Hatred, the Leftist Emotion?

You’re a white racist.

This is one of the lovely epithets being slung around today. If I were on the receiving end of such hostility, I would have to respond by saying that I do not believe in turning the other cheek. Therefore . . .

You’re a totalitarian, postmodern progressive irrationalist, which means you are a communist/socialist/fascist/Nazi polylogist leftist and wannabe dictator whose only method of accomplishing anything is through physical force masked by governmentally initiated coercion and legal plunder called laws and regulations.

Other comments could be added, such as, “you’re a racist against whites, a misandrist, and a heterophobe,” but let’s just say, for short, that you are a communist/fascist leftist.* Your motivation is envy and hatred.

Envy has been covered by Helmet Schoeck and Ayn Rand, though Rand said envy is not the right word. Hatred of the good for being the good is more correct. So, let’s look at the psychology of hatred.

“Hatred of the good” is not envy because bad students who express this emotion do not want to be good students. They want the good students to fail, or at least be dragged down to their level. The same can be said for today’s entitlement poor. They do not want to work hard to become rich like successful business people. They want the rich to suffer (ignoring the history of rags-to-riches stories) and become like them.

Hatred, according to psychologist Edith Packer (Lectures on Psychology, chap. 4), is an emotion that begins with anger and resentment. If unchecked, that is, if underlying evaluations of the emotions are not examined for truth or falsity, and when false, not corrected, anger and resentment can develop into rage, hostility, and aggression.

Underlying anger, says Packer, is the universal evaluation that “an injustice has been done to me,” the word “universal” meaning all instances of anger express the same evaluation. That evaluation in any specific instance, however, may be valid or true, as when someone rudely cuts in front of us in a movie line, or invalid or false when it turns out that the cutter was joining his wife who was holding his place, or the cutting was inadvertent.

Anger expresses an injustice resulting from a specific action. Resentment expresses stored-up anger, stemming from a belief (valid or invalid) of long-term unjust treatment that has been neither confronted nor resolved. This can then lead to hatred.

Hatred says the target of the emotion is totally contemptible, that the person’s character, not just his or her specific action, is despised. To quote Packer, “an individual who feels hatred usually also feels helpless to correct the injustices committed by the person he hates. While hatred can be justified in some rare cases, almost always it is neurotic or pathological”** (pp. 103-04).

Rage, an out-of-control fury deriving from the conviction that somehow I am the cause of this injustice, often follows from hatred and is pathological. As is hostility, although hostility is a defense mechanism that only looks like anger. Deriving from self-doubt that is projected outward at an alleged injustice, the aim of hostility is to make the target suffer. Aggression, finally, is the behavioral manifestation of hostility, verbal or physical actions to deliver the intended injuries.

Hatred of the good that we see today is rage, hostility, and aggression, by way of shouting down speakers or banging on windows to disturb them, blocking street intersections or entrances to venues, and, in the worst cases, hurling rocks and other missiles at the targets and destroying their property.

Such hostile behaviors are criminal, driven by frail egos filled with self-doubt, and are not new.

Recall the decidedly un-civil-disobedient student demonstrations of the 1960s, the seizures of property, kidnappings of college deans . . . and bombings and killings. Or recall 1920s Weimar Germany and its street clashes between red-coated communists and brown-shirted Nazis, not to mention Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch.

The pathological and contemptibly immoral goal in both time periods was to tear down and destroy the accomplishments of capitalism and, ultimately, replace it with some form of totalitarianism. The same is occurring today.

Marx and Engels advocated violent revolution. Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler were just carrying out the communist/fascist founder’s wishes.

Marx’s method of argument was to declare to his opponents, “you’re just a bourgeoisie.” We can’t reason with you, he would say, because you don’t understand proletarian logic. That’s the meaning of “polylogism.”

Today’s Marxists, that is, the postmodern progressive Leninist, Mussolinian, Stalinist, Hitlerian leftists, do not even pretend to offer arguments. They smear opponents—people of prominent positions in universities, business, entertainment, and, especially, the media—by calling them names: “You’re a white racist, misogynist, homophobe.”

And they intimidate and threaten them, by pouring money into campaigns of vilification. If the targets do not toe the politically correct party line, or apologize grovelingly when they cross it, the leftists step up their campaigns to have them removed and their careers destroyed.

If this is not hatred—hatred of the good, the competent, the able—I don’t know what is.

(By the way, communist/fascist leftists, all crimes are hate crimes. That pickpocket who relieves you of your wallet is not doing it out of warm, fuzzy love.)

Postmodernism, and its leftist activists, reject the Enlightenment’s values of objective reality, reason, logic, individual rights, and capitalism. Stephen Hicks, in his book Explaining Postmodernism (1; Applying Principles, pp. 33-36), eloquently dubs postmodernists the Iagos to the Enlightenment’s Othellos. Their goal is to inject doubt into modernity’s values and, as it did with Othello, “let that doubt work like a slow poison” (Hicks, p. 200).

Or, as Hicks elsewhere describes the activists on college campuses (whom he denies the epithets “snowflakes” and “delicate flowers” because their tears, he says, are a tactic): the “grievances are not meant to be resolved. They are meant to fester and be used in the service of power-politics strategy. . . . The protesters’ point is to make unreasonable demands, and their goal is to see how much they can get away with.”

Calculated hate? How can it not be!

The antidote to this festering poison is a rational psychology that the Iagos do not possess, but if they did, it would consist of independence and a commitment to facts and truth.

In particular, it would be a commitment to the Enlightenment’s values that there really is an objective reality “out there,” that we can identify it through reason and logic, that we each individually possess rights deriving from our nature as human beings and applying universally to every person on earth, and that laissez-faire capitalism, or the closest thing we have ever come to it, has cured, and continues to cure, dread diseases, and has abolished, and continues to abolish, poverty in cultures worldwide by providing abundant opportunities for all to rise above their original stations in life.



* I’ve been struggling for some time to come up with an appropriate sobriquet to describe the far leftists. “Communist/fascist” works because differences between the two systems are superficial and Marx, Engels, and Lenin considered communism and socialism to be synonyms. “Left” on the political spectrum means total control of life and economy—this includes fascism—so “totalitarian leftist” becomes redundant.

** A justified emotion of hatred, for example, might be that of a victim of the Holocaust whose hatred is directed at the Nazis and their modern-day sympathizers.

Our Goebbelsian Culture and the Soviet Minders Who Claim to Protect Us

A smear, according to Merriam-Webster’s unabridged is “a deliberate and usually unsubstantiated charge or accusation intended to foment distrust or hatred against the person or organization so charged.”

As a logical fallacy, it is one-half of ad hominem. The fallacy runs as follows: “Mr. X is immoral. Therefore, his argument is false.” Today’s smear merchants, to use Sharyl Attkisson’s term, specialize in using the first sentence, embellished and sensationalized in varied ways, and omit any pretense of talking about logical argument.

In a world where facts don’t matter, our culture has become Goebbelsian. (See also (Applying Principles, pp. 293-95, 307-15)

Attkisson’s book The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What you Think, and How You Vote cites Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda from 1933-45, as one of the pioneers of smear-merchantry. The Gobbelsian method, in Attkisson’s words, says: “Tell a big lie. Focus and repeat—until the audience recites it in their sleep” (p. 12).

Smear merchants are unprincipled promoters who work for the highest bidder, and they have worked on both sides of the political aisle, but the difference today is that in the last twenty to twenty-five years that Attkisson chronicles, there are more “useful innocents” on the progressive Left who fan the flames of the smear.*

The fanners, says Attkisson, are the mainstream press, reporters eager for hot stories with legs, fed to them by the promoters and reproduced wholesale with little investigation on their part. The reporters, of course, are oblivious (or hostile) to the concept of objectivity in journalism and their own biased premises guiding the sensationalized slurs.

How do the smear merchants work? First, they funnel millions of dollars into nonprofit organizations that pretend to be unbiased watchdogs and protectors of the “public good.” (Words like “free” or “free society” are no longer used.) Next, they find influential targets to destroy, targets who are considered enemies of the “public good” (which means political correctness).

The organization assigns one Nazi- or Soviet-style “minder” (my term, not Attkisson’s) to read, listen to, or watch every word of the target, sitting in wait for the tiniest slipup, though the slip does not have to be actual. It may only be apparent, but once the smear merchants do their work, the audience will see it as actual.**

The slip, or alleged slip, is posted on the internet and distributed to hundreds of sympathetic members of the press who will then magnify and sensationalize it and express unforgiveable outrage, demanding not just groveling apologies but removal of the target from his or her influential post.

Part of the smear technique that is new in today’s world of the internet is the immediate use of social media and email. Media Matters, the most notorious and effective of these organizations, uses an algorithm and a small number of operatives to send thousands of social media messages and emails that appear to come from thousands of different people from all over the country. They all, of course, express the same outrage as the press.

The death blow for the target is thousands of emails sent to advertisers, who seldom have the spine to stand up to these kinds of assaults or the will or resources to verify the assertions. Advertisers then join the cabal for removal.

This is how Don Imus was removed from CBS radio and Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly were removed from Fox television. Sean Hannity was attacked in the same way, but he was prepared and has survived.

Imus, for example, made his name making shockingly offensive remarks as humor about a wide variety of people all over the political spectrum. The last straw for the Left were racial comments made in jest by him and his producer.

Beck, in a Media Matters campaign funded by wealthy Leftist George Soros, was accused of potentially inciting violence, domestic terrorism, and recklessly endangering innocent lives. O’Reilly was smeared for unverified charges of sexual harassment.

Hannity fought back loudly and at length on his television show and threatened to sue for slander and libel, which is what is necessary to defeat the smear merchants.

Joseph Goebels reportedly said, “A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” This is the essential modus operandi of the smear merchants.

What happens if someone from the other side of the aisle commits a slip? Nothing. Attkisson lists seven such actual, not apparent, slipups—double standards, she calls them. One slip was dismissed simply as a “lame attempt at humor” (pp. 52-53). Everything thereafter was right with the world.


* I begrudgingly use the kinder words of Ludwig von Mises. Mises used the words to describe naïve, alleged classical liberals who flirted with and made concessions to the communists. “Useful idiots,” my preferred choice, were words attributed to Lenin, apparently mistakenly, though Lenin had many such idiots to swallow and distribute his propaganda. Attkisson just calls the innocents “friendlies in the media.”

** “Tracker” is what the organizations call their minders. When the target commits a verboten slip, or pretended slip, many more trackers may be assigned to gather ammunition for the kill.