Why do they hate us?

It is now cultural dogma that "hate" (or the tiresome gay version, H8) is always wrong, bad and evil. Inexcusable and to be repressed entirely. Hate is the new Lust. Being call a "hater" is another way of instantly invalidating you. (It's like "racist".)

But wishing doesn't make it so. All human emotions make sense, whether you like them or not. And none of them are going away.

One of the fuels that drives hatred is a sense of being under threat. One of the kinds of people or groups or ideas we hate is what threatens us.*

Part of the campaign against hate is a desire to prevent certain groups from noticing or, worse, asserting that they are threatened.

Some threats are fantasied or overdone. Many threats are absolutely real. Paranoia, like so many mental dis-orders, is really just a natural and normal state gone rogue.

Hate often makes sense. And if you disallow that emotion in others, you will never get to understand why they hate you. It's not just because they are bad or defective (though they may be) but because they perceive you as a threat to something they value.

And you very well may be.

It might be instructive to lay down your defensiveness and investigate. Not to make friends or surrender, but to figure out what and how your enemy is thinking. Isn't Sun Tzu supposed to be cool right now?

The outcome of this may not be Kumbaya moral equivalence and Star Trek one-worldism**. You may decide that you are a threat and that's just fine with you. In a world well characterized by John Kekes as full of "scarcity, flaw and contingency", being a threat to someone is well nigh inescapeable. Mother Nature made the rules long before you were born.

So if you find yourself (personally or as a group) hated by someone, ask yourself why...and be prepared to find an answer other than that you are an innocent and blameless object of mindless and irrational hate. Hate often has a clear mind and a functioning reason. But with different interests from yours.

If you are gay, or a Jew, or White, or a Muslim, or Black, or an illegal immigrant, or Republican, poke around a little and some more reality may come your way.

If you really ask Why Do They Hate Us, there's usually an answer.



*Perhaps this is a source of the Christian prohibition of hatred, a recognition that it is rooted in fear. If the Christian religion is true, then a believer cannot be truly, that is, ultimately, threatened by anything human. So there are no grounds for fear, and hence, for hatred of any human.


**Although very entertaining, Star Trek is the epitome of liberal dishonesty. Positing an end to poverty and war and tribalism on earth, through mere technological means that eliminate scarcity, (which it imagined as the source of flaw and contingency), it had to project the drama of violence and competition out onto the galaxy. Otherwise, there'd be no script. They don't call it science-fiction for nothin'.

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