We Are Starting to Enjoy Hatred
wsj.com
wsj.com
Taken solely by their on camera presentations, Thomas Wayne, Murray, and the police seem pretty reasonable people. However, this is overshadowed by the screen time and depth given to the joker.[1] The audience might briefly wonder if they deserve to die, but before that question can sink in, the plot advances, and the question is forgotten. It is easy to see how time, perspective, speed, and narrative saturation drive emotion.
I think our modern political environment has a lot of parallels. It is all thinking fast and no thinking slow.
[1] Aside, I think it is a great example of cinematic dissonance, where multiple meanings are intentionally or unintentionally layered. Eneaz Brodski had a great article about that introduced me to the term: https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/cinemanarrative-dissonance...
I mean, America was founded by people who thought the government should be risen up against and torn down with violence every other decade, just to keep things spicy. And that was the rich, white, Christian gentry that the American political system was created to empower and protect. Just imagine how women, non-Christians, non-white immigrants and black people, indigenous people, gay and transgendered people, and everyone else for whom that system has been at best callous and indifferent and at worse actively malicious feels.
A misanthropic hatred of society and its constructs is hard-coded into the American zeitgeist, by way of the sanctifying of revolutionary violence as a virtue by the Second Amendment and the ideals of the founders. "Hatred" in this sense has been the primary engine by which America has been forced, incrementally and often against its own instincts, to live up to its own ideals, and the more "free" America becomes, the more the hatred of America and its own hypocrisy and self-contradiction spreads. This is nothing new, it's always been there.
What? Source?
Constant violent transfers of power was a very minority view.
He thought the rebellion was an act of ignorance and failure of society to properly educate and inform the populace, but also felt that regular rebellion itself was necessary for any democracy, and shouldn't even be a crime. Essentially, he wanted to normalize the French Revolution as a regular facet of civil society.
Obviously that point of view didn't make it into the framework of the state (apart from, arguably, the Second Amendment) and the same government that created the Second Amendment put Shay's rebellion down, but the ideal has become a foundational part of American culture and beliefs about the nature of liberty and government as inherently hostile to liberty.
Nothing in Jefferson’s letter suggests a revolution every other decade, he simply states a preference for insurrection more frequently than “every century and a half” [1]. He also refers to insurrection in general, not French Revolutions; Jefferson supported executing Robespierre for his brutality [2].
In short, one founder believed in insurrection more frequently than every 15 decades. He decried brutal violence in even revolutions he supported. And he joined a government that rejected the notion of violent insurrection.
America was not “founded by people who thought the government should be risen up against and torn down with violence every other decade.”
[1] https://shaysrebellion.stcc.edu/shaysapp/person.do?shortName...
[2] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-28-02-0...
I don’t think I’m as cynical about the innate American spirit, or its exceptionalism. I think these are common human sentiments that wax and wane in different cultures at different times. I think it often be attenuated by factors and narratives outside one’s own hardships, or lack theirof.
> Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but over time devour us from the inside out. And it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure. We prefer think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy involuntary reaction to negative stimuli thrust upon us by the world we live in, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it’s a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again.
Note that Kreider's essay is from 2009: it's not like this dynamic is new!
[0] https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...
I speak of another danger we confront, not as dread or as foreboding, but equally offensive and evil to all reasonable, rational, free American citizens.
It is the danger of hate and venom, of slander and abuse, generated by fear and heaped indiscriminately upon many great Americans by another relative handful of zealots, in the ranks or clutches of self-styled “I am a better American than you are” organizations.
In every day’s deluge of mail at my office, there are generally a hundred and even two hundred letters which I describe simply as “fright mail.”
[ ... ]
Lunatic columnists, apostles of hate and fear on radio and television; and loony letters to the editor provoke their share of fright mail.
The curious fact is that the fright peddlers, from the simple simpletons to the wretched racists, all claim to be conservatives.
They are anything but patriotic. It is curious to me that they all have generally the same aims: Get the United States out of the U. N. Stop all foreign aid. Repeal the income tax. Abandon NATO and bring our troops home from Europe.
It is ironic that these very aims are very likely identical to the real hopes and aspirations of the Kremlin.
And I find it hard to believe that the followers of the fright peddlers are all wholly oblivious to the anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and outright racism of many of their “saviors.”
Thomas Kuchel, CA(R)
"The Fright-Peddlers", Cleveland State Law Review 1963
The more things change, huh.
This assertion runs contrary to the lived experience of 2016-2020 for the overwhelming majority of Americans.
The mainstream media has instructed the hatred. There is plenty to criticize about Trump in a dispassionate manner. For example, he is no financial reformer, and offers no specifics about reforming much of anything.
Were Trump's detractors interested in offering a sound reform platform, they would watch the MAGA crowd drop the Donald like a bad habit.
Yet that reform platform is nowhere in view.
Curious.
IMHO if you understand Nazi values and don't hate them, you're hate-deficient. So the total amount of hate someone carries around is a bad proxy for the quality of their values. It may be a better proxy for moral awareness or sensitivity.
Hate may have a place in a somewhat-developed moral system, but in a better-developed one, it's seen as a weakness in ourselves.
Note well: That doesn't mean that you do nothing and let Nazis run over other people. You still have to oppose them. But guard yourself against hatred when you do. Hatred will try to turn you into a Nazi-but-with-the-other-flag if you let it. (That is, one could have all the Nazi values, just point them at different people than the Nazis do.)
I mean, I'd understand Obama and Trump, but Biden?
How can someone so bland polarize a country?
But because Trump is a polarizing figure, not-Trump is too - just by being not-Trump, not due to any inherent polarizing-ness.
The polarization is not personality based. It comes from tribal thinking along political lines. Whomever is on the opposite side is “bad” regardless of their personal failings or achievements. Trump is, objectively speaking, a terrible human being and is a truly polarizing figure.