Hate is a very common emotion which all of us know of. As defined in Wikipedia, it's as an emotion of intense revulsion, distaste, enmity, or antipathy for a person, thing, or phenomenon. It is interesting to note that its other cousin – love – gets all the attention from every possible quarter. You just have to see the coverage it got here, compared to “hate”. The possible reason is perhaps obvious - as a philosopher might say “Love makes life go ahead”. However, today’s realities suggest that Hate (and not love!) perhaps drives the world. Scores and scores of news channels, newspapers, and other media vehicles depend upon the end-product of hatred, to glorify their headlines and increase sales. Millions of air-time, ink, bromides and hence dollars are spent every year to highlight hatred.
Further, in the wired world, now we see another avatar of hatred in form of websites, blogs, emails and e-newsletters. So much importance this emotion has gained since ages that today we can see many people indulging in cashing in on the phenomenon. The latest one which drew my attention is a website — which writes to any person telling them that there is someone who hates them! Just write in the name of someone you hate, pay them $5, and the job is done.
Although I’m at a loss about the benefit the hater gets by doing so, yet if by doing so he/ she gets peace, I feel there could be some interesting possibilities. Imagine…
1) millions of Lebanese paying 5 bucks each to hate the person responsible to start the recent war. This “hate contribution” could go a long way in rehabilitating their war affected brethren
2) scores of such hate services crop up in each country. In extreme cases, you can expect crimes - due to hate alone – decrease considerably
3) media reporting perhaps more stories of “love” than hate and bloodshed
4) all of us perhaps could be well progressing towards more Utopian society, where productivity increases just because the negative emotion of hate is not there anymore
An angle which is often missed about hate or hatred is that like love, it is also an extreme emotion. You cannot hate a subject / object, unless you’re completely in love with that. As a result, maybe you’ve raised some kind of expectations about that subject / object, which when unfulfilled, triggers your anti-feeling. So it would be interesting if someone thinks of making “How to Love” as their business venture.
A second take on this could be encouraging a similar venture of teaching people to be “indifferent”. If you cannot love somebody, you start loving him more (albeit negatively) when you start hating him. But by being indifferent, you kill your emotions. Discounting the risk of treading the path of “religious preaching”, I feel this could be a much evolved way to tackle “Hate” or “hatred”.
Any takers? If none, any sponsors, who’d like to fund this project?
Image taken from http://www.whotohate.comFiled under:
1 comment:
Very interesting thoughts on these consuming emotions...
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