Happiness

HATRED

Hatred is the winter of the heart.

VICTOR HUGO

Of all the mental poisons, hatred is the most toxic. It is one of the chief causes of unhappiness and the driving force of all violence, all genocide, all assaults on human dignity. When someone hits us, instinct would have us hit back, so human societies give their members the right to retaliate in varying degrees of justice, depending on their level of civility. Tolerance, forgiveness, and understanding of the aggressor’s situation are generally considered to be optional. We are rarely able to see the criminal as a victim of his own hatred. It is even harder to understand that the desire for vengeance stems from basically the same emotion that led the aggressor to assault us. So long as one person’s hatred generates another’s, the cycle of resentment, reprisal, and suffering will never be broken. “If hatred responds to hatred, hatred will never end,” taught the Buddha Shakyamuni. Eliminating hatred from our mind stream is therefore a critical step in our journey to happiness.

THE UGLY FACES OF HATRED

Negative anger, the precursor to hatred, obeys the impulse to shove aside anyone who stands in the way of what the self demands, without consideration of anyone else’s well-being. It is also reflected in the hostility felt when the self is threatened, and in resentment when it is wounded, scorned, or ignored. Malice is less violent than hatred but more insidious and equally pernicious. It can be fanned into hatred, which is both the desire to harm someone and the act of doing so, directly or by circuitous means.

Hatred exaggerates the faults of its object and ignores its good qualities. As Aaron Beck notes: “Biased perceptions and thinking become set in a mental vise in response to threat, real or imaginary. This rigid frame, the prison of the mind, is responsible for much of the hate and violence that plague us.”¹ The mind, steeped in animosity and resentment, encloses itself in illusion and is convinced that the source of its dissatisfaction is entirely exterior to itself. Our perception of being wronged or threatened leads us to focus exclusively on the negative aspects of a person or a group. We fail to see people and events in the context of a much vaster web of interrelated causes and conditions. Forming the image of the “enemy” as despicable, we generalize it to the whole person or the entire group. We solidify the “evil” or “disgusting” attributes we see in them as being permanent and intrinsic traits, and turn away from any reevaluation of the situation. We thus feel justified in expressing our animosity and retaliating. Self-righteousness can also make us feel the need to “cleanse” our entourage, society, and the world at large from such “evil.” Hence discrimination, persecution, genocide, blind retaliation, and also the death penalty, the ultimate legal retaliation. By then we have obscured the basic benevolence that makes us appreciate everyone’s aspiration to avoid suffering and achieve happiness.

Hatred is not expressed solely through anger, but the latter erupts the moment circumstances permit. It is linked to other negative emotions and attitudes: aggression, resentment, bitterness, intolerance, slander, and above all, ignorance. It can also stem from fear when we or those we love are threatened.

We also have to learn to identify “everyday” hatred connected to our immediate circle. What can we do when we hate our brother, our colleague, or our ex-husband? They obsess us. We brood over their faces, their habits, and their quirks until they make us sick; our obsession relentlessly converts mundane aversion into persecution. I knew a man who turned red with anger at the slightest mention of the wife who had left him twenty years earlier.

The undesirable effects of hatred are obvious. We need only peek within ourselves. Under its influence our mind sees things in an unrealistic way, the source of endless frustration. The Dalai Lama has an answer:

By giving in to anger, we are not necessarily harming our enemy but we are definitely harming ourselves. We lose our sense of inner peace, we do everything wrong, we cannot sleep well, we put off our guests or we cast furious glances at those who have the impudence of being in our way. If we have a pet, we forget to feed it. We make life impossible for those who live with us, and even our dearest friends are kept at a distance. Since there are fewer and fewer people who sympathize with us, we feel more and more lonely. . . . To what end? Even if we allow our rage to go all the way, we will never eliminate all our enemies. Do you know of anyone who ever has? As long as we harbor that inner enemy of anger or hatred, however successful we are at destroying our outer enemies today, others will emerge tomorrow.”²

Hatred is clearly corrosive, whatever the intensity and circumstances behind it. Once hatred has overwhelmed us, we are no longer masters of ourselves and are incapable of thinking in terms of love and compassion. And yet hatred always begins with a simple thought. This is the precise moment to jump in with one of the techniques for dispelling negative emotions that are discussed in Chapter 10.

THE DESIRE FOR VENGEANCE

It is important to stress that we can be deeply opposed to injustice, cruelty, oppression, and fanaticism, and do everything in our power to counteract them, without succumbing to hatred.

When we consider an individual in the clutches of hatred, anger, and aggression, we should consider him more as a sick patient than as an enemy. Someone who should be healed, not punished. If an insane patient attacks a doctor, the latter must bring him under control and try his best to cure him without feeling reciprocal hatred. One does not expect a doctor to start beating up his patients. One can feel boundless repulsion for the misdeeds of an individual or group of individuals, as well as deep sadness for the suffering they have caused, without giving in to the desire for revenge. Sadness and repulsion need to be mingled with broad-minded compassion for the miserable condition to which the person has sunk. The patient should be distinguished from his disease. This is not just cheap pity for the murderer, but vast compassion for all sentient beings, whoever they might be, and the wish that they may become free from hatred and ignorance. In short, contemplating the horror of other people’s crimes should enhance in one’s own mind a boundless love and compassion for all, rather than hatred of a few.

It is therefore important not to confuse repulsion for despicable behavior with the irrevocable condemnation of a person. Of course the act does not commit itself, but although he may currently think and behave in the most noxious way, even the cruelest torturer was not born cruel, and who knows what he will be in twenty years? Who can say for sure that he will not change? A friend of mine told me about an inmate in an American prison for repeat offenders, who very often go on to kill one another within the institution itself. This inmate decided to pass some time by attending a meditation class offered to prisoners. This is his testimony: “One day, it felt like a wall collapsing inside me. I realized that up to then I had never thought or behaved in any other terms but hatred and violence, almost as if I’d been crazy. I suddenly understood the inhumanity of my actions and began to look at the world and other people in a totally different light.”

Over the course of a year, he struggled to function on a more altruistic plane and to encourage his peers to renounce violence. Such transformations are rare only because the conditions conducive to them are not usually made available to prisoners. Someone who has lost all intent and power to cause harm can be considered to be a new person.

Just as an individual can fall prey to hatred, so too can a whole society. Yet hatred can disappear from people’s minds. A clean stream can become polluted, yet it can be purified and become drinkable again. Without the possibility of inner change, we would be caught in a self-defeating despair bereft of all hope. A Buddhist saying goes, “The only good thing about evil is that it can be purified.” Human beings can change, and if someone has truly changed, forgiveness is not indulgence toward his past deeds but an acknowledgment of what he has become. Forgiveness is intimately linked to the possibility of human transformation.