You don’t have to hate anything, hatred is a self harming emotion, you could be indifferent, apathetic, toward any subject or object you choose. I like cats, some people are not fond of them, but that is not the same thing as hating cats and everything about them. The person who says “I hate cats” likely doesn’t mean that, and if they do I’d personally like to know why? I hate my own angry and violent nature, I hate bullying in any form, and I hate my ex wife, but these hatreds have reason behind them, they have harm associated to them. What actual harm could a cat do?

There is a downside to ambivalence though, that your indifference may make you inactive. Let’s say you decided that watching tv news made you feel too much, and you just stopped, became ambivalent to suffering because you were deliberately unaware of it other than thematically? News in an abstracted sense has less impact, if I see the rubble and the dead bodies that is a different thing in terms of feeling something than if I hear the newsreader describe what happened, or read the statistic of some people having died in a bombing raid.

I said hatred is self harming, no matter what you do hate, it is the actions that you might take that have the potential for harm, not the hatred itself. By hating something you change your state of being, but not the state of being for that something or someone. It has no effect on my ex wife that I have a deep burning dislike of the fact that something bad has not befallen her. I too am foolish enough to think, I mean to hope in a forlorn way really, that the universe has the capacity to correct mistakes in its fabric. A yin and yang, a reciprocity, karma, what goes around comes around etc. But the world doesn’t work that way and I’m pissed off when I think of her bank account having been stuffed with my cash, and every other misdeed she enacted upon me in the years I was conned.

Hate is an emotion we are better off without, yet the only way to not ever hate anything is to not love or care about anything. To care about emancipation is to be annoyed at the least by oppression, to care about people in poverty is to be at the least a little critical of capitalism, to care about your friends is to occasionally resent that they face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to care about a pet is to know you will likely outlive it by a long way, to care about all animals so much that you have decided not to eat them is to be in conflict with those that enjoy a barbecue feasting ceremony. Every single thing you give a shit about opens a part of you to potential hurt, but hatred makes that gap wider.

Paul S Wilson