The Pleasure of Hating

Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference and disgust; hatred alone is immortal.

— William Hazlitt

The genteel among us can't help but see vigilantes as living symbols of Hate. But we don't always call them for what they are: sadists.

Americans didn't invent Hate; it's bred in our bones.

Wracked by civil wars, the Ancient Greeks understood Hate to represent Love's equally passionate opposite—and a source of tremendous pleasure to men who nurse it within.

But it took another 2,500 years for anyone in the West to realize how Hate is baked into our species.

Sigmund Freud—borrowing a theory from his disciple Sabina Spielrein—called Love the "self-preservative instinct" and Hate the drive that compels us to "lead organic life back into the inanimate state." 

In other words, Hate manifests our species' self-destructive "death instinct."

When I see vigilantes, I think of Freud, grappling as he was with the horrors of World War I. And I see vigilantes' conspicuous Hate—their vivid displays of anger and aggression—as open expressions of a narcissistic neurosis; as the "dark side of love" on parade for all to watch.

Their conspicuous kind of Hate—Hate, American Style—reveals that Americans crave discord, division, destruction, and death.

It shows Americans love to hate.

Can a second civil war be far away?