Hatred

HATRED HAS FOUND FERVENT APOLOGISTS IN OUR MILIEU.

Since the time of Bakunin, proclaiming the strength and the beauty of the destructive desire, too often, in the daily fight against all forms of oppression, the anarchists have appealed to hatred. It has given rise in our groups to interminable discussions; in our newspapers there are endless polemics. Young people, as enthusiastic as they are impulsive, have called for and ferociously defended it. Even here, in the columns of l’anarchie I recall having read a series of articles signed Olivine rehabilitating hatred which, according to Libertad, “alone creates acts of will.”

This is a lovely theme for literature, but from the point of view of logic, of reason, and anarchist education, not at all!

We need more than the sonorous assertions of a poetic enthusiasm: we need detailed, exact, and scientific arguments and logical, correct reasoning.

In order to discuss hatred, and it must be discussed for once and for all, we must begin by defining it, and this is precisely what we have neglected to do.

What is hatred?

We can, I think, after impartial analysis, define it in this way:

Hatred is a constant, imperious, a priori desire to do evil and to belittle, in order to finally destroy a being or a category of beings.

Is this sentiment in conformity with our vital interests? Is it logical? And in the first place, what is its origin?

Hatred is the child of suffering. It’s because we have suffered that we hate the person or persons who were the cause of that suffering. The worker sometimes hates the bourgeois because he sees in him the cause of all his ills. X has a ferocious hatred for Z because the latter caused him prejudice.

In practice, hatred can thus be reduced to a desire to do evil because we have suffered it.

This desire in simple beings—in animals or in men whose mentalities are not well-developed—is entirely understandable and flows from the very principle of the struggle for life. In order to live, the primitive being must be stronger than his adversaries. When he has received a blow he must be able to return two in order for his superiority to be obvious.

Returning two blows for one, striking someone without any immediately useful goal, for no reason but to assert one’s strength for a second time and because one was struck oneself—is this not the principle of vengeance, an act of hatred? This act is mechanical, purely reflex.

When a man or a beast, struck a first time, is not able to return the blow and immediately avenge himself, the feeling of permanent danger that the existence of the enemy constitutes gives rise to an uninterrupted desire to do him harm, to destroy him, a sentiment that is a substitute for the instinct of preservation, and which is nothing but hatred.

For the being abandoned to the risks of the brutal struggle for life it is useful. It keeps him on the alert, hounds him, spurs him on during the combat. It has its raison d’être.

This theory is confirmed by the observation made many times that the simplest animals, the most primitive men, are those in whom hatred is most developed and the need for vengeance most persistent.

To take examples only from those peoples closest to us, the Italians, the Spaniards, and the Turks—of a temperament much more impulsive and less evolved than that of Northern Europeans—are they not those among our neighbors in whom these feelings are most deeply rooted? On the contrary, the French, the German, the English, and the Scandinavians, with complex and reflective mentalities, are almost totally ignorant of the barbaric custom of the vendetta.

A similar comparison could be made among individuals of a same original temperament. In which category of individuals belonging to the same race is hatred the most developed and its manifestations most frequent? Among the most disinherited, the least educated, unpolished minds submitting to ancestral influences without reacting.

Marc Guyau, in his remarkable study of morality, explains clearly, through a vivid image, the decrease in the feeling of hatred and the desire for vengeance in parallel with the evolution of intelligence: “Irritate a ferocious beast and it will tear you apart. Attack a member of the society world and he will answer with a witty remark. Insult a philosopher and he won’t answer you at all.”

Conscious man no longer feels the need to respond blow for blow. He knows the inanity of vengeance, and reasoning has abolished in him raging hatred. He will only strike when it is useful and necessary, and until then all he’ll do is shrug his shoulders.

As man perfects himself, as the conditions of struggle change, weapons are modified and forces are transformed. Where victory once went to the vigor of fists and muscles, today it goes to clear and perspicacious intelligence. Violence increasingly appears archaic and barbaric.

In the eyes of an impartial logician hatred and vengeance can in no way be justified.

Take vengeance? Why? Can a crime repair the damage caused by anther crime? Is it a reason to commit another? Do we cure evil through evil?

I defend myself. But when my enemy no longer threatens me, whatever the evil he can do me might be, I don’t feel the need to do it to him. I strike from necessity and not to do evil, the evil I abhor. Vengeance is absurd and irrational in the light of reason.

To hate! By their unconscious and unharmonious acts the men I rub shoulders with wrong me at every moment. Their limpness, their rapacity, their foolishness prevent me from living. But how can I hate them when I know that their least movements are determined by factors external to their will (heredity, education, prejudices, etc.) and that in the end they are nothing but puppets, worthy only of inspiring pity? The anarchist who would lower himself to hating them would himself cease to be a strong and proud individuality and would become just one more backward plaything of our instincts.

For hatred is impulsive and unreflecting. Hidden away by centuries of warrior-like atavisms in the profound mysteries of our being, in days of struggle it inspires in us senseless desires for blood and murder. Whoever allows himself to act under its impulse allows himself to be determined by ancestral ferocity and abdicates reason, hatred being an a priori sentiment.

It can be objected that hatred is a lever that can give rise to individual revolts. Perhaps. In that case it is one of those levers we shouldn’t make use of. Like blind anger, like jealousy, like drunkenness, it can give rise to passionate revolts. But revolt only has value insofar as it driven by clear ideas and precise desires. It is only a factor of progress on condition that it is conscious and not passionate.

And when he sees the usefulness of an act the anarchist must find within himself enough energy and will to accomplish it, whatever it might be, coldly, tranquilly, with the precise goal before his eyes and not needing to appeal to the bestial intoxication of hatred in order not to waver.

(l’anarchie, September 2, 1909)