The Simple Truth About Hate

Some people learn to hate with such an intensity that it becomes a degraded counterfeit of love, almost a paradoxical opposite-parallel to the more popular pretender of lust. It infatuates and obsesses, and comes to structure lives with a powerful pseudo sense of purpose and meaning. They’re on a quest. They have an experience of value and commitment in what, sadly, are most likely otherwise felt to be fairly empty and aimless lives. This is one of the biggest mistakes that a human being can make. And of course, no one who witnesses this in another can talk him out of it, any more than you can talk someone out of being massively infatuated. Lust is the last emotion to listen to the logic of reason. And so perhaps is its faux twin. But one wonders whether the misguided soul can come to fall out of hate like those who report they fell out of love. The most extreme level of emotional intensity is never forever. It eventually wanes. It burns itself out into a shell of itself before it finds itself extinguished. If the parallel will hold, then there is hope for all the political hate of our day, whipped as it has been into the fire of an all-encompassing inferno. If, like the California firefighters, we can just keep it contained, then as the winds subside, it will become a bad memory, leaving only a scarred landscape behind. And nature has a strange way of reviving devastated landscapes with the positive of vibrant and promising new life.