"Stop the Hate"

Almost everyone, including conservatives, is shoring up a pernicious woke concept. They’re legitimizing it. They’re agreeing with the woke. They’re helping woke’s idea stay cemented as a moral truth, when it’s actually a destructive lie.

I used to do what I’m about to accuse nearly everyone of doing; it’s an easy mistake to make, but it is a mistake. A consequential moral mistake.

They’re using the phrase and concept “bigotry and hate.” Yes. I’m saying that using that phrase is the shoring up of the pernicious concept that’s doing great damage. Let me explain.

First, let’s break the words apart. They are not the same. That’s the first important point to understand. Bigotry and hate are NOT the same.

Let’s talk about “hate.” We need to talk about it, but none of us do. You, reading this, are statistically likely to have used the word in this way. You’re likely to have said “they’re just promoting hate,” or some similar formulation. But you have never defined what you mean by hate, either in spoken word, or in writing, almost certainly. You likely don’t know what, specifically, you mean by it, do you (be honest inside your head-you don’t know, and I know that because I’ve been in your position)?

You think you know what “hate” is because “everyone knows what ‘hate’ is.”

No. Hate, to almost everyone, is the proverbial water of which fish are unaware because they have never experienced a day of life outside the context of water.

First, we need to define what people think they think hate means. Then we need to interrogate whether that thing is the ultimate sin that everyone agrees is an ultimate sin because it’s objectively the ultimate sin (spoiler: no, it isn’t. We’re completely deranged about ‘hate’ as a moral concept).

Bigotry is straightforward. It is the refusal to interact normally with another person because of that person’s membership in a definable group. It might be religion, skin color, social class, anything. What makes it bigotry is that one refuses to normally interact with that person simply and only on the basis of their group membership. Bigotry does not allow for individual moral character to make any difference in how one sees or treats that other person.

Hate, on the other hand, as we use it today, has no such simple definition. Try it out. Ask yourself, right now, what, very specifically, and not using the word ‘hate’ as part of the definition, you think you mean when you say ‘hate.’ When you object to “bigotry and hate.” When you talk about how we have to “stop hate.”

What, exactly, do you mean? Define what it is in detailed terms that “we have to stop”? I know many of you are tempted to roll your eyes and say, “Josh, everyone knows what hate is.” No, they don’t. And you, dear reader, are very likely among those who have no idea what you mean and why you’re saying it. Again, I know this because until the past few years, I said “bigotry and hate” the same way you do. I’ve thought about this for years now, and have concluded that I was simply parroting what has become a social law one must follow to be perceived as a morally and socially acceptable person.

If you are among the few who have already thought this through, and to whom this does not apply, then understand that this essay does not apply to you, and please do not personalize or kick back and get angry at me. I’m not insulting you, personally, reader I don’t know.

Even if you believe the modern definition of “hate” is self-evident (it’s not), it is true that we have never had a specific conversation defining it. There’s no popular documentary, or movie, or article, that everyone knows that we can point to and say, “This piece articulated the shared social meaning of this important concept.”

So, we can only triangulate what “hate” means in the modern context. By modern, I mean from about 2010 into the future. It was within this period that the term “haters” became popularized. A term that comes from the snotty lexicon of 15-year-olds is now regularly used by putative adults. It has replaced the terms “critic,” “adversary,” or “intellectual opponent.”

Notice what that did semantically. It turned the perfectly acceptable state of being a critic, or an opponent, into a moral sin. It turned ordinary—including hot and fractious—disagreement into an emotional and philosophical crime against whoever or whatever we allege is “hated.” It put that type of disagreement off-limits.

Notice how archetypally feminine that is. It socially criminalized a normal human emotion that’s not “nice.” That’s the nub: it’s a social criminalization of an emotional state that’s not “nice.”

The term “haters” accompanied the rise of the use of the term “hate” to describe what we used to call “bigotry,” or “unjust discrimination.” Again, bigotry is not hate. These are distinct concepts. And, no, bigotry is not always and necessarily prompted only by hate/hatred. That’s not true, no matter how popular that callow idea is today.

The meaning of “hate” has metastasized in the modern period to mean these, or some combination of these:

-Moral disapproval (of homosexuality, of Islam, of Christianity, of feminism, of take-your-pick)

-Aesthetic objection (to a way of living, a style of speaking, a way of worshipping, a style of architecture, etc.)

-Irritation with and unwillingness to tolerate (a foreign culture, practice, language, etc.)

Let’s take stock of that and consolidate it. We have now all decided, tacitly and with no discussion, that the best term to describe moral disapproval, disagreement, objection, or irritation, is “hatred.” A word that means hot, seething, blind anger. The kind of hot seething anger that intoxicates and leads to cruelty and things like murder.

That’s fucking insane. We have made the normal, human states of moral disapproval/disagreement into a synonym for the morally blinding anger-lust the Bible warns against. Insane.

What prompts all this “hate” from me (it’s a joke and I’m smiling)? It is seeing everyone, left, right, and libertarian, using the phrase “bigotry and hate.” Or the phrase, “we must stop hate.” No one stops and queries himself about what he means. No one thinks, “Wait, am I impugning rational objection unfairly? Am I setting up people who honestly disagree with me as strawman caricatures who should be treated as outside the sphere of moral concern in polite society?”

We should do that, because almost all of us are doing that.

“Hate,” today, is the term used to describe any objection that falls afoul of the American cardinal rule: “Anyone who says anything critical or negative about blacks, gays, trans, women, feminists, Muslims, or any other current Sacred Caste is guilty of Capital-H Hate and must be treated socially as no morally different than an admitted member of the Ku Klux Klan.”

In more economical language, “hate” is the term used to shut up anyone who doesn’t genuflect and lick the boots of the currently favored Eternal Victim Classes.

As is evident to anyone who reads me, there are plenty of Eternal Victim Classes that I have big problems with. I don’t like them. I don’t respect their behavior. I don’t find anything “beautiful and authentic” about them. I won’t bend the knee to them, and I won’t refuse to say so.

Yet I am not guilty of “hate.” And neither are you if in your private, silent mind, you too have some irritations or objections to the character/behavior of any of the classes of people listed above (and almost all of you do because you are humans like I am).

We are not guilty of “hate.” We have not violated God’s Law, or any sane Western social compact, by having the emotions and views we have. We are not “dangerous.” Our views may be more or less justifiable, wise or foolish, but they are not sins.

We need to become ethical adults again. Adults understand and accept the variety of human emotions. Adults do not pathologize negative emotions and visit social death on those who display them out of a cowardly, feminine, neurotic need to think of ourselves as always and only “nice” people. That is the behavior of children.

This piece is literally a first draft with no editing; I haven’t let it stand, I haven’t come back to it with fresh eyes. Therefore, it probably has logical and philosophical holes that need patching.

Let me know what you think.