In our last class we discussed William Hazlitt's On The Pleasure of Hating. We discussed how it seems as though Hazlitt hates the fact that anger and hatred have such an ingrained role in human nature, as well as himself. He ultimately acts as the ultimate pessimist in his essay and states that there is no hope for mankind because the only thing seem to be able to do is some form of hate. He talks about how if an Englishman fights alongside another Englishmen that they do not actually fight for the sake of Englishmen, but because they both hate the French.
However, is this common or mutual hatred all that bad? The old saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" could not be more true. Hatred is a very strong emotion. It is an emotion that makes friends out of enemies. There is a mutual understanding or friendship that forms sometimes from the mutual hating of something. An example that was brought up in class was how students at Furman who have never met before form friendships by sharing the same mutual hatred for the Dinning Hall or their hatred of FUPO for giving them Alcohol Violations, and these people become instant friends.
We are told day in and day out that hatred is bad and that we should love everyone, but should we? Hatred is human nature and it is an emotion that is engrained in us. Although hatred for certain things and the understanding of what it is is cultured through society. Society determines and shapes what hatred looks like and what its meaning is. However, we are all naturally engrained with the emotion of hatred, so why try and change something that is so primal? Hatred brings people closer together, although that sounds counterintuitive I truly think it does.
In my personal experience I have made some of my best friends after we both discovered that we hated a certain song or a certain smell. I regularly get coffee, dinner, lunch, breakfast etc. with my friends and we have venting sessions where we just talk about what we hate and we hate what we hate. The only difference that I think Hazlitt does not cover is that after I have these venting sessions I try to constructively change whatever it is I hate. I think this where Hazlitt could have benefitted from and it probably would have changed his view on hatred.
I definitely agree that hating forms close relationships, but I don't think that many people notice that. You mentioned getting together with friends and just venting about what you hate, and before we started talking about this essay, I would have never thought about the interactions that I have with my friends in that way. However, after our class discussions and reading Hazlitt, I've noticed that some of my closest friendships are based upon mutual hatred. I've looked back through some of my text conversations with my best friend, and we hate so much. "If blank and blank hang out and don't snapchat every moment, did they really hang out?" "These bitches sat directly in front of me [in the library] and won't stop talking I'm going to lose it." These seem like average correspondence (to me at least), but this kind of hatred has brought my best friend and I together. I don't think the hating is bad. It feels good to hate on the things that frustrate us. Hating is a guilty pleasure that everybody wants to deny and hide, but we all do it (maybe some more than others).
ReplyDeleteThough I agree that hatred brings people together, I believe there are other sources of friendship that are perhaps more important. Though I'm guilty of venting as much as anyone else is, I don't think it's the source of my friendship. If my relationships with people revolved around only hating, I'm not sure I would consider it a good relationship. My favorite memories with my friends are not of us finding commonality in what we hate, but in finding commonality in things we like.
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