Drawing The Line

Imagine the experience of an infant coming to existence. It is born into a state of terrifying helplessness. It is bombarded by stimuli, blinding lights, deafening sounds and bizarre internal sensations of hunger and cold. All out of its control and completely at its mercy. No definition where the experience of the child ends and the outside world starts. No distinction between the child, the blanket that wraps it, the mother’s skin it rests on. There exists no it vs. the world.

Flooded with sensation which its primitive psychic apparatus cannot comprehend the infant proceeds in a pleasure principle. It interjects (takes in) whatever is good, pleasurable. But, and this is crucial to our existence, it spits out or rejects whatever is bad or unpleasurable. This repulsion is our very first act of hate (hate stripped of its moral baggage.) It is what allows us to draw the boundaries of self against the whole. What we like remains incorporated and what we hate is rejected, further into the otherness. Through this act of repulsion we carve ourselves out.

Hate is the original act of creation.

In the beginning there was the word. And the word was with the child… And the child said “No.”

Hate is a structural necessity of the human psyche, one of the three primary passions (love, hate & ignorance.) We might like to think of hate as a shortcoming, a regrettable residue from our infancy. But there’s nothing we hate that doesn’t stem from a deep passion of being. The “No” is not a failure of love, rather a condition for the possibility of one.

And finally, the question that kept returning throughout this process: If hate is an integral way of knowing ourselves and the world – and we can’t do without it – what becomes of the modern world’s well intention push to eradicate hate and demand a frictionless empathy? What of the seductive fantasy of saying yes to everything? Can we affirm the totality of existence without including its negative?