I Hate, Therefore I Am

I said a good word about Elon Musk not long ago. It was at a party. I’d had some punch. (Two cups. Maybe two and a half?) I think it was something about Starlink. I’m not sure. I’d just read Walter Isaacson’s affable Musk biography.

My interlocutor, a genial fellow professor, looked at me as if I’d kicked his dog. Why? Because we (good people, Whole Foods shoppers, composting mavens, pronouns respecters) don’t like Elon. In fact, we hate him. Truly, we do. We once aspired to drive a Tesla, but no more. Everything about him is bad.

I find hate to be virtually omnipresent in the current culture. Libs hate conservatives, and conservatives hate ’em right back. People hate politicians, the elite, MAGA hats (and their wearers), social media (though they cannot stay away from it). Some hate the rich. Some despise immigrants. People hate the media.

They hate corporations. They hate capitalism. They hate woke and cancel culture. They hate globalism and globalists. They hate this president. There is love out there to be sure — for Beyoncé, for Pedro Pascal and, yes, even for this president, but hate trumps love by a mile now, or so it seems to me.

Why should this be true?

Descartes had a famous dictum about the constitutive powers of the thinking self: I think therefore I am. Could it be that, today, I hate, therefore I am? What if who and what we hate is who we are now? Why might hate be constructive — crucially constructive — of identity at this particular point in time? And why should possessing identity matter so much to us?

The traditional sources of stable selfhood have been significantly depleted over time. We live in an age of skepticism, often corrosive skepticism, about our institutions and their good intentions. Perhaps we are not wrong to do so. To speak personally, the revelations about priestly child molesting sent me to a level of antipathy to the Catholic Church (in which I grew up) that stays with me still. Many others have had similar experiences — about bank bailouts or Covid school closures or President Joe Biden’s reported mental acuity.

Once we could consolidate an identity by calling ourselves, say, a Boston Globe- reading Roman Catholic who votes Democratic and roots for the Red Sox. Now, perhaps the only plausible entity in our list is the Red Sox. And with the arrival of legal gambling in professional sports, it’s hard to imagine that our games, even what was once the national pastime, will remain untainted for long.

What happens when those once-basic planks for building an identity become useless for many? What happens when they seem to be rotted out?

One may define oneself — one may define the self — through hate. One day you are a blank slate, a void. But you can become yourself simply through hatred. You define yourself through your antipathies. I hate the church. I hate my school. I hate my parents, hate the administration, hate the president, hate the fascists, hate the communists. And maybe you begin to hate the Red Sox, too. I know any number of people who define themselves at least in part by hating a sports team. Take a bow, Duke University basketball.

Suddenly, you have stabilized the self. Do you want to be somebody? Well, now you are. You are the person with a stunning palette of hatreds. You don’t need to have positive allegiances to define yourself: The negative ones will do. Suddenly, ambiguity and nuance disappear, and you become Someone, with all of whose energies flowing in the same direction.

Character is inner conflict much of the time. We tend to have warring internal lives in which we hate and love simultaneously. This is confusing, turbulent. But outright hate clears all that up. There are, I think, laudable ways to unite the spirit: Pursuing courage, compassion, creative expression and wisdom can do just that. But there are toxic ways as well.

Nietzsche says that people would rather have the void for purpose than be void of purpose. Having nothing, having no purpose in the world, may be a more threatening state to the individual than hating. Hating gives you a plan for action.

Yet hating is like gathering dry brush from the fields and piling it. You do that and your friends do so as well. And there’s a bit of pantomime to it. The hate-fests are all just among pals. I put my hate on the internet, but that’s not real. Or so one says, and the dry brush gathers and gathers until one day there is a spark and the flames jump.

There are factors now that militate against a hate-based wildfire. The economy is good. We’ve got big-screen color TVs. But pull that security out from under us, and where shall we be? More susceptible to letting hate turn into what it can, or less? Does one even need to ask? Playing with hate is playing with mortality. And many of us now play frequently with hate.

We live in an age of identity. Everyone seems to need to have a profile. Did Norman Mailer compile an arresting book called “Advertisements for Myself”? Now we’re all advertising for ourselves. We post our pictures, trumpet our achievements, boast about our plans. As Adam Phillips says, not knowing for certain what the good life is, we settle for the enviable life.

Attention is our most valued commodity. Get enough attention and one way or another, the cash will flow. And to monetize the self, one must have a self to monetize. We cultivate the sense of identity in a world where there are very few props for self-construction. Hate is one, and perhaps the most reliable. (I hate therefore I am.)

Freud said that in order to thrive in life he needed a committed friend and a fierce enemy. He needed to show the enemy what he was made of. (Carl Jung obligingly played the role of both in sequence.)

I once heard Harold Bloom, a fine writer and teacher, say that he welcomed criticism, the nastier the better. For the catcalls he heard at his back inspired him. He went so far as to say that the catcallers were doing his work for him.

What is to be done? The readiest answer is to work for a renewal of love. Love your enemy, or at least love your neighbor as yourself. Jacques Lacan said this might not be such a grand idea, given that most people don’t love themselves much at all.

Skeptical psychoanalysts aside, why not work for a culture based self-consciously on love? As an imperfect follower of Buddha and Jesus, I would be delighted with that. But I fear it is not to be. We are too far gone in antipathy.

Instead, we might cast a skeptical eye on this concept of identity that seems so powerful now to so many. I’m not saying we should scrap thoughts of self and identity. But maybe we should occasionally send self away, send self on a brief vacation. Take a rest, breathe a breath or two in peace.

I think this is possible, and I think there are writers who show us how. I’m thinking of John Keats and his idea of developing negative capability: the ability to be in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, without irritably reaching after fact and reason. Keats offers us a beautiful detachment from the world and self. Suspend your commitment to belief, he says, if only for a while. See the world from all sides or as many sides as you can, as Shakespeare did. Quiet your opinions; rest the nagging, persistent self.

I’m also thinking of Emily Dickinson, who wrote a wonderful lyric about how and why to suspend the pressure we put on the self:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don't tell! they’d banish us — you know!
How dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a Frog —
To tell your name — the livelong June —
To an admiring Bog!

If there’s a better brief critique of our existing constructions of the self, I’m not sure where to find it. We are, all too often, telling our name all day and night to what we hope might be a set of admirers, but is in fact nothing but a bog populated by other dreary self-proclaimers. Dickinson’s advice: Duck out, keep quiet. Maybe you can start again, without the hate.

My last example comes from Michel Foucault and the conclusion of “The Order of Things.” (In French, “Les Mots et les Choses,” (“Words and Things”), a better title). There, Foucault imagines a figure drawn in the sand that is washed away by the incoming tides. That figure is Man, as he has been constructed in the West.

Man is made by a collection of defining discourses, according to Foucault, and in time those discourses will wash away, leaving us with a new start. Foucault puts us in touch with the transience and indeed the inevitable disappearance not only of ourselves as individuals, but also of humanity as currently conceived. His way of delivering us from the burdens of self-definition focuses not on the individual like Keats and Dickinson, but on the collective.

I would urge that we look at these writers not as merely eccentric, but as offering us something. What they offer is an escape, or the prospect of an escape, from the burdens of constructing a self out of the culturally available material. They offer us a break from the fiction of individual unified being. They offer us an escape from hate.