The Cheapest Shot

by Justin 16 January 2011 22:30 Miscilliness

Welcome to a new edition of "Randomly Thinking Aloud" in which I attempt to understand why people hate, and why they persist in hating. It'll probably be a laugh-a-minute read - join in!

This post is inspired by the Westboro Baptist Church - it's not about them though. If you're not familiar with the Westboro Baptist Church (and I'm not going to feed them by providing any links or quotes here) then all you need to now is that they seem to exist solely to hate other people and to try make their lives miserable.

Obviously this doesn't make much sense.

The lights are on...

However deranged, misguided or ignorant other hate groups are most of them follow some form of internal logic: they have a view of the world that doesn't include certain types of people so they want to make the world conform to that view by getting rid of the types of people they don't like and convincing the other people that they're completely right in doing this. There's an awful lot of self-justification, wilful ignorance and obstinance required to do this, but you can usually see that there's a fairly clear endgame. It might seem futile and empty to the rest of us, but from a coldly logical perspective there's a goal and a method at play.

With the WBC there doesn't appear to be much purpose in what they do, other than to be particularly spiteful towards people who are already in fairly shitty situations. I have to wonder why. I just can't accept that people do something for no reason whatsoever. You might do something that has no point, such as sitting on the sofa watching reality TV for six hours straight, but really the point is to give your mind and body some time off. There's almost always a guiding reason behind even the most seemingly pointless activities.

So, to go back to the original question: why do people hate? What do they get out of it? We know that hate is a bad thing, we learned that in school and most of us, I believe, innately know that it's a bad thing: it's an ugly, unpleasant feeling when we experience it, it's simply not right. Nevertheless, we have all done bad things in the past - even if it's jut something as trivial as stealing a pencil from one of your classmates back in school, or calling one of your parents a bad word one time.

I'm going to assume that at some point everyone has felt that thrill you get when you do something bad, and the bigger thrill when you realise you've gotten away with it. Take an example: you steal something from a shop; you get the adrenalin rush when you first slip it in your pocket; you get a twinge of fear wondering if anyone saw you; you make your way to the door; your adrenalin peaks as you wonder if someone's going to stop you; but you make it out of that door and you get a huge buzz knowing that you got away with it.

Of course, then you realise you've got a useless piece of crap in your pocket that you didn't even want anyway.

You might be able to see where I'm going with this hypothesis. You've got the useless piece of crap, you've come down from that adrenalin high, but like all highs you want to experience it again, so you steal again, you don't even want the stuff you're stealing, you just want the feeling you get while you're doing it. It's an addiction.

(I should quickly add that I'm not in the habit of shoplifting, and I don't think I've actually ever done it, but it's a broad enough example that everyone should be able to relate to it to some degree.)

Might as well face it...

So I have this idea that hate works the same way: you get a buzz from saying something bad about other people, you get a buzz when you get away with it, and then you're left feeling empty inside. If you don't have anything particularly good in your life to fill that void you'll do it again. And again. And again.

For most of us (I hope) this will be a fairly alien concept. This is because we often have things to be happy about and, even though we might also have lots of things to complain and bitch about as well, we generally know that the better feeling comes from feeling good about something, not from feeling bad or hateful.

Unfortunately it's almost always easier to do the negative thing, it's simply human nature: it's easier to sit on the couch than to go for a jog; it's easier to have another cream cake than to resist; it's easier to focus on the bad things than the good things.

This is a broad statement and does not apply universally but, let's face it, if it was easier to be happy then we'd all be walking around smiling and telling each other how great we all are (some people do actually do this, but a lot of people don't).

This post is in extreme danger of turning disastrously twee, and I've got no intention of going all Smiley Hippy Oprah McLovin here, but... I believe if hate can be addictive, then being nice can also be a bit contagious. If you smile and say thank you to the person who sells you your coffee in the morning there's a chance it might lift their mood, consequently they'll be that bit nicer to the next person they serve; that person, in turn, will be pleasantly surprised by their experience and will be a bit nicer to their colleagues at the office, and it'll go on from there.

It's actually a basic rule of customer service: if you're a nice customer, you more likely to get good service; if you provide good service you're more likely to get customers coming back. It's nicer to be nice, but it takes more effort to go up than to come down.

Why is this relevant? Well, if you're surrounded by people who aren't able or willing to make that bit of extra effort to be nice then you're never going to get that upbeat feeling and neither are you likely to get that positive feedback effect. (I actually hate the fact that I've just used a term like positive feedback but, unfortunately, it most clearly expresses the point I'm trying to get across.) If someone's not very nice to you, or simply not very nice, it'll put you in a stinker of a mood and make it harder for you to be nice to the next person.

You're in deep...

Although I've tried to tone down the twee I'm going to summarize before I end up with a guest spot on daytime TV.

This has all been very simplistic and I'm in no way trying to defend people who hate. They suck. I do, however, want to understand why they hate. My simplistic view is that people like the members of the WBC have grown up in situations where there's not much genuine happiness and, in the absence of this, they've become accustomed and addicted to the buzz of being bad. In a lot of ways I don't see it as that different from someone who gets hooked on crystal meth (except that a person who abuses themselves probably deserves more sympathy than the person who chooses to abuse others).

There's a lot more to hating than all the above. Doubtless the fact that the WBC and others exist in a complete moral vacuum is also to blame, and it's possible some of them act the way they do simply because they don't know any other way of existing. I guess this isn't entirely about why they do what they do, but what they get out of it.

As usual I've scrawled this down with no research whatsoever, so I'm always grateful for comments, counterpoints, personal experiences - if you have anything at all to add just leave a comment.

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