The Sanskrit word for ego is ahamkara, which literally means “I maker”. I would submit that the first, inherent task of such a thing, such a process, is the creation of difference. There can be no “I” if there is not a “not I”, an out there. The ahamkara is also a “difference maker”.
I would submit that the principle function of consciousness is precisely differentiation. There is a difference between a bird and the sun, between dog shit and roses.
And there are differences between people. There is a difference between a pedophile and a sincere philanthropist. If we extend the “I maker” to groups of people the unit of society would be the “Us maker”. It would be what creates the differences that define that group, which NECESSARILY would include internal consistencies, such as rejecting in principle and gut pedophilia, and praising sincere philanthropy.
Hate is a dysfunction in this system. It is a failure in either the I maker or Us maker, probably both. A person who hates is someone who is not full, who is not fully individuated, who is not yet engaged on a creative personal adventure, who does not enjoy life, who is not complete in some way, who is half baked and half risen. Likewise, a society which hates is one which is insufficiently integrated, in which people do not feel part of a flow of life, of larger creative energies, who do not feel wanted and valued and esteemed for who they REALLY are; who in many cases do not KNOW who they are, since that society does not encourage self exploration.
Who are the two groups who do most of the hating in the modern world? Muslims and Leftists. In the first case, what you have is a system which largely rejects the individual, which is manifested in the rejection of the desirability or even POSSIBILITY of individual moral judgment, of communication with God unmediated by the Koran and Hadith. You cannot grow as a person in such a system, unless it is softened by non-dogmatists, as in practice has happened around the world. Gurdjieff, if memory serves, found the heart of true Islam in Bukhara.
Fanatical, fundamentalist Islam must be seen as a response to the perception of marginalization of tradition, and religion in the modern world. It must be seen as a response to the perception of an attack on the “Us maker” and the “I makers” of their world. Precisely to the extent they feel uncertain about themselves, they hate.
It some respects I am mouthing truisms here, but I often find that even when I am covering familiar ground, I will notice some side alley that leads somewhere new, even if only in a small way.
Leftism I deal with daily. The headless people.
I will say that Sunday I was on a longish like, and your mind wanders at times when you’re in steady motion for several hours. Voldemort popped up in my mind, life-size. I shrank him, and confined him in a cocoon of webs. His form altered, such that he had many heads and legs and arms. He became less a human than a force composed of pure anger. That image lingered for a while, and I wondered what to do with it. And it occurred to me to pull it back in. I did, and felt an anger in me that I realized had been there a long, long time, but that I had rejected and suppressed.
Anger serves a purpose. It is a sort of guard dog, protecting us at all times, and will attack what is hurting us until we call it off. And I think that while all of us are familiar with the concept of “psychological conflict”, I don’t think we quite realize how acccurate this term is. Many of us, with certain histories, have what might be termed an emotional “shadow budget”. We consciously allocate energy to our chosen and necessary tasks daily, but we also have to allocate emotional “money” to feed antagonists within us, the guard dog and the unwanted intruder.
We become less than we ought to be, and never know it.
Few thoughts. It is fortunate for me–and I thank God (truthfully, I pray to “spirits of light”, in whom I do believe)–daily for having granted me the gift of time. I was supposed to be on the job site an hour ago, but have no clock to punch. This extra time has been useful. Sometimes doing nothing is achieving maximal productivity. As I have said, you can’t do paradigmatic work while in relentless motion. Better three purposive and new steps than a thousand as a machine.
Edit: I will add that the simple point I wanted to make is that hate is the shadow aspect of the very real human need to judge, which is to say to contextualize, which is an essential process in individuation and self actualization. A stable society–a GOOD society–will combine judgement with GENUINE tolerance.
The need to judge cannot be eradicated, and if the effort is made–as has been done in modern Sybaritic Leftism–all that happens is a part of your self disappears from conscious awareness, meaning that hate and following anger will appear in strange and unpredictable ways, typically in response to people for whom moral indifference is NOT a principle ethical ideal.
That unrecognized hate becomes, then, a hidden but quite real pestilential swamp which is highly conducive to the breeding of full blown Cultural Sadeism.