I think the primary emotion is shame. Hitler drew on the shame felt by Germans at their ignominious defeat in WW1, an emotion buttressed by the Versailles Treaty. The Germans were ready to hate. They just needed a target.
Likewise, the Bolsheviks (always a minority party) drew on both the Russian defeat in WW1, coupled with centuries of humiliation at the hands of the various power elites.
For his part, Pol Pot learned that you CAN teach children to hate, if you get them before they develop the emotional capacity for empathy, a capacity you can permanently stunt if you get your tricks inside them early enough.
But psychologically normal people will not and cannot carry true hatred in them. Anger and mistrust, to be clear, are very different from hate. Hate is a word which has been used so reflexively in recent years that it means nothing. It is like racism in this respect. It has been ruined.
True hate, though is the combining of shame and anger. The two must go together. In order to hate someone, you must first feel yourself inferior. This triggers a survival instinct, a survival urge, which enables the orderly expression of aggression via anger.
For myself, I find myself saying “I hate everybody” whenever I feel shame. I think most people can relate to the sentiment “fuck everyone”. I think most of us–except the happiest among us–have felt this.
I don’t really hate everyone. I don’t know everyone, and I know there are people out there who are good. What I do is hate myself, then direct it out as unbearable, and to use language more precisely here, shame is the equivalent of self hatred. It is a lasting, pervasive emotion in those of us who got stunted at some point through trauma and lack of emotional nourishment.
Ultimately, it is shame I am trying to deal with in my neurofeedback. Here is the thing: anger and fear tend to be social emotions. Most of the time, they happen when you are out and about. You overreact both with excessive anger, and excessive paranoia about people and their intentions. I do, in any event. But shame backgrounds everything. It is the water in which this fish swims.
I am going through some hard times right now. Thick emotional mud. This is what I understood from the Tibetan Kun Zhi, although my scholarship is insufficient to know if I am using this term properly.
Roger Waters always spoke of carrying a stone. This is where the stones live. This is where you find them, and discard them, after which you are much lighter.
I was thinking this morning that one of the obvious blessings of having a body is that your body can continue when your psyche cannot. It can just keep putting one foot in front of the other, when you can’t imagine it. I think anyone who has reached a state where they could not go on, but they went on, will have felt this.
Imagine the alternative: pure consciousness, flitting around the universe. When you felt despair, you would go there and stay there. The increase in capacity for learning made possible by being able to get in the game and stay in the game is inestimable.
I may just be human soon. Stay tuned.