I want to spend some time on a subject that some folks are going to roll their eyes at, but it is something that I believe needs to be covered, so I’m gonna ask for participation from you. Yes, you.
I’ve been seeing an increasing number of mentions of “Hate” across the blogosphere, from both sides of the aisle.
I’m not talking about your casual and useless kind of hate of “Oh, I hate that song.” No, I’m talking about hate pointed at someone in particular. Sure, the leftosphere has a lock on the “Hate Canal” with their BDS or anything free market and the like, but folks in the rightosphere have their moments too. Hell, I saw one of my favorite Samizdats very recently saying that they actually hated someone.
I found this very strange and more than a little bit disturbing, but it could just be me and my lack of social skills.
You can look through the whole of RNS and you will not find me “hating” anyone, and probably not even hating any thing. Go right ahead and search. I may be an opinionated asshole, but I don’t hate people, and I’ll tell you why tomorrow.
So this is what we’re going to do: Make sure Phil is sane.
And this is how we’re going to do it: You are going to define the word “Love” for me.
You can do this. At least, I hope you’re all man enough to do this.
To get to the bottom, you have to start at the top. To get “Hate” we have to figger out what “Love” is.
Take your time and use as many words as you need. My comments section is your essay paper, if need be. You can talk about love for another person, be they spouse or parent, or you can talk about love of a thing (though I’m not sure how that is possible) or even the love of an idea.
Whatever you comment on though, just make sure to get it in by tomorrow morning, which is when I’ll post my answer my answer.
After that, we’ll get onto “Hate”.
I like Heinlein’s definition of love: “Love” is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own…
I can’t say that I truly hate anyone either. Except child molesters and rapists. But if society would adopt my rules for those conditions then we’d soon have a lot less problem with that.
Love is knowing all of a persons flaws and still Loving them (yes I violate the idea of a definition by having the defining word in the definition also a hat tip to Meet Joe Black”). Hmm, so I could change that to “. . . and still want to do anything for them and have them be a part of your life, and when they are gone have an irreparable hole in your life that will remind you of all of the good that is to be had in life” And yet that still comes up short. Notice that I have Love not love for I find a distinction between the two, like I would in Hate and hate. I love a lot of things, but only Love a few people. I do not know if I Love or love mankind. I know that I would do the “bellyflop on the grenade” to save mankind, but but it gets harder to distinguish the more you break us down into separate societies. I know that I would have a hard time doing that for person that is diametrically opposed to me, Would definitely not do it for a Jihadist (interesting side note my spelling of jihadist brings up sadist) or such, but that does not mean that I Hate them, just not willing to give up my life for theirs, but willing to give up my life to protect others from them. You can love an object, but not Love and object. You can only Love people and ideals. I hate lots of things, but Hate very few things. The capitalization of the word is a big thing for me. I am trying to reach though the nebulous ideas that these words have for me and an sucking ass in doing so, but that is what I am coming up with in this bastardized stream of consciousness writing. Maybe more later, but I wanted to get my ideas out there with out being prejudiced by other peoples comments.
Hate is not the opposite of Love.
The true opposite of Love is… Apathy.
And I think you can derive a lot of meaning when you think of it in those terms.
Love is when you’re willing to ignore certain risks that would bring difficulties to be with someone or something you appreciate more than most other things/people.
Hate is when you detest something or someone so much that you are willing to assume risk to end that hate relationship, in whatever manner you choose to.
Now, all that said, let’s cut to the chase.
PeeCee, the philosophy is fond of telling us that hate is a bad thing, without exception.
I don’t accept that. Hate is a useful emotion when it is appropriate to motivate yourself to rid the world of you object of hate, and such riddance is considered appropriate for the society.
The best examples of directed hate are when your nation is at war, and it becomes necessary to go into combat against a HATED foe.
When you distill emotion to boil off honor, veneration, respect, awe, desire, obedience, worship, longing and dependence; then only love remains. Whether one loves G-d or spouse or parent or child, the pure light is love, and those other distillates serve to color the emotion. Pure hate is the darkness that rushes in to fill the void where love is extinguished. It has colored distillates of its own, such as despair, envy, rage and disgust. Spiritual teachers lead one through these states to show the path is not the goal. Apathy is not the opposite of love – it is the absence of both love and hate. Satori is the annihilation of hate and love in a blissful instant of pure emotional nihilism.
I love the deer, I hate to spill its life; I love to squeeze the trigger, I hate to kill carelessly; I love a belly full of venison, and I hate the gnawing of hunger. This may be as close to enlightenment as I will ever get – or ever need.
Man, I’ve erased my comment three times, this is hard.
Uh…Love is time spent denying yourself to the gain of another.
That’s all I got. I was going on about happy realtionship stuff, but that reminded me more of “steak and a BJ” than the broad meaning of love. I still love my family, dog, girlfriend, steak and a BJ ect. but this is RNS, so serious stuff first, heh.
You’ve picked a couple hard words to adequately describe – they can mean so many different things to different people and the intensity that they feel these words run the gamet.
Maybe the “old actions speak louder than words” adage works here. It’s simple but true. Everyone has seen a Mother, be it bear,dog or human protecting it’s young. The instinct to protect, nurture and Love is so very strong even to the exclusion of thinking of anything else, including her own well being.
I have to say I think Christopher’s explanation of Love, love, Hate and hate makes a bunch of sense to me even though he thinks he’s “sucking ass” trying to explain what he’s talking about. I understand completely. Gotta say, I know how he feels cause I feel like I’m rambling on too – I know what I want to say it’s just hard putting it into words.
So I’ll just stop here and end by saying to Phil – I LOVE you.