In defence of hatred and anger

Just to forestall any possible criticism that this isn't related to the issues dealt with under the rubric of "antipsychiatry", I would first like to say that this bears directly on the current war on the institutional evil that is organized psychiatry, because of the pervasive use of the hatred some people understandably feel towards the evil of psychiatry, both in its historical and contemporary guises, as a means of discrediting their criticism.

It is something of a modern cultural axiom that hatred and anger are always destructive, cankerous in their influence. Even hatred felt towards oppression and those who incarnate it is dismissed as merely adding to the sum total of the world's evil.

It is my contention that throughout history perhaps the sovereign motive that could be said to have impelled real resistance fighters was hatred, and that hatred to the evil and the injustice of the world which we inhabit and those who embody this evil is a vital catalyst in any resistance to injustice and evil, and also a bulwark against complacency and moral indifference.

TBC>

The criticism, which constitutes something of an immoral equivalency that obliterates numerous important distinctions, is that hatred against an oppressor reduces you to same level as your oppressor, that you become the very thing you hate. Even if one were to accept that such hatred is an evil, it still ignores the difference in degrees of evil between hating someone on the hand and actual violence against the person on the other.

Hatred and anger are often necessary, especially when employed to noble ends and harnessed to the cause of justice. The Red Army didn't push back the Nazi hordes by singing kumbaya, preaching Christian precepts, by refusal to intervene for fear of futher contributing to the world's evil, or by respect for the maxims of cognate schools of thought such as quietism, pacifism, and stoicism. Such people often unwittingly contribute to the proliferation of evil, and if we had heeded the pacifists and the quietists at the time of the second world war, we might all be living under a thousand year reich right now. Sometimes, due to the exigencies of the historical situation, hatred and anger are necessary. Indeed, it might not be going too far to say that hatred and anger form the very lifeblood of resistance, and those lacking it are usually the ones least inclined to fight back against evil and most inclined to collaborate with it, or at best, to simply offer qualified criticisms lacking the requisite intransigency that oppression demands, as is found amongst most critics of psychiatry.

Some people justify their unconditional hatred of hatred by deluding themselves that there is some sort of infallible cause and effect relationship between hatred and evil acts. Yet the disciplined, bridled hatred of a great moral philosopher such as Solzhenitsyn, whose rankling and obsessive hatred of Stalinism was the source of the work he wrote memorializing the evils that happened under the Soviet dispensation and the suffering of the victims, never translated into evil acts.

As I see it, certain emotions, such as fear, anger and hatred (some might not describe hatred as an emotion because of its cogntive content, but all emotions have cognitive content), when they reach their highest pitch, may transport the mind beyond the bounds of reason. Tossed about on the waves of an unsteady temperament, judgement often founders; nevertheless by means of these emotional currents, it is often directed into the right channels, and alights upon the right shores.

I tell you one thing I hate is that new phrase people say all the time now "it is what it is" , seems people these days have no fight in them at all. I really hate that saying.