Cultivate Hate

I’m a big fan of common sense (not all that common), but conventional wisdom? Not so much. Ever since kindergarten, I’ve been questioning the status quo. I’ve been misunderstood and labeled as a troublemaker but to be fair, I’m just curious.

Question authority! Remember that? Well, now I’m an authority on questioning authority, so when the “experts” all say we need to get rid of all the hate around us I naturally flip the script. I rail, therefore I am.

There’s so much hate these days it’s time to cultivate it. That’s right Cultivate Hate. First of all, the opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference, so let’s not talk about replacing hate with love. Hate is above all else, an energy, and when it’s activated it brings with it a power that unleashed and unbound seems unconscionable. So, suppose we could flip the switch and turn the power from destructive to constructive? Happens all the time. It’s human nature. We’ve just gotta show the hate a little love.

The Jewish mystics tell us we mortals have a yetzer tov (an inclination toward good) and a yetzer hara (an inclination toward evil). We’re hardwired as we’re hard-headed. When we honor our yetzer hara we strive to make what we see as nature’s shortcomings better. We build things to shelter us. We band together and invent things, cure things, and re-shape our world to suit our highest yearnings. Sure, in doing so, we can, individually bend the energy to capitalize, but when hate is truly cultivated, we progress and evolve. Without the yetzer hara we’d be complacent and that doesn’t work, even for those that are doing well, thank you. That’s because there’s always more to do even for the well-to-do. It’s that urge to be better, bigger, brighter. The world is infinite. There’s so much to hate and infinite ways to make. bitter better.

Now, the cultivation is the key. Think of hate as a weed. You can damn it and destroy it or turn it into medicine. It doesn’t care, but when you care for it so much good can come out of bad.

We see it all the time when technology developed for war in the military gets transformed into consumer products. WIFI, smart devices, jet planes, camping gear, — hell the interstate highway system which opened up so much of America came out of a need for civil defense. It is weren’t for hatred of Communism we’d never have pushed to the moon, and made room for boomers to attend college and learn science, the arts, and more. So God Bless the hate. But in the blessing, we need some direction.

Face it, haters gonna hate. Taylor Swift doesn’t lie. Let’s all come together and put our hate in one basket. Hate low pay?Check. Hate government waste? Check. Hate disease? Check. Hate potholes? Check. There’s so much hate to agree on. We got this. There’s so much to build on. A good war effort is a terrible thing to waste.

One thing, though. Hate becomes destructive again when it’s essentially self-hate. Problem is, that when there’s self-hatred it destorys all that energy by projecting the hate onto others. Bummer. So if you hate what you’re doing and you conflate it with who you’re being, you might defend yourself against yourself by projecting your hate on others: other people, institutions, a circumstance, the world, God. (By the way, God doesn’t care. God just says “yes” to whatever you’re throwing god’s way).

And that’s the issue. Look at a toddler’s room post-tantrum. “Looks like a hurricane hit it,” my mother would say. Well, think of all that good whirlwind energy bent on destruction. Plug a frustrated toddler into a socket and light up the house. Free. Who needs solar when you’ve got rage? Don’t rage against the machine, plug into it?

All that to reiterate and not obliterate. To cultivate the hate. We can do it. It’ll take an amalgam of public relations and an aggregation of our aggravation all across the nation. We’ll be dancing in the streets. A rave not a riot.

So why wait? Let’s hate. Make America Hate Again, but this time as one. Todd Rundgren once sang “Light of the world, shine on me, love is the answer.” He’s right but we’ve got to hate hate enough to get to love.

Let’s turn that yetzer hara into yetzer hurrah!