I hate mosquitoes. If they are in my home, I swiftly execute them. But — it does not mean that I am cruel about it; I don’t deliberately kill them slowly or try to inflict the greatest pain possible: I recognize that they are programmed by nature to suck my blood and annoy my sleep; but alas, it seems I am programmed by nature to hate them. Their death relieves me of some anxiety. I fear their fang. They inflict pain upon me to prolong their life. I inflict death upon them to reduce the potential for my suffering. No one grieves their demise, not even other mosquitoes I suspect. If I were a mosquito, I might even welcome a quick smoosh; death so swift it is not felt; perhaps I'd be reborn as a human -- anything that is not so hateful.
Mosquitoes have been inflicting pain and sometimes death upon humans for millions of years. And humans have done all they can to eliminate that danger. If we "loved" mosquitoes, Florida would not be as populated as it is today. Loving mosquitoes is foolish. It is sometimes even wrong. Surely lets not intentionally torture mosquitoes; I think that is bad; but if a mosquito inflicted malaria on a person's family, and many of them died, I wouldn't rebuke a person if they simply had a fantasy of torturing the mosquito. However, if a person’s “love” had directly led to them refraining to kill mosquitoes that entered the household, that would be some bad love.
I don't meaningfully love everything or everyone. Nor, do I believe I could even if I desired to. No matter how much some people might admonish me for what they perceive as my lack of love, I do not think I will or can ever love everyone. But, I do say -- I have *some* compassion (perhaps the word love could even be used but I think it would be too loose) for even the most vile humans and creatures. That does not mean I'm going to give them a kidney if they need it. It simply means that, for example, I don't think anyone or anything deserves hell. I don't think anyone deserves to be punished or inflicted with pain for aeons or an eternity by supernatural forces. Ideas of hell, that have proliferated throughout human cultures for thousands of years, are evil. I hate them. And even the most vile people -- Hitler, Voldemort, Moses, yah I said Moses -- don't deserve hell. That is a reflection of my universal compassion, if it makes sense to say I have it.
The invention of hells are the projection of the most compassionless and malevolent impulses of human nature. People are sometimes not content with the suffering and misery possibly inflicted on people they hate in this world and fantasize about following people into the next and conceiving the most painful scenarios possible, unrestrained by the pesky physics of this world. If it is acknowledged that it is just fantasy never to leave their hearts, that would dull the malice, but some people hope and have faith it is true, and they swear by the righteousness of the cruelty. I may be able to empathize with a person who feels that way toward someone who, for example, cruelly inflicted a lot of suffering on them or those who they love; but all to often hell has been imagined to be where people go for the most relatively trivial, and often righteous, of actions, like disparaging a tyrannical fictional character.
There are people who think hell is righteous — whether it is aeons or eternity or physical or mental, or however they conceive it -- and I'd like to provide a succinct argument for why hell is not righteous, regardless of the sin. Our natures are not our choice. No matter what we decide to do or desire to do we do so because we are constructed to do so. Whatever we choose to do, we do so based on our natures; our desires, our impulses; our psychic constitution; our soul; whatever—but whatever we foundationally are, we are not fundamentally our own making; we can always go back in time and back in causation where something was not our choice. Even if we choose to change our selves to the extent we can, our desire to change and ability to change derives from something we ultimately did not choose. This applies to us all, the good and the evil. Whether we are entirely mortals of this earth or we are some sort of immortal-esque spiritual beings, our constitution is not self-made. That being the case, ultimate causal responsibility for our actions does not lie in us.
If a human made a machine and that machine was sentient and could feel and hate and love and cry; and that machine went around torturing babies, would it make sense for that machine to be tortured for aeons? Would it make sense for it to be punished and make it suffer for its actions for aeons? Were it to fall into a place that caused it deep depression of despair and remorse and shame—would it make sense for people to approve of that place? It is true, being the sort of being that hates, it is probably impossible for the people who approve of hell to come to relinquish their hatred of the machine, but the knowledge of all our ultimate existential determinism perhaps can tweak their heart enough to hate the idea of a hell.
What a curse the machine received, if a hell is its lot—made to torture and then be tortured! What being or what law could create such a machine--such an abomination? Certainly not one worth my reverence. It would deserve my hate and my contempt — even if my hate for that being or law ultimately were a fruit of that being or law. Fortunately we have no compelling rational or emotional justification(at least I do not) to believe or have faith that such a being or law exists. Better possible and plausible worlds exist. If we are going to have faith in immortality, we can do so without hells. Out of love, hells should be hated.
What is odd though: it seems common for people who supposedly advocated at moments something like unrestrained love and compassion to have thought the idea of hell righteous. Jesus -- "love your enemy", "judge not", preached hell was right for his enemies; Gotama -- "love even those who are actively sawing off your limbs" preached hell was right for people who obstructed him on a path he walked. The hypocrisy, nonsense and doublethink is extraordinary; evil.
But what is this "evil" I refer to?
Some people seem to think hating is bad--even "evil". I think that is contradictory nonsense. To even judge something as bad, as wrong, or as evil, requires a kind of hate. We can call it dislike. We can call it hostility. Whatever we call it, hate is on that spectrum, and it is in that family of emotion. There isn't anything contradictory suggesting hating something specific is wrong. A person can suggest hating homosexuality is wrong. A person can suggest hating Jesus is wrong. But suggesting hating is wrong is contradictory.
Some people want to outlaw hateful speech. But that is nonsense too. How much hate must a person have in order to use the threat of violence to suppress speech that is hateful? A person can express all sorts of crude hatred -- minus actual threats of violence -- and it doesn't rise to the level of hatred that is expressed by hate speech laws. Hate speech laws are hateful; advocating them is “hate speech”. Though I do not think there is anything bad about the fact they are simply hateful. What makes them so pernicious is the tyranny, hypocrisy and irrationality of the laws. The laws are never consistently applied by these haters of hate. Laws are only applied to particular hateful speech; not all hateful speech, as one might expect from laws supposedly punishing speech that is hateful(although application of the law would probably be impossible even if it were not inconsistently carried out, and still wrongfully tyrannical); the haters of hate will be free to speak hate towards what they hate. They will however restrict the speech of those who they hate. They so hate their political opponents and the ideas of political opponents that they will use violence to restrict certain emotional expressions about particular things and from particular people. Again, I don’t think it is bad that hatred motivates their behavior. Hatred is an essential and wholesome emotion that can be expressed toward the right things in the right ways. It’s how they are formulating their hatred and what specifically their hatred is directed toward and what specifically they are doing with their hatred. The evil is in the details.
Now let’s discuss Nazis. Nazis want to exterminate and enslave groups of people for stupid reasons; and what do people these days commonly think about Nazis? Well, if they aren’t a moral degenerate: they hate Nazis. They don't just mildly dislike them: they don't want them marrying their children. They don't want them taking care of their pets. They don’t want them in their cities. They don’t want them to be their neighbors.
Imagine you found yourself stuck in a trolley problem and you were standing next to an unrepentant wide and giant muscular Nazi who once rounded up innocent people and happily put them on death trains. If pushing him off a bridge could result in saving the lives of a trolley full of kittens, because his size would be perfect to trigger a switch that redirected the trolley away from danger -- you would do so, honorably. If you didn't push the Nazi off the bridge, you would be a “bad” person. You wouldn't deserve hell, but you might be close; you would be very very fortunate that your decision was just the inevitable result of your nature that you didn't yourself choose.
If a person hated hate, how are they going to push a Nazi off the bridge to save kittens? They could be compromised. There is no time to hesitate. Making that honorable choice will require righteous hatred.
Okay, Okay, maybe a person who didn’t push a Nazi off a bridge wouldn’t be a “bad person.” Maybe that person was just afraid of being caught, or maybe they were raised to pathologically “care” about anyone and everyone and everything regardless of context. Maybe they just had the unfortunate fate of being raised Buddhist and internalized superstitious threats of karmic hell for acts of violence or promises of reward for not expressing aggression. Maybe their poisoned conscience dissociates them from their hate. Deep down inside, they really do hate the Nazi enough to push them off the bridge to save the kittens. They have a virtuous soul, but it has just been corrupted by their wicked world.
Hate is on a spectrum. I can dislike something very mildly. Or I can hate something with extreme passion. Or anything in between. Haters of hate tend to not realize there is this spectrum. If someone expresses a dislike, it is taken as a mad passion of hate. If I say I don't believe trans women are women -- and I disagree with that particular *idea*; and I dislike it when people express that *idea* as if I’m morally obliged to agree -- there are going to be some people who infer that I desire physical harm to come to men who believe they are women and women who believe they are men, which is not true. I desire to protect trans people from actual harassment and violence; not affirming their pronouns or gender ideology is not harassment or violence.
Some people are going to *hate* my *disagreement* so much that they want to create laws -- which use violence and the threat of violence to coerce compliance -- to try to stop me from using pronouns in a way they *hate.* I think "trans women" are men and I think "trans men" are women; and I think it is accurate to use the pronoun he to refer to trans women and the pronoun she to refer to trans men, but I think using the technically inaccurate pronoun is also perfectly okay if that is a person's voluntary uncoerced choice. I have no interest in punishing people for what I consider "misgendering" -- that is, using pronouns that don't accurately reflect a person's sex.
I think there should be no laws requiring people to use peoples' preferred pronouns; not in private, not at work. If people who disagree with my view have a problem with "hate" so much that they want to punish me with the violent hand of the law, they should have a bigger problem with their own view. It reflects more hatred. That though alone is not what makes their position wrong; sometimes more hatred is good -- like pushing Nazis off bridges in trolley problems to save kittens.
If a person finds themselves in academia, or wants to be hired in that world -- it seems pretty clear that hate is a job requirement. Universities should just be up front about what they want: a statement of hate. "I solemnly swear to hate people who don't like racial and gender tribalism and people who don't want to play the pronoun game." They might object with something like, no no, we love trans people; we don’t hate; we are trans allies, etc etc. Well, there is no way to be an "ally" without hating the enemy. What is the opposite of an ally? If an "ally" is caught fraternizing with the enemy, they ain't an ally anymore. An ally has to hate the right folks. Its part of the deal of being an ally. In WW2, who were the allied forces? They were fighting the axis powers. Aka, the Nazis and their allies. “Ally” is war language. Allies are bound by shared enemies and shared hatred. War, among other things, is an expression of hate.
I imagine some of you reading this have experienced the hatred from haters of hate -- especially in the last 8 years or so, since the rise of The Dark Lord Trump, and the extremely sectarian racial and gender ideology began to capture more mindshare of the American public. Very peculiar and nonsensical notions of what it means to be an "ally" to racial minorities and trans people and other historically "marginalized people(tm)" developed and if a person didn't express fealty to those notions, some people began to personally shun and ostracize them: they were ironically marginalized.
A few fairly good friends of mine who I could talk openly about philosophical and political topics for decades have blocked me on social media or stopped responding to my text messages or phone calls once they discovered I was a heretic to their new ideology. One thing that fueled their hatred was not hating something as much as they felt I should. Trump, for example, while I have contempt for him, I currently have no less contempt for Biden -- the fact that I view Biden as an equal evil to Trump was sufficient for some to hate me enough to shun me; it wasn't enough that I "hated" Trump, I didn't hate him enough. And they of course will be among those who nod their heads in agreement when someone cries out in doublespeak to “fight hate.”
A year ago because of what Hamas did toward Israel, there has been an upsurge of hatred towards speech that is critical of Israel or Judaism. The rhetoric used to express that hatred is opposition to “anti-Semitism.” The people who hate “anti-Semitism” have come out expressing the same kind of desire for control over “hate speech” as the people who want to compel people to support gender ideology. Just like people who claim not affirming gender ideology is “transphobia” and hatred toward trans people, people who are condemning anti-Semitism(aka racism toward people with “semitic” biological ancestry) are often hating people for disparagement of a religion or ideology.
There is bellowing hatred toward people for supposedly racially “hating Jews” if a person expresses something that is hostile to “Zionism”, the Israeli government, or Judaism. “Anti semitism” is the term typically used. But Jews are not a race or “ethnicity”. Just like Christians and Scientologists are not races or ethnicities. Not all semites are Jews and not all Jews are semites. Just like not all Christians are European and not all Europeans are Christians. A Han Chinese could become a Jew, Christian, or Scientologist. That would not change their race or “ethnicity”. Moral dislike(or hatred) of ideology like Scientology or Nazism or Christianity or Judaism or Wokeism is not hatred of any people because of their race. But people generally sympathize with hatred toward racism and racists. Thus it is can be politically effective to slander people as racists for disliking an ideology. Racism is politically and socially hazardous (at least in the US) in a way that religious/ideological antipathy is not. While campaigns today against “anti-Semitism” are often carried out under the banner “anti-hate”, the campaigns themselves are fueled by hatred. Any anti-hate stance is a stance of hate. “Hate” has become so taboo in our society that accusing someone of hate can ironically be an effective means of socially destroying a hated enemy. Some of the most hateful organizations in the United States — the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, the Human Rights Campaign, all have expressed hostility toward hate itself and use accusations of hate to try destroy their political enemies.
Don’t infer from my previous paragraph that we shouldn’t hate anti-Semites. We absolutely should; but we also absolutely should not slander people who aren’t anti-Semites as being anti-Semites. Nazis were true anti-semites. They falsely believed Jews were a race, and they murderously hated that imaginary race — and they generally hated every race that was not their own. And as I have already written, it would be virtuous to push an unrepentant Nazi off a bridge to save a trolley of kittens. Given the potency of the association between anti-semitism and Nazism, and the hatred people have toward Nazism, accusing people of anti-Semitism is a very loud call to viciously hate whoever is being called an anti-Semite.
If the hatred is expressed in the properly ritually Orwellian sanitized way, a person can expel tons of aerosolized vitriolic bile onto someone else. “Thou art an anti-semite; thou hate”, “Thou art a racist; thou hate”, “Thou are a sexist; thou hate”, “Thou art an Islamophobe; thou hate”, “Thou are a transphobe; thou hate”. But let us keep going with the logic. “Thou art a Naziphobe; thou hate”, “Thou art an anti-Scientologist; thou hate”, “Thou art an anti-communist; thou hate.” Anti-hate disintegrates in the light of reason. If people passionately peddle anti-hate to spread their own bespoke hatreds, chances are they are wannabe dictators, who simply dream of oppressing everyone’s hatred except their own. A people without hate is pleasing to a tyrant, because without hatred people will never dethrone her. I do not think it is a coincidence that the tyrant Ashoka promulgated (and possibly even contributed to the creation of) “Buddhism”, a pacifistic, politically nihilistic, religion that traditionally promotes the idea that aggressive acts and even emotions will be met with supernatural punishment and submissive acceptance of oppression will be supernaturally rewarded, after his conquests.
After all this talk of hate though, let me address love. Love is never too far from hate. Because without love of something, we would not hate anything. Hate is dependent on love. It’s like a coin. You can’t move the head without moving the tail. The only way to get rid of hate is to get rid of love — and if that could actually be achieved, it itself would be an act of hate. People don't go to war unless they love something; it might be something most of us find contemptible - like love of the Aryan race; regardless, there is love. Sometimes it is a love that should be hated. But sometimes there is a hate that should be loved. Pushing the Nazi off the bridge to save kittens contains an element of love (for the kittens; if unrepentant Nazis were in the trolley, we shouldn’t try to save them by pushing the obese Nazi off the bridge) and an element of hate (for the Nazi).
Behind any love we have is a hatred that lies in its shadow, ready to come out and protect it whenever it is perceived to be threatened. No amount of doublethink will change that. And I think if more people acknowledge that, there will be less chance unrecognized hatred will become bigoted, generalized and spread irrationally, unyielding to reason, potentially harming what we love.