WHERE HATE COMES FROM (Basic)

Put too many rats in a cage, and they will fight in the most vicious manner, to death. 

Humans are no different. The cage is the planet. The planet can probably sustain, long term, with present technology, only a fraction of the existing human population. A consequence is the CO2 crisis, and several other pollution crises. The end product of these crises will be a devastated biosphere where advanced animal life will be difficult, if at all possible.

Thus there is only one optimal outcome: better technology… the very factor which makes hate problematic at this point of evolution.

Ecological crises have dominated human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years, ever since our ancestors became the dominant predators. As humans imploded the ecology, evolution discovered that it was more conducive to survival of the fittest to eliminate surpluses of humanity before eliminating the ecology supporting said humanity. This is how hatred became a dominant human instinct. Hate entices humans to kill humans. Hate renders highly performing humanity possible. Hate is an adaptative behavior so ingrained it became an instinct.

Astute observers will remember that ethologists also discovered that chimpanzees conducted wars of extermination in the next valley over. There too the deep root is the ecology… and this shows that hate is not just a human instinct, but most ancient. 

Add to this propensity for hatred the fact human beings are not just made to be free, but perform best when they are free. Thus humans hate to see their freedom curtailled. Moreover groups of free humans think in parallel, not in series, and thus are more intelligent.

As oligarchy, propped by ever more powerful technology, grows, so does hatred against those who rule. Hatred grows, both in those who see their freedom curtailled, and in those who see the dowthrodden rise against the privileges of the upper crust. And hatred tends to be fungible: once it has arisen, it goes around. 

Nothing new in the basic psychology, but, as Vlad the Mad is keen to remind us from the Kremlin… we have nukes now, and weapons like you have never seen before. This makes the full enjoyment of hate impossible, as, like the thugs around Putin remind us, “humanity could be turned into radioactive ashes“. 

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So what to do practically? 

One has to understand that hate has a life of its own, once it is born. Understand also that hate has deep roots, reasons of its own. And that it is even noble in some sense: who doesn’t want to save the ecology? Well, hate wants to save it. Thus if one wants to prevent hate, one has to destroy the roots, and the processes which could lead to even more roots.

For example, when it became clear that the KGB/FSB, the Soviet-Russian secret police, was behind the rise of Putin, and once it became clear that they would do anything to grab power (the bombings in Russia and the Chechen genocidal war), it should also have been clear that, to feed Putin and his thesis that the disappearance of the genocidal USSR was the greatest tragedy of the 20C, was to feed hate large enough for a world war. I wrote about this for decades, so I was not surprised when it happened, as I had predicted.

The way to prevent Putin was to put maximum pressure on his regime from the start. The same applies to Xi’s genocidal regime. But what have we been doing? The opposite!

Hate is the gift which keeps on giving, we are getting smothered by its generosity. But the way out is not to hate hate, but to love sustainable solutions before they become problems.

Patrice Ayme

P/S: The first part above was published as a comment in NYT on “Where Does All That Hate We Feel Come From?“April 27, 2022 By Thomas B. Edsall starting with: 

“The story of the 21st century is less a story about exponential population growth than it is a story about differential growth — marked by a stark divide between the world’s richest and poorest countries,” Jennifer Sciubba, a professor of international studies at Rhodes College, writes in her new book, “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration Shape Our World.”

Much of that differential is driven by tech prowess (for example hydrocarbon extraction is highly automatized, and involves relatively few, very well paid workers, so it encourages concentrations of wealth and power)… But also by hate, since, as we sketched tech to increase hate (just as it increases goodness and other extremes… but the equivallent of a nuclear bomb doesn’t exist with love!).

If I ate all the grass, my species would die off. Fortunately, predators will eat enough of my kind to prevent this. And who will kill the predators, if there are too many? Humans… Who also eat grass! We need something, somebody, to kill humans!

Victimization Is Instinctive

Collaboration With Victimization: A Sin To Ruin Civilization.

Victimization is a powerful instinct that encourages masters to become ever more abusive. All masters have it. All those who submit to it, encourage it some more.

Thus victimhood is another drawback of a society with masters and servants, as victimization tends to make it ever more so.

Where does the Dark Side, this gift that enables us, come from? From a set of evolved behaviors that our brains naturally engaged in, from the very way they are. Those behaviors were fruitful in the last thirty million years or so. They enabled our uppity primate ancestors, in their quest for the conquest of everything.

We grew, and changed as a genus, into what we are.

White House Resident Obama says all the time “it’s not what we are” after describing how the USA are. He is living in total denial, so his presidency has consisted into crawling modestly at the feet of great plutocrats, and accomplishing nothing. Why? Because beggars, supplicants and victims, per their nature, accomplish little, except for living in denial. They instinctively resign themselves to be emergency food supply, and finding consolation that way.

(An animal being devoured, flooded with endorphins, does not suffer that much, thus allowing the predator to not suffer an  injury. Injuring a predator is ecologically disruptive!)

Victimhood, and thus impotency, has been the defining characteristic, and great advantage, of Christianity, with its tortured hero hanging from nails, pathetically moaning. That’s why Roman emperors loved to give birth to Christianity, to victimize the population some more.

The end result of all this victimization and victimhood glorified: the quasi-collapse of civilization until the “Franks”took over. That “Frank” meant “Ferocious” (and thus free) is no coincidence: the Franks were the exact opposite, and opponents, of victimhood. As Consul, King and Imperator Clovis pointed out, “if my Franks had been there, this would not have happened”. By “this” he meant all this pathetic moaning on a cross. The Franks did not recognize victimhood as a valid moral posture, that’s why they were able to restart civilization.

Real philosophers are more interested by what we are, than in denying who we are, Obama style.

Instead of claiming that there are no waves on that beach, when periodically a wall of water sweeps ashore, learn to surf them. So goes wisdom.

We are predators, the most efficient predators that ever were. In practice that means our species, for at least 2 million years ate, dominated and killed whatever was in the way. And that did not happen by accident, but by will, and because such is our good pleasure. We got the psychology to kill and dominate.

This domination became total during the Neolithic. Before the Neolithic, in the Middle Earth as anywhere else, lions (or lion like) species were the most numerous (and thus massive, literally) species. Humans exterminated the lions from all the places suitable for rising cattle, and, so doing, as cattle exhale prodigious quantities of methane, modified the climate, avoiding a little re-glaciation.

Thus the concept of “Anthropocene” (the geological age of man) is entirely justified, and we entered it more than 10,000 years ago.

The first megafauna to disappear was that of Australia, when it was invaded by Homo Sapiens hybridized with Denisovans.

In general what does a predator do? Kill. Kill what? Preferably the weak, the sick, the dumb. Most predators engage in a period of observation of the potential prey to determine who the weak are. Predators chose their prey among those who look like the best victims, they are attracted by victims, excited by victimhood. This is a very strong “instinct”… There is a pulsion, even among a simple an animal as a shark, to focus aggression on victims.

That instinct of victimization is no doubt present in humans. That does not mean that it’s simply a sin, something to bemoan, and claim loudly on rooftops that will have nothing to do with it. One may as well bemoan the weather and rain. Because one has no control of it, and, however disagreeable on the moment, it is also a good thing.

What it means is that any system of thought or mood that brandishes victimhood and martyrdom as if it were sainthood is accomplice to aggression. Including, of course, non-violence made into a religion.

Nietzsche perceived this, somewhat confusedly, and riled against victimhood as a religion.

Non-violence (and hate of the British) made Gandhi a self-declared friend of Hitler. This is no anecdote, and it’s no ancient history: Gandhi’s attitude led to the partition of India, and thus a threat of nuclear war (and thus the obstinate desire of Obama to stay in Afghanistan to keep on messing up with Pakistan!).

Now it is increasingly perceived that the Munich conference of 1938 and the Yalta conference of 1945 encouraged Hitler (with the first one) and Stalin. Both Munich and Yalta showed Stalin that, the more a dictator ordered the West imperiously, the more he got.

At Munich and Yalta, leading democracies started to behave like trembling victims, and that excited the predators.

In neither case that was justified: in 1938, the French and Czech armies could have held off the Nazis, while Britain rearmed. At Yalta, the Western Allies, had under their command 16 million soldiers (to Stalin’s 600 divisions). But both Churchill and Roosevelt were weak and close to death. Having excluded the fierce and dashing De Gaulle, who would have no doubt stiffened their spine, was a huge mistake.

(General De Gaulle, heading the hastily constituted French Fourth Heavy Armored division, nearly cut-off the Panzer army in May 1940, and nearly killed the entire Nazi Panzer command, including its chief Gen. Guderian… So De Gaulle was a real combatant, differently from Churchill and FDR. I recognize this, although I don’t like him.)

Except of course, Munich and Yalta were not really a mistakes, from the plutocratic point of view. Whatever weakens democracy is good to plutocracy, so Munich and Yalta were irreplaceable. Indeed, to this day, Russia is an unabashed plutocracy headed by a KGB agent, a spiritual son of Stalin. (And, early on, American plutocrats financed, advised and helped not just Lenin, but also Stalin… However counter-intuitive that is.)

A more recent example? Abe is the Prime Minister of Japan. He, somewhat rabidly, honors World War Two mass murdering criminals of the worst kind (the kind entangled with the worst infamy).

What should the West do? Acting as it has been doing, like a trembling victim again? Chosing the path to victimhood again?

Or lodge a formal protest and withdraw Western ambassadors from Japan for “consultation“? Of course the latter. Japs who have learned nothing important, are apparently still around, calling holocausts they conducted before, heroic, while worshipping the worst souls known to man.

(Japan killed more than 35 million citizens of other countries in World War II, most of them civilians, while losing only two millions or so, most of them soldiers in the Japanese army, from disease. Crying oversized crocodile tears about Hiroshima and Nagasaki won’t change that reality.)

Those Japs have to learn civilization is their master, and it has a sword, and even a few nukes, and the will to use them. At the first clear occasion. Playing trembling victims excusing themselves with Japan at this point would be an exact repeat of what happened in the past: encouraging victimization by behaving like victims.

The plutocrats that led Japan until 1945 were morally identical to the Nazis, albeit with even fewer excuses, and the fact that the Japanese government still does not get that basic monstrosity in 2014 is more than alarming: it turns civilization again into a trembling victim. Again.

Victimhood is no strategy in the defense of civilization. It only invites predation on civilization. And that is also true with all and any inexcusable drift towards the Dark Side (Obama, his drones, and his NSA being another obvious inexcusable drift).

Martyrdom and victimhood are deeply inhuman. They behoove not who we are and how we evolved into the crown of creation.

Patrice Ayme’