to always play by your rules. When you cannot come to a conclusion on how to end your hatred, you can at least come to accept why something angers you and proclaim that circumstances are sometimes out of your control.
If it is a behaviorism in another person that upsets you, you could try to calmly explain to the person that his or her actions make you uncomfortable.
Choose your battles wisely. A person cannot easily change certain elements about themselves, such as their ethnicity, sexual orientation, cultural upbringing, or religious opinions. You taking the time to voice your concerns to them may alter their behaviors, true, but it could also lead to more aggression and an increase in your level of rage.
Any lingering hatred you currently possess is a sign that you have not taken the opportunity to be introspective and discover the reasons behind your rage. While this exploration may be painful at times, it is necessary to your happiness.
Allowing yourself to become consumed by anger every time a particular situation occurs will take time and energy away from the more important aspects of your life. However, you cannot live your life without hatred because you cannot live your life without conflict. Try to realize the difference between a new sting of hatred and a lingering flow of abhorrent anger.
Confronting your rage will take you one step closer to understanding the reasons behind it, as well as further your understanding of yourself as a human being. Learning to move on, even if you cannot have full closure, is sometimes the only solution. Allowing yourself to forever dwell on things you cannot change will keep you stagnant and continuously unhappy.
Focus on what you do have control over. Do not deny yourself the freedom of experiencing your thoughts and emotions, but do not allow your emotions to take away your freedom.
The Eccentric Eclectic's Blogs About Everything and Anything 
I was referred to your blog by the auto-generated reply. What a gem I have stumbled upon in your blog! I read the entry on “Hate” and absolutely love it. I’ll include your blog in my list. It is rare to find someone who can write about everything, anything. I am lucky to find you.
Hi L,
Thanks for the invite at Shelfari. must say you have great ingenuity to track me down at Shelfari!
Sometimes when I logged into wordpress and try to comment on other people’s blog, I’m never quite sure which of my blog address would appear, as I maintain 2 blogs, one of which is a private journal. But here I am, I can be found in shelfari, in http://www.bibliojunkie.wordpress.com.
As I am not a native English speaker, and you are a native speaker with an English major, you might find glitches in my written English! My apology in advance. 🙂
It’s a pleasure to know you. Please feel free to chat me up or give comments. I would be delighted!
Actually for some reason I wasn’t immediately able to look at either of your blogs. I ended up entering your username on a search engine and stumbled across your Shelfari account– — fortunately I have an account of the same sites, so things worked out.
I just added your blog roll to my list, and I will definitely read and comment when I can.
You mentioned you’re a non-native English speaker, so I was curious as to what your native tongue is?
I would greatly enjoy chatting you up from time to time.
Cheers,
-L.
My native tongue is Chinese. Native tongue is a misnomer, because actually Mandarin is a language, Taiwanese and Cantonese are dialects of a variation of Mandarin. Yes, I speak all 3 of these, including English and Malay, which is the lingua franca of Malaysian.
But I felt I speak and use English a lot more now that it feels almost native. Except that because I learn English as a second language, it’s a not a natural part of me. I can write something, look back at my sentences and think up 3 ways that I could correct my sentence / grammar. I suppose English is an easy language to learn, but difficult to master. You of all people should know.
I thought you could fare very well as a self-help writer. You wrote with profound insights into the emotion of hate and anger that sums up what a self-help book on anger management could do.
I struggle with a lot of anger, unfortunately almost most of them are beyond my control. That’s not to say I’m have a victimised or helpless mentality. but I’m such a go-getter that when a lot of things went wrong and cannot be put right, especially something which is core to my existence and reason of being, I felt a persistent anger that eats me away. I can’t purge them easily because I am confronted with situation that provokes such anger almost every single day. And I can’t say, ahh… to H*ll with it.. because if I tell myself I do not care about the things that happened my life, I wouldn’t be the proverbial go-getter wouldn’t I?
Anyway, it’s a struggle. Do not meant to think of you as a shrink. It’s just a thought.
I think you write great stuff. I haven’t had time reading the rest. But I will do so in a very near future. I hope you published one day. If Cecelia Ahern can do, you can do it 100 times better than her.
Forgive me taking over a week to write back — — my deadline is coming up for my most current project. No matter how well I plan out what needs to be done with my projects, I always get super focused on work as my deadline is coming up. The project I’m working on actually has something to do with what you wrote in your last response. I am presently writing a self-help book, but it is focused on helping people find a career that makes them happy. It’s my first book commissioned through a publishing company, and I see it as a steppingstone into being an author instead of just a journalist or blogger. Not that I want to stop being either a journalist or a blogger, I just like expanding my horizons;0)
You mentioned that your native language is Chinese, or perhaps more specifically Mandarin. I always find myself impressed by multilingual people. It aggravates me immensely that in the states we do not encourage our children to learn other languages until they are already 14 or 15 years old. Perhaps in private institutions or charter schools it is different, but it is certainly the case in the public school system. Learning a different language is far more effective if we start when children are young, like between ages 3 and 10. Many people still have this idiotic mindset that children are ignorant, when in reality children learn faster when they are younger because their brains are willing to accept so much more information. They lack the filtering system we adults develop and have to fight to break through.
In regard to English, I find you have a strong command of the language. Nonetheless, I completely agree that you can write any sentence in English and then find multiple ways to rewrite the sentence with the same meaning. I’ve studied other languages, but I’m not fluent enough to know if this phenomenon occurs with other languages. When I tutor students who are English as second language learners, I kind of feel bad that my native language is such an ambiguous system where the rules don’t always apply. In fact, English is so absurd at times that even though Americans and people in the UK both speaking “English,” we constantly find ourselves not understanding one another. I think it was on a movie called “About a Boy,” with Hugh Grant that had an extra on the DVD entitled “English to English dictionary.” It made me giggle profusely.
You talked a lot about your emotions, especially how you deal with anger in situations. Your ability to articulate your emotions is a very good sign. Many people become overcome with anger but can’t quite explain why they are so angry. I’m not sure if anyone living in the real world, as opposed to a monastery or solitary existence, can truly control their anger every second of the day. There might be some things in life we can say that we don’t care about — but I agree with you in the fact that certain people — go getters as you call them– care about things too much at times. A burden and a blessing, true, but it is what it is. The best you can hope for is to recognize what is making you so angry and figure out if you can avoid those situations or confront them.
Furthermore, you have to judge what level of anger you’re experiencing. I know that when I’m driving and there’s traffic, I easily get annoyed and do occasionally start swearing at drivers who will never hear me. In the states we call this road rage. But the anger goes away when I get out of the car. Maybe I tell someone about what some stupid driver was doing, but nothing more than that. Every day has frustrations like these that will temporarily just infuriate us, but once we’re out of the situation we don’t think about it again. For those situations, I wouldn’t let yourself feel bad or guilty about temporary moments of anger. That being said, if those temporary moments of situational anger cause you to physically harm yourself or someone else, then you may need to seek some form of professional therapy because there’s probably a deeper issue that you are not yet addressing.
Anyhow — I must get back to my project. My deadline is Thursday the 14th, and I am doing the final editing stage of this project. I definitely prefer writing to editing, but I like playing with the details. I guess I don’t mind editing so much.
I hope to hear from you soon, and forgive me if I take a while between responses.
Cheers,
-L.
Hi L,
Thanks you for taking time to write a long reply. Sorry for not replying sooner, I got caught up with a whirlwind of reporting responsibility, especially doing it for the first time. Well, I finally finished it today. A big heave of relief!
The Chinese language do not abide to a stringent rule. Although kids in school these days are taught to adhere a lot more rules about the Chinese language, but it is really just adding bureaucracy into the language (and I am sure the educationers would disagree with me). The Chinese language is made up of block of characters. and One character means something, and if you put Char A with char B, it is not the same as putting Char A with Char C. So it is quite a creative language. Used a more refined characters, that will display your prowess in the language. Very much so like the English when they write in the Queen’s English. The difference that you talked about for example English between American and English, happens for Chinese as well, Chinese Singaporean, and Chinese Taiwanese and Chinese Beijingnese all call the kettle a different kind of pots. I suppose this phenomenon is localisation, rather than due to ambiguity in Language rules, as in the case for the Chinese Language.
Enough about the languages, the other day I was talking to a friend, a guy, and I mentioned that I always ended up talking about interesting things and topics with another guy, instead of a person of my own sex. It is a sad case that I find female friends are shallow, reserved or reluctant to share. and I told this friend of mine that I thought you were exceptional, as a woman. So yeah, if I have more friends or woman like you, I wouldn’t be sharing my ideas with guys all the time, which may perceived as some degree of adultery, esp when you are married! 😀
I am soo.. Happy to hear about your project! Let me know the title and the ISBN and I’ll go grab a copy..generally I am happy in my chosen career, but what I needed is a little bit more money! haha 😀
As I’m typing this at work, I need to run off for a meeting. You can write to me at bibliojunkie.jovenus@gmail.com, and we can speak more about it.
Take care, and good luck in your book!
P/s : Do keep me posted.
I just discovered I wrote incoherently.. correction.
I wrote: Very much so like the English when they write in the Queen’s English.
is supposed to be: Very much so like the British when they write in the Queen’s English.
I wrote: The difference that you talked about for example English between American and English.
is supposed to be:
The difference that you talked about in English language for example American and British…,
URghh.. I told you I am not a natural! 🙂
I was ‘Google-ing’ or looking for someone to substantiate my conclusions on the emotion of hate and came upon this Blog or commentary. I have long ago concluded that hate is as real and necessary an emotion as love although there is no pleasantness in it. To hate the fact the the ice and cold does damage to your child’s feet,as maybe a crude example, would cause one to remedy that hatred and acquire that child protective footwear would not be a bad thing. It does not mean you hate all cold for it also brings beauty in snowfall, ability to skate, ski and add to the existing beauty of nature however temporarily. One must hate the actions of a rapist or child molester in order to protect oneself or loved ones from the perpetrator of those evils.
To add to your conclusion that “.. hatred is an extreme reaction to conflict” I would suggest that sometimes hatred is often a reaction to extreme conflict.
Like love, lust, desire, envy and all human emotions, to conclude that any of them are good or bad is to assume that human emotions are chosen.
I could no sooner wear a ‘don’t be a hater’ tee-shirt as a ‘don’t be a lover’ one. – insufficiently analyzed love, as an example, has far too often given birth to irrational and terrific hate. Witness the current rate of divorce and it’s damaging effect on those ivolved and especially the innocent children.
After all there are those that love arson, rape, violence, cheating, Demons etc.
My finding you and reading all of this wisdom in both you and the young lady ‘L’ have made my day.
If I may, I would like to ask questions as I do not profess to have all answers on this subject. As a start I would like to address your comment that “Any lingering hatred you currently possess is a sign that you have not taken the opportunity to be introspective and discover the reasons behind your rage”.
Upon reading that statement I was immediately made to wonder of the politician or concerned citizen that feels a need to correct an injustice done to his country or way of life. I thought of the past conflicts in Cuba and Tibet.
If discovering the reasons for ones rage should lead to passivity and then failure to lead/make necessary changes or defend ones love of country/culture as an example then which path should be taken?
Thank You! I will be looking into your other writings.
Sincerely
E.Dee
Dear Eric,
First of all, let me apologize for not responding sooner. If you want to know why I haven’t responded faster, you can read this information.
As to your question, I’m not sure I can provide an absolute answer. Introspection allows you to find out the reasons and motivations behind your rage and hatred – true – but knowing why you’re mad does not necessarily allow you to come to any conclusion of how you should act. On the one hand, I would say act in the way that will cause you the least amount of hatred in the end, but I would fear that in saying so it could lead to people taking the action of absolute vengeance, which I do not advocate. I’m a humanist above all else, and I would promote people acting in a way that supports helping their fellow human beings to become healthier, happier, wiser, and more productive. In places of such political and social turmoil as you discussed in your example, there are no easy answers for what people should or should not do. Concerned citizens need to act, but citizens can only do so much without the support of the people or the support of the government. Likewise, the government needs to act to protect the people, but politicians are still human and easily corrupted, or in some cases easily threatened into action or inaction.
In regards to my blog, I was mainly addressing the individual, and not large-scale groups. Granted, groups are made of individuals, and individual actions can cause a landslide of effect; however, with each additional player involved in such large-scale politics, each action/choice results in a multitude of variables, so I can’t in good conscious provide instruction on what to do unless I know every single variable, which is nearly impossible. I could give you platitudes that people need to treat people with respect, the politicians need to stop corruption, etc. etc., but those are idealistic catchall pseudo-solutions and not answers.
While there needs to be a movement toward change to promote human connection, charitable reciprocity, and a pursuit of knowledge, I don’t know if society as a whole, a global whole, can agree to move toward with these ideals, since we focus so much on what separates us. Some argue that a change is coming, that economies are crumbling, that governments are falling apart, and that massive war is on the horizon. While I would not want to live through those ordeals, I do know that, based on history, if such events occur that they will cause massive changes to our society. Unfortunately, such horrific events only guarantee drastic change, but change is only judged as good or bad based on human and social perception.
I think that the positive changes I would like to see occur in our world would have to happen through slow adjustments to society. People deal better with change if it happens fast enough to be recognized but slow enough not to cause resistance. While I realize I may not live to see these changes in my own lifetime, I take comfort that my children and my children’s children may benefit from the changes of a steadily paced humanist movement.
hate is needed for our survival
Hate and Anger results when we are pushed to the corners and our voice is ignored and suppressed
This frustration of losing our place in Society will result in Nager and we will hate the person who took things from us and our mind considers him a threat our existence
Instead of Giving into hate we need to control it and learn the reason for hate and use our brains to get what we deserve
If we can control love then Hate can be controlled as well!
I couldn’t agree more.