Hate is a Drug

I've been watching the recent degeneration of public discourse in the US, for which the healthcare debate is merely a convenient pretext ...

... I've been seeing and hearing more and more intelligent, sensible conservatives baffled, frustrated, increasingly angered by the screaming, the tantrum-throwing, the name-caling, the irrationality that is currently disguised as "conservative" opinion on a number of topics,

leaving them feeling totally excluded from their own ideology [or those who claim to espouse it] and their own preferred political party, on healthcare, national security, the economy, and various other issues ...

... and, since it is very true that the personal is political and the political is personal, I've been strongly, repeatedly reminded of various instances of mob savagery I've seen in cyberspace, in workplaces, in families.

Because mob savagery is what this is, but that isn't all it is.

This is what happens when hatred is deliberately encouraged and inflamed, as a form of cheap relief for feelings of powerlessness, and [not coincidentally], as a diversionary tactic.

Hate is a drug.

Hate

is

a

drug.

It is intoxicating, and addictive, and damaging to its abusers and to everyone with whom they come into contact.

It is utterly deceptive, and it requires increasing degrees of self-deception to maintain the addiction in the face of its effects.

It is ultimately fatal.

Do we, as a society, really wish to be addicted to hatred? Do we really wish to have our society dominated, our national character predominantly influenced, by those who are?

Consider this well:

Hate is the abusers' drug of choice, and it is also the drug that abusers push onto their enablers and sycophants. The crucial qualifying exam for gang membership is, after all, one's willingness to act out the hatred of one's gang bosses, instantly, without question or pause, without thought.

And this is true whether the gang in question is led by a brash teenaged she-brat in middle school [let's ignore Suzy; she's not cute and her mother dresses her funny, let's mock her and pick at her and taunt her until she cries]

or a psychopathic street criminal in baggy pants and tee shirt [let's shoot those ----s, they're on our turf disrespecting our rule]

or a brazen-voiced hatemonger on FM radio [Iet's sabotage anything our President tries to do to improve our current situation; he's Not One Of Us].

Hate is an incredibly blinding, incapacitating emotion. It completely disables critical thought. And detachment. And awareness. It makes us complicit in our own destruction, while we flail madly at smoke and mirrors.

I can't count the number of workplaces I've seen in which upper management deliberately played "the staff" against itself, encouraging rivalry, feeding competitiveness, rewarding petty malice, mocking any collegiality and cooperative spirit. It's no coincidence that in these workplaces salaries were low and morale was lower. Of course they were; as long as the peasants could be kept at one another's throats, they were no threat to their slumlords.

Once more, with feeling:

As long as the peasants can be kept at one another's throats, they are no threat to their slumlords.

Suggested countermeasure:

Just Say No To Thugs.