All Hate Is Self Hate

The Neo Axial Age, Part 4

“Can true humility and compassion exist in our words and eyes unless we know we too are capable of any act?” — St. Francis of Assisi

I was conversing with a friend the other day about the unfortunate ways social media talks about toxic masculinity, how all sides paint with far too broad a brush, making claims that imply either that all men everywhere are inherently toxic and must be restrained and retrained to act more like women, or that all behaviors our culture has historically labelled as masculine are always good and healthy and anyone who suggests otherwise is just a man hater. I happened to mention in passing the parallel difficulties in talking about toxic femininity, and my friend pulled up short. “Wait, what?” she exclaimed. “How is femininity ever toxic?” I was a bit stunned that she had never considered the possibility. But of course, any role in society can be occupied in a toxic way, because social roles are occupied by humans, and humans — all humans: white, black, male, female, gay, straight, rich, poor, conservative, liberal, and every shade of variance in-between all of these social labels — are capable of toxic behavior. 

We all just love to pretend otherwise. 

Which is, ironically, a toxic behavior. 

As a society, we focus a lot of our energy on social problems, as well we should. But the deeper truth is that we’re never going to get very far solving those problems until we each confront the more personal and more difficult reality that the darkness we see out in the world has a secret home in each of us, and until each of us has an honest reckoning with that darkness inside us, we’ll never be able to meaningfully resolve the darkness we see out there in society. 

Confronting the darkness within ourselves is a slippery endeavor even for the most earnest among us, because each of us is compulsively driven to distance ourselves from our own more shadowy parts. We’ll enact all sorts of elaborate social displays to prove (to ourselves, mostly, but also to anyone who might be watching) that we are innocent and righteous and incapable of the kinds of depravity we see in “them” or “that group” or “those people.” We’re quick to scapegoat various groups based on their power or status within the current social order, saying it’s all because of them that the rest of us are suffering. 

But the inconvenient truth is that if we took the privileged status from one group and gave it to another, over time we’d see a lot of the same toxic behaviors show up in the new power players. And who created that lopsided system in the first place? Maybe it wasn’t primarily you or your group this time ‘round, but we have all played our part in sustaining it. The truth is we humans are absolutely addicted to pecking orders. We find it nearly impossible to think about social groups without assigning them some kind of hierarchy. We are social creatures by nature, and are always trying to figure out where we fit in the larger group dynamic. As a result, we always create social systems were some are favored more than others. Sometimes those status markers are based on merit and make some logical sense to our shared flourishing as a group. Other times they are ludicrously nonsensical, such as whether your skin tone is lighter or darker than the person next to you. 

We keep trying to locate the problem out there, but keep finding, inevitably, that the problem is actually inside us. It is as Reinhold Niebuhr observed, so concisely: “Man is his own most vexing problem.” 

People are people, and neither gender, sex, skin tone, cultural history, economic status, nor any other qualifier of their identity can release them from the burden of their own conflicted nature. We are all made of a strange mix of light and darkness. Each of us is capable of great good and great evil, and until we grapple with this vexing conflict in ourselves, we will never eradicate it from our societies.

I’m not at all saying we should not resist toxic systems or correct negative behaviors when we encounter them out in the world. But I am saying there is a world of difference between generative social reform and punitive social hate, and that any tendency toward the latter in us inevitably makes us part of the problem and renders us incapable of being part of the solution. We will never reform democracy by hating members of one political party over another. We will never reform the patriarchy by hating men, or male authority. We will never reform the disparities in our economic systems by hating the rich or despising the poor. We will never resolve the complexities of human sexuality by hating straight men or straight women or those within the LGBTQ+ communities. We will never eradicate racism by hating people whose skin tone is different than ours. 

All hate is self hate, because we are part of one another, and what I despise in you I despise because it’s in my nature too, but I don’t want to face it. Our egos are addicted to building fortresses around ourselves to prove we are something special and different and better than the “them” of the moment. But there is no them. There is only us. When we malign and kill and pass judgment on others, we are ultimately only doing those things to ourselves. For they are us. And we are them. 

Until we see this, we have no hope of salvation, for our hearts will remain obsessed with scapegoating other hearts for all the darkness in us we hide from ourselves. 

However, this shared human conundrum is far from hopeless. All each of us really needs is a little humility and a little honest accounting of our own fallibility. Once you accept what Jung called your “shadow” — which is to say, once you bring your own personal darkness out into the light and confess, openly, nakedly, every ugly thing that’s in it, once you accept what you confess as a part of who you are, with compassion and without judgment — then you will find, to your great delight, that you don’t have to hate anymore. 

This release from the burden of hate is an astonishing grace. We’ve no idea how much weight our hate loads on our backs until it is at last thrown off. Its departure revolutionizes everything we believe about what it means to be human, and what’s actually required for human thriving. It changes the conversation from “them” to “us,” and from “you” to “me.” It awakens the keen awareness that we humans are actually all on a shared path, a path that’s moving us, ever so slowly yet relentlessly from a state of fear to a state of love … and as long as even one of us remains afraid and unloved, none of us can claim to be truly free.

(Note: This is the 4th installment in a series of essays. You can find all the entries by following these links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, and Part 8.)