For a time of great enlightenment, and equal validation, our era seems to also be one of vicious self-hatred.
People disfigure themselves with tattoos, sure, but that is only the outward manifestation. Their self-hatred first works within through their low expectations and rationalization of failure.
Most people have such negativity toward their world that they not only have low expectations but relish the satisfaction of those expectations, feeling a sense of power from having predicted mediocrity and been correct.
When at their jobs, they complain about the individual tasks they are asked to do, and the equipment they are given, but they rarely if ever complain about the situation of having to attend jobs and the situation of being office-bound during the few sunny days of their lives.
Each morning they get up and drive on the roads, muttering at how stupid everyone is, never criticizing how dumb it is to have everyone attend work at roughly the same time. It guarantees congestion, but that is rarely a topic of discussion.
In society, they rail against certain people they dislike and the asinine behavior of those people, but are rarely found complaining about low social standards that encourage permissiveness toward such behaviors.
When they get home, they lash out at family members in anger, but are not critical of the varying psychological balances that ensure almost any family situation will be fraught with emotional disaster.
Complaining about litter on the street, check, but not about a disposable society that generates litter and people who think it’s a great idea to litter. They whine about what’s on TV but never think to simply shut it off and use it as a planter.
They seem to live to hate each other, and to hate the achievements of others. They are prone to vandalism, drunkenness, public befouling and even defacement of their own property.
On the surface, they drink too much and have empty sex, eat too much and are ill, waste their time and then rage at their purposeless existences, and complain about authority figures only to knuckle under whenever one appears.
They are hollow shells of purposeless rage because they cannot attack the real problems they face. These problems are perpetual because they are nobody’s fault, but are the result of the aggregate of what other people want.
To attack these is to attack not just society, but its wave of popular support for certain notions. That target is off-limits as attacking it is like attacking their own freedom. And so they smolder, whimper and self-destruct in impotence and frustration.
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The opposite of self-loathing is not self-loving, though many people have slogans about unconditional love and “if you can’t love yourself, nobody else can love you” or that Whitney Houston song. The truth is, you’re human. There are lots of unlovely qualities to being human.
The opposite of self-loathing is self-acceptance. What it looks like is, “this is the choice I made and I’ll just go with it.” For example, if your dad is dying in the hospital but he was a bastard who betrayed your trust, and your family is saying you have to go to the hospital and get closure or they’ll be upset with you, but you decide not to, that’s your decision and you have to have enough compassion for yourself to care about your own choice. It can’t be made pretty.
I get this idea from a book called Compassion and Self Hate by Theodore Rubin. I found this book maybe ten or fifteen years ago right when I realized I didn’t like myself. Still, it’s a habit-forming thing to go around and say “I’d be all right if I weren’t so ___ so I’d better beat myself into shape” or conversely, “I know I’m ___ so I should hide it by making myself look really good.” It takes a long time to learn compassion for the human being.
I went through several marriages before realizing my wives didn’t subscribe to the same goals that I did. They weren’t interested in ‘making it work’, only in getting what they could from it, while it lasted.
And so nothing was geared to success, only to using-up.
This, I see, is a common trait of our society.
Get it while you can.
It still confounds me when I see people taking this approach, because it is something I am simply incapable of. My lack? Or my virtue?
I subscribe, by default, to good outcomes, and the building of something lastingly admirable. While most people seem only to be interested in scavenging what they can, from what there is, like copper-thieves, raiding an electrical substation.
I don’t there is any greater evidence of “society’s” self-hatred than its explicit embrace of abortion as “fundamental right.”
We now have a generation of “men” coming of age with a subconscious or conscious belief that their mothers had the “fundamental right” to kill them in utero. Those that are made conscious of this formerly subconscious belief then double-down in their self-hatred by justifying their hypothetical annihilation “by the fact” that they would have never known otherwise. In short, being killed unknowingly by your mother is perfectly justifiable.
That’s some real self-hatred.
Slight non-sequitir, no? But seeing as you brought it up, if a woman getting an abortion means there is one less feral into the world, I’m not going to oppose it. The problem comes from the fact that it is only women of good stock who have self-restraint and the mental capacity to realise abortion is an option.
In my country, prole women frequently get pregnant by accident and begrudgingly bear the child or do so because it might be fun, without thinking of the long-term, full-time investment that is parenting. To that end I could not support viciously pro-life legislation.
Huh…
This post was about “society’s” self-hatred. We can translate “society… awash… in self-hatred” into the mass self-hatred of individuals in OUR society.
And what is the empirical evidence for this mass self-hatred?
The embrace of self-annihilation.
And what is more damning empirical evidence for belief in self-annihilation than a mother’s “fundamental right” to kill her child in utero?
When a female aborts her child she is LITERALLY killing a part of herself.
And when a child consents to this abominable “right” to be killed by his mother in utero…
Then we have before us two individuals comprising of the “chain of life” that believe in and thus embrace, self-annihilation.
That is some REAL self-hatred.
Good points to ponder, certainly.
Your comments read so much better without the big ‘W’ & ‘S’ words.
Although…
They’re really all apart of the same cognitive consonance.
Haha, I was thinking the same thing, wondering whether the S and W words would make their appearance…
Why does everyone hate each other so much?
I occasionally meet someone who seems genuinely cordial, but mostly experience faux-kindness (because they feel obligated) from people on the receiving end of money. As to my fellow consumers, I encounter the same, but quite often experience a sense of downright hatred – as if were not not for social norms these people would be willing to attack. Driving I occasionally experience this sort of passive-agressive situation as well – semi-drivers waiting until the last second to pull in front of you, knowing that you have to slam the brakes in order to not die while they could claim innocence in causing a death and destroying some company’s property they’re hauling around and could care less about.
Perhaps it is because I live in a diverse down-economy city, but I feel reminded daily that society is somewhat of a false veil and were it not for the rule of law many of these people would be more than happy to commit violence and theft on a moment’s notice.
This question has been bothering me, but I think your article makes a lot of sense. People are generally timid and often feel down-trodden or like they are taking unnecessary abuse. This seething hatred seems to come to the surface while not at work through hatred to those better off and a general disregard for others they consider equal – “You are equal to me, so it is okay for me to abuse you (because I hate and allow myself to be abused)” – perhaps that is it.
Stress.
When nobody is allowed – by law, as well as by social judging – to be who, what or how they are, but must forever be acting-as-if, stress builds and builds, and while many can sort-of handle it, many can not.
At the very least, the disappearance of goodwill, and its replacement with resentment, results.
Just so, well said.
Good article.
Just for fun, there is something I would add to your whole list of things people complain about: that is their lack of privacy. You hear everyone complain that there is no more privacy these days and that they barely have anytime for themselves. But it never occurs to them that they are doing all in their power to destroy their own private lives. They put their whole life on facebook, for the world to see, they update everyone on what they’re up to, they never even consider switching off their mobile phones (because, hey, what if I miss something “important”) and so on.