Can hatred be an ideology?

The Ideology of HatredIn her book The Ideology of Hatred: The Psychic Power of Discourse, Niza Yanay argues that conflicts formerly identified as struggles for national autonomy or self-determination are now being viewed as products of hatred. We heard a lot of that after 9/11: “Why do they hate us?”

Perhaps the answers would have seemed too embarrassing if the media had asked questions such as, “Why do they want control of their own oil, of their own territory?”

Yanay argues that hatred is not the opposite of love but rather is intricately intertwined with it. Think about it. On a personal level, how often do husbands, wives, lovers, and children say “I hate you” to the people they love and need most?

Yanay categorizes hate into two types:

  • Hatred by the oppressed toward an oppressor
  • Hatred by the oppressor toward the oppressed.

The first, she points out, can be easily understood. The second type, however, requires the development of an ideology to support it—an  ideology that portrays you and your particular group as moral, good, and just, and any “Other” as hateful and dangerous.

While political-military leaders and the media may reinforce such an ideology–for example, referring to an “Axis of Evil” or “Muslim terrorism”—people have an unconscious desire to connect with the “enemy.” For example, sometimes Israelis refer to Palestinians and Arabs refer to Jews as “our cousins.”

Yanay offers a way out of the sort of hatred promoted in the Middle East and elsewhere: form friendships, even in the face of conflicts, just as we do in our personal lives. Most of us have good friends who occasionally frustrate us, anger us, refuse to see that we are right and they are wrong. In general, though, we value those personal friendships enough to work things through.

Nations can do that too.

Kathleen Malley-Morrison and Majed Ashy

An earlier version of this two-part review was recently published in the American
Psychological Association journal, PsycCRITIQUES, August 2013.

Psychoanalyzing human aggression and war

Uncle Sam poster, Psychoanalysts have had a long interest in war and other forms of human aggression. For example, the “father” of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1915), horrified by the outbreak of World War I, argued that the violence was convincing evidence that “A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.”

Decades later, appalled by violence in the United States (which he identified as “the most violent of industrial societies”), psychoanalyst James Gilligan placed considerable blame on people’s moralistic motivation to punish others. In his view, rigid and hierarchical social structures produce shame in the downtrodden, and those victims strive to replace shame with pride. He cites German resurgence in the post-World War I era as an example of how punishment and shame can generate appalling violence.

More recently, an Israeli scholar, Niza Yanay, offers another psychoanalytic analysis of the psychological foundations of violence. In The Ideology of Hatred: The Psychic Power of Discourse, she explores the unconscious forces and conflicts that underlie political hatred, which she views as an ideology of power and control.

Disillusioned, like Freud, with governing groups, Yanay comments “Sovereign states and groups are usually motivated to construct a humane face and a just image for themselves” (p. 99). She goes on to suggest that hatred helps aggressors maintain their image of goodness by turning the victims into objects of blame deserving hatred.

What do you think of these psychoanalytic perspectives? Do you think governments seek a monopoly on violence and will commit acts of aggression that would be declared illegal when done by individuals? And do they try to present a “humane face” while using propaganda to promote hatred?

Kathie Malley-Morrison and Majed Ashy

An earlier version of this two-part review was recently published in the American
Psychological Association journal, PsycCRITIQUES, August 2013.

Star Wars off their rockers

In the world of Hollywood, R2-D2 is an appealing robot who comes to the rescue in every Star Wars movie. In the real world, robots are being created to kill on their own—that is, without human direction and oversight.

Big dog military robots
Big dog military robots. Image in public domain.

Although proponents of killing without risk to one’s own side use terms like “lethal autonomous robotics” or “autonomous military robots” to describe the latest product of deadly technology, the term “killer robots” captures better what these machines are programmed to do.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots makes a very compelling case for why it is so risky to program robots to kill and then to turn them loose.

Concerns about killer robots are strong enough and widespread enough that the Human Rights Council of the United Nations is urging a moratorium on their development “before it is too late.”

A U.N. ban on the development of killer robots is a good idea, as was the U.N. 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction–the international agreement banning antipersonnel landmines. The U.S. is among the small number of nations that have not signed that treaty.

UNICEF estimates that in the world today there are 110 million landmines in 64 countries; many of those (e.g., in Vietnam and Afghanistan) were planted by the U.S.  Every month about 800 people–mostly innocent children and other civilians–die from landmines, and thousands more are seriously injured.

Do we really need to add killer robots to our arsenal of deadly weapons?

So many Americans cloak themselves in hatred and search for an evil empire to destroy with the latest Star Wars weaponry. They may succeed. And the empire they find and destroy may be our own.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

The Constitution corrupted, Part I

Hate crimes victims data
Graphic by Abram Samuelson, used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Seven more deaths (including the gunman) and four more wounded in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Why? Racism, hatred, anger, fear, frustration, propaganda, the easy availability of weapons, and the corruption of the United States Constitution.

Pseudo-conservative, pseudo-Christian, pseudo-moral right-wing extremists have been able to convince too many people that the United States Bill of Rights was written solely for them.

Their claims appeal in particular to the increasing number of people who see the American dream escaping them, who struggle to make a living in a society where wealth seems to abound, and who wonder why they can’t have it all.

The propaganda giants are only too happy to create scapegoats.

Imagine what it would be like if the Bill of Rights were re-written by the power-hungry right-wing minority that would like everyone to believe that our basic rights should be interpreted as follows:

Amendment I. Congress shall make no laws interfering with the right religion; Congress shall not interfere with the freedom to spread lies and hatred and to incite to violence; Congress shall not interfere with the right of people to assemble peacefully as long as they are the right people.

Amendment II. Nobody shall interfere with the right of disaffected vengeful people to bear arms in order to kill anyone who disagrees with them (or is the wrong color or the wrong religion or the wrong nationality).

Amendment IV.  People have the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures unless they are the wrong people.

These are NOT the original Amendments to our Constitution—the Constitution that our public officials swear to uphold. (See the correct wording.)

In the next post, I will consider how some of the other Amendments to the U.S. Constitution have been corrupted by seekers after power who have no interest in human rights or democracy–only the pursuit of their own interests.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology