In Defense of Hate

This post is in reaction to the YouTube crackdown on hate speech channels, which is part of a larger pattern of shutting down extreme voices online. The list of attributes of individuals or groups that shouldn't be targeted seems to get longer and longer: age, caste, disability, ethnicity, gender identity, nationality, race, immigration status, religion, sexual orientation, victims of a major violent event and their kin, veteran status.

Now, although I'm not racist or anti-LGBTQ rights, I watch this trend with alarm, skepticism, and distaste. I think if you squint hard enough you can see the neurotic SJW with a sign of "Live, Laugh, Love" hanging in her kitchen who comes up with these idiotic ideas.

So, first, where exactly do we draw the line between people it's ok to hate and the "sensitive" groups? Is it ok to hate my cheating wife or my lazy co-worker? Or maybe is hatred, in general, a bad thing? What if I hate the bourgeoisie and want to eat the rich and save the planet from the ecological catastrophe late capitalism will bring about? Is that wrong because it leads to violence? Well, that's the whole point: a red, violent revolution. So what if I hate religious people? Isn't religion the cause of genocide and various atrocities?  Wouldn't humanity be better off without these slavish freaks?

Second, hatred is a glorious, natural emotion that shouldn't be repressed. I can't think of anything positive that I've achieved in life without my hatred playing a role. I went to university partly because I hated my parents and wanted to move out of their house. I moved to Canada because I hated Romania. All my writing is steeped in bitter misanthropy. The same goes for the fiction of famous classical writers like Dostoyevsky, Kafka or Lovecraft, not to mention more modern writers like Martin Amis and Chuck Palahniuk.       

   

                                                                                           

Which brings me to my next point: you can't do psychology with a hatchet. Chopping off a strong emotion like hatred can only result in a fractured, lobotomized self. Hatred is the same as the sexual instinct: when you try to repress it, as Freud teaches us, it will come back ten times stronger and wreak havoc to the whole psyche. Hate is intimately related to love. Sometimes jealousy can turn the most sublime love into savage hatred, or someone we hate might suddenly appear to us in a beatific light. Also, the term "love-hate relationship" clearly captures the essential connection between these two emotions. In an ironic twist, the absolute divide between love and hate that SJWs assume is a remnant of Christian ideology. Christians have been happily torturing, raping, and killing people for two thousand years now. So, uncritically accepting that absolute dichotomy, that our modern hippies and feminazis find so appealing, didn't go so well in the Christian case. Lastly, the SJWs cry, all the hatred leads to violence. Well, I reply, first, there's physical violence and then there's systemic violence. Trump's decision not to pay taxes is systemic violence. Extreme inequality is systemic violence. Now, physical violence is sometimes used in reaction to systemic violence, like during the French Revolution. My point is that physical violence isn't bad in itself and that there are forms of institutional violence which are more sinister and damaging: the Catholic Church covering sexual-abuse cases, tax-giveaways to the rich, The Church meddling in the affairs of the state, money in politics, and so on. Thus, who's to say that the eradication of Catholics wouldn't be a blessing for humanity? Sometimes violence is the only solution. 

To sum up, I think the crackdown on hate-speech online could potentially create more difficulties than it solves, and it's a poor, ad-hoc solution to a complex problem; a cowardly, weak attempt to sweep complex, important issues under the rug. Who's to say that these hate groups would just disappear as a result of the crackdown? The oppressive censorship move might offer them more legitimacy and vindicate their narrative. We have to accept that hatred exists, try to understand its mechanism, and fight it head-on.