Hatred: The Psychological Descent Into Violence [Hardcover]

It seems that the anecdotal evidence from history would overwhelmingly argue that "normalized" and sublimated cultural and societal hatred in the form of sanctioned "bent-up" resentment and stored hostility (as in the case of the passive assent of Germans to the mechanized murder of Jews during the holocaust of WW-II, or the centuries of sublimated and stored hatred between opposing factions in Yugoslavia or Rwanda, or even the episodic eruption into violence by blacks in America).

While this profoundly serious, well-written and well-researched analysis based both on the best psychological theories and the best results of clinical experience is right on target in the issue it has isolated for analysis-the evil of hatred that spills over into violence--it suffers from what I call "the error of the psychologist." It fails to deal with the issue of how cultures and societies themselves promote collective hatred through its institutions and through conditioning. When hatred that spills over into isolated violence is staked out as being qualitatively different than collective hatred that has been quietly normalized and diffused through the societal mind and through societal structures, it ignores all available evidence that there is such a thing as "structural hatred," a kind of societal pre-positioning of hate, or staging area that prepares and directs a culture towards the kind of hate that is permissible.

While it is understandable why it is currently fashionable to focus on the "Hitlers" and "bin Ladens" of the world, this focusing on the aberrant is itself a form of projection in which ordinary people get to "distance" themselves from the hatred within themselves by projecting it outward onto the isolated aberrant cases. In giving us permission to ignore the hatred within us and to hate any deviations from the norm, it is made all the easier to ignore the generalized collective hatred within the society at large--a hatred which condones and conditions us to passivity-the very kind of passivity that allowed Hitler's holocaust machinery to take full reign.

This may seem like a fine point-so many angels dancing on the head of a pin-but in an era where symbolic hatred is so much easier to formulate, consolidate and direct than hatred based on "real" fears, it is not a small matter at all.

Yes, we must deal with the killers of James Bird, and the Idi Amins and bin Ladens of the world, but we also must deal with cultures of hatred-including that of our own. In the U.S., by the definitions the author uses for hate, Americans still have permission to hate blacks-so long as they do not hitch them to a pick up truck and drag them to their death, or call them "niggers"-at least only do so when paraphrasing Mark Twain's Huck Finn, etc.

This restricting one's clinical vision to what is below rather than what is at or above the societal level makes the Psychiatrist's myopic analyses look a great deal more profound and useful than they really are. We live in a culture where everyone but the Psychiatrists is peering over the head of society looking deep down within its abyss rather than being captivated by what is inside it and looking up.

The Psychiatrists had better wake up or they are going to be left holding the bag. But this criticism aside, this is a great book, much, much better than Rush Dozier's "Why We Hate."