Amerika

The human being who feels inferior always responds and governs himself through hatred. The one who feels poor and miserable will direct his frustrations against whatever he considers an enemy, immersing himself in a struggle that transcends reason, blending a present of resentment with basic instinctive reactions of defense — hatred thus becoming the dynamite that releases the pressure of inferiority.

The poor will hate the rich, for he will blame him for his present misfortune; the anti-Semite will hate the Jew in much the same way as the communist, seeing in him the source of his misery. Elsewhere, others will hate the communists, fearing they might be stripped of their possessions.

The human being who feels above others will not experience hatred but contempt toward those he does not consider his equals. Both hatred and contempt arise from a fundamental condition of inequality — hatred directed from below to above, contempt from above to below.

The failure of mass movements that attempt to build nationalist or patriotic alternatives — or any movement based on the identification of us versus them — begins at the moment they choose empty foundations to justify their existence, giving more importance to them than to us. For example, a movement born out of hatred toward foreigners will lose its raison d’être once those foreigners are gone; it will have no justification for its continued existence, for such a movement was an end in itself.

Being anti-something is a hallmark of modernist tendencies, and it is precisely this condition that makes such movements headless and groundless. In this sense, the hated groups have everything to gain: since their existence is not defined or justified by hatred, they possess a greater reason for being than the groups that hate them. A community of foreigners — of a particular nationality or ethnicity — under attack by hate groups will reinforce the bonds that unite them, prioritizing what they share over what divides them, for to them it becomes a matter of survival.

Within groups under attack, hating the hater becomes less important than loving one’s kind; in the union of these lies the strength lacking in the isolated individual. Such unity arises from a kind of love for what is one’s own: seeing the same face and the same values reflected in the members of the community, the individual projects his instinct for survival beyond the boundaries of the hatred displayed by his enemies.

Union through hatred is doomed to fail, for everything that such groups defend about us depends on them — on what they fear losing to them — whereas they live for themselves, and every step they take against us is a step gained for them, for no one else.

Tags: hatred, modernism, nationalism, resentment