On Hate of Humans

DIALOGUE OF THE TROLLS
(Or, on the region of Questioning as the annihilation of the Human Being)

Participants of the Dialogue

Troll
Troll Stranger, who is called Stranio

Troll. I see you are in the orange clogs of a stranger; here we sport exclusively green clogs. My dear troll, from where do you hail?

Stranio, the Troll Stranger. Totoquaesōstadt, the region of silent lightning and majestic shadows.

T. What has driven you here?

S. I have come to range about the renowned stalls of your bazzar, to haggle for glass, by trade or money. Our (troll) women, brother, are proud and bid us bring them mirrors of glass, though we make polished metal mirrors of extraordinary quality at home they count them cheap.

T. Tell me, do your kinsfolk, with their coal black eyes, see humans as we do here? I mean, Stranio, as despicable beings.

S. The humans are terrible.

T. Aren’t they though? My dear troll, I have mirrors of the finest quality for you, but entertain me only this far, and tell me how you and yours explain the human being. How is the existence of these horrible and repellant beings accounted for amongst your tribe? I beseech you, do not be silent now Stranio, for this is not a city for those with orange clogs, far from home and amongst strangers.

S. I will tell you, brother troll, as best I can, just what is said about humans at home. So far as I understand, once upon a time trolls were very like humans; in the remotest, most terrible and unpleasant first dawn. Accordingly trolls once had cold hearts, as do humans, and they lived in vain war-like squalor. Their defining characteristic was this, their hearts were shaped by unshakable opinions, which strangled these hearts at each step and filled them with painful disquiet. And yet, they lived and relied all the time on these opinions. The human being, much like trolls once were, is the opiner.

T. And by opiner you mean one who has opinions?

S. Surely that is what I mean.

T. And opinions are not knowledge?

S. They are not.

T. So, the opinier, the human, moves between opinion and knowledge, and this is where they have their being and dwell uneasily?

S. Yes. The gods have indeed endowed you with prodigious powers. You have with wondrous clairity envisaged the human himself.

T. The human is loose at sea. Lost, and losing himself between the neighing of the black waves and the shouts of the whitest winds which touch the foaming crests. There he breathes heavily in his wretched burning slumber.

S. He is a disgraceful forlorn being, is he not? Always moving between his wreched opinions, and his pretensions to knowing.

T. An utter wretch. However, was there not, among the humans, an extraordinary master who claimed to know that he did not know? And was he not the first to see this situation for what it was?

S. Yes, this human was perhaps more like the humans than the others, more wretched and lost. He claimed only to know that his opinions were not knowledge.

T. Was this not a kind of knowing? Or, put another way, an opinion?

S. It differed from the other opinions in the following way, it was wholly general, and touched on all opinions. It was indifferent to the question about this or that opinion, and the way from it to this or that knowing. It permeated all opining, so treacherous was this last and most unpleasant opinion.

T. In claiming that humans did not know what they thought to know, and what they relied on, did he not say that the human did not know, but only opined, about the human being, about what is was?

S. Did not know, indeed, toto caelo. At the same time, this not knowing was still opinion, but what opinion was was no longer known, at least for those few called, who could hear, this stunning word of the human.

T. Surely these humans were in a grievously sorry state. Did they see that in not knowing what they were, they could not know what would avial for them?

S. By degrees this became more obvious, at least for those few who sensed what had happened, the rest sunk back into slogans and soon were satisfied with their old morbid squabbling once again. For the few a scarcely credible impression was formed, and it gathered like the blinding glow of the meridian sun on a polished surface of metal, flickering in a quite frenzied manner within their souls.

T. This human, who knew that he did not know, did he not admit that this knowing was no wisdom?

S. To be sure, he said that had he found a wise man, he would become like him, and learn the habit of this wisdom, but that since wisdom might not be something one could learn by speeches, but only through inspiration, he thought he had better let his soul go on weighing speeches. At least there, he thought to find what could be learned.

T. So he thought speeches would not avail to bring wisdom to humans? And so he called everything that speech could not reach despicable?

S. This is so.

T. And what are speeches, are they not where reason is found by the soul?

S. To be sure, the soul or intelligence hears the speech, so far as it is to be measured for reasonableness, for the ear alone does not do this.

T. But wisdom is not be found in speeches? Rather, in no longer seeking knowledge by reason.

S. Why would a human cease to seek knowledge? They put away great quantities of experience for this purpose. All because they forget that they don’t know what the human is.

T. I am not sure. Is it not that humans, unlike trolls, are sure that everything that stands before them, the pines and the scent of the wind by the sea, and the strange silence when the evening glow hangs over the world as the night gathers, is for them a resource?

S. A resource? You mean something available, something that would help them to get more pleasure out of their wretched lives?

T. Yes. They think everything has been meant for their opinion of themselves, of what they are according to this opinion, to reveal to it secrets and to bring it endless pleasures painted and animated with their own demands.

S. We trolls must be ready for anything, as the humans may think we are meet for their endless demand for consumption, for what is available to them.

T. I can no longer stand to speak of humans, so alive is my hate of them at this moment. Come with me now Stranio, you orange clogged troll form strange parts afar, I will get you your mirrors.

END

You trolls receive no mirrors.

Misanthropy is a lonely path and doesn’t get anything accomplished, being revolutionary is superior.

=D> Agreed.

Sounds legit.

[rewritten]

I think it is important to understand that Hatred is a ‘combo-emotion’ which arises when a mind is experiencing two distinct emotions—anger and fear—which are both focused at the same time on the same target. People hate snakes because they fear them.

Indeed, we really don’t understand anything at all about Hatred if we don’t understand that hate is driven by fear. The Hater shows anger, but is possessed by a feeling of desperation that arises from fear.

This little detail happens to matter a great deal if you are someone who believes it is possible for humans to resolve their differences and bring an end to the animosity that so many people feel toward each other.

It gives us a more nuanced understanding of ‘haters’, revealing them to more than just ‘pure threats’ to other human beings. They are indeed a threat to others, but it is only because they are afraid. To eliminate the hatred people feel, we need to eliminate the fear they have which drives their feelings of hatred.

If we understand that hidden beneath the anger we are shown, there is a vulnerability-based fear that is inspiring the threatening emotions we are witnessing, it then becomes possible to plan a path toward the ending of hostilities between any humans who hate each other.

So yes, misanthropes will confess to you that they hate humans, generally, but it is important that we understand that the only reason they hate humanity is because they fear humanity, for reasons that are actually quite understandable…

Who said they never understood this existence because they were misanthropic or fearful? I swear, put that into perspective monkey.

There wasn’t a reason for someone to fear what they never knew.

There’s only a thin line. A few silver clouds. And lines in the sand that totally distinguish that which is correct… Learn more information partner.

“fear them”

Your fear of hate seems great!

I cannot for the sake of conversation say that this place was such a hateful place. But there has been sometimes I wonder what fear was. And I’ll never distinguish this from actual pain.
Cause it seems as though I never truly know both.
Yet love and unconditional love for one second is enough to matter because sometimes that drives us to have courage.
Courage is a lost feeling or emotion these days among mortals.

I liked your post and tend to agree, fear is fundamental. There is a habit of using aggression as a response.

But then, as your last line indicates, one must look at context. A slave back in the old plantation South would likely have hated the white slaveowners in most cases. Of course there is fear involved, underneath, so to speak. But given the situation, since one cannot satisfy the normal fear to action pattern - you see a lion in the trees, you back off slowly so as not to trigger an attack, for example - CANNOT be carried out, the hate will remain as an underlying emotion, not expressed except in private and even then carefully. It cannot change, at root, because it was, in that situation, a natural response.

Alright, that’s an extreme example, but it opens the door to now having to examine all instances of ‘hating as habit’ to see where the problem is.

And that is not easy and will include any analyst applying his or her own values (political, emotional, psychological) and working from whatever always incomplete and skewed information he or she has.

This is not me arguing against your post, but presenting a caution when judging haters, as this thread in part does, using the good point in your thread and the door opening of the last sentence.

We judge the hate in ourselves also. Often, I think, without seeing what the context is.

Well, repressed feelings of hatred are a fairly common part of human experience. Of the two components of Hatred—Anger and Fear—the more distinctive one we notice, that characterizes the emotion as a threat to society, is that of Anger.

But as powerful as the Anger Instinct is, there is one thing that is more powerful than it, and that is the Fear Instinct. No matter how totally possessed a human might be by feelings of anger, it is still possible to completely throttle those feelings with a strong enough dose of fear.

So yeah, people will live with seething feelings of hatred for a human, or an organization, for indefinite periods of time, when they see that they have no other promising alternative to submission. So the ‘normal response’ one should expect to see will depend on which of the two feelings—anger or fear—ends up assuming primacy, as determined by the circumstances one finds oneself in.

Generally speaking, Anger will prevail…up to the point when Fear begins to shut those feelings down…

There’s also guilt. Which, I agree pre-emptively, includes fear, but is not just fear. And it can throttle just about any emotion, even fear. You might feel afraid of a loved one, but out of guilt - since ‘fear is not love’ according to new agers and others who might give one certain beliefs - one stifles the fear, denies it and does not listen to it - and move out of the house taking the kids, for example, in a woman soon to be battered.

Or guilt maintains the lock.

Not qutie sure what you mean. I see people as having tendencies toward various emotions. Some being more comfortable with/accepting of anger others fear. Often emotions are converted into others. I used to convert anger into grief. I would get sad instead of angry. Others make other kinds of conversions. Battering men, to keep up that thread, I think often convert fear into anger, since to notice the fear, let alone express it, seems even more powerless and dependent.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SFt7JHwJeg[/youtube]

Historically, philosophers and psychologists have made impressive efforts to compile exhaustive lists of all the different kinds of “feelings” that humans experience which could be construed to be “emotions” or “passions.” Some of these lists are quite lengthy, indeed.

I, however, am one of those who believes that these list compilers have missed the ultimate simplicity which lies behind the feelings that humans experience in different situations. It all begins with the two primary “feelings” that human experience on a daily basis: Pain and Pleasure. Pain and Pleasure are feelings which are triggered/generated by “need-mechanisms” which generate painful/pleasurable feelings whenever they are deprived/satisfied.

While Pain and Pleasure are indeed “feelings”, they are not emotions. Emotions are feelings generated by the brain (Amygdala?) in response to Pain/Pleasure events. Experienced Pain triggers an immediate feeling of Fear, or Anger, or both. Experienced Pleasure triggers the feeling of Desire.

Yes, it is true that most people would say that Fear and Anger are “forms of pain” even though they are actually only felt in response to previously (or currently) experienced pain. Perhaps the reason why Fear and Anger are ultimately “painful” emotions to us is because they are typically experienced while one is experiencing, or remembering the pain that triggered the response. In a sense, Fear and Anger are an ‘echo’ of the pain that generated them.

Likewise, Desire (hope of future pleasure, or relief from pain) is ‘pleasurable’, in a sense, because it is driven by the the memory of, or current experience of, pleasure. It is not, however, the same thing as pleasure, because it is only ever a response to an experienced/remembered pleasure event. Again, it is sort of an ‘echo’ of pleasure, related to the real thing, not not equivalent to it.

I argue that all the various ‘emotions’ that theorists have put on their lists are comprised of some combination of (1) one or more of the three basic emotions, (2) currently experienced pain/pleasure (that triggered the emotional response), which is associated with (3) particular situations/events that are commonly expected to cause those ‘emotional’ feelings.

Example: I assert that guilt is fully explained as primarily the emotion of fear that is not accompanied by actually experienced pain, but is only triggered by anticipated pain, pain which is associated with one particular kind of pain/pleasure, which is experienced only in certain (usually social) situations/contexts. To be more precise, guilt is the feeling of fear of the disapproval of other humans (or of being denied their approval).

I could go on and on, of course, with this sort of analysis but I did want to at least address the example of guilt that you provided. If I understood you correctly, I would say that a soon-to-be battered woman will not leave the husband she fears (usually only some of the time) not solely because of guilt (fearing the disapproval of others who might blame her for causing her husband’s violent outbursts or for not placing the welfare of the children above her own concerns for her safety) but perhaps also because she fears deprivation (of $$) more than she fears the possibility of a future physical attack by her husband.

So guilt is fear, in a particular context, concerned with a particular kind of pain/pleasure.

I can experience the expression of anger as pleasurable, if I have to choose between pleasure and pain. The trigger is unpleasant, but the expression can feel good, as long as I am not judging the feeling and there is a flow. Rather than feeling guilty, suppressing, squeezing it out, for example. I can even enjoy some fear as long as it is balanced out with excitement, curiosity or something. Again, yes, the trigger will be negative or a representation, in a film for example, of something negative.

Desire can be pleasurable for me, but it can also be painful, and the Buddhist have at least good grounds to consider desire as the root of suffering. I disagree with their complete conclusion, but I do see how many people suffer their desires.

I don’t consider guilt an emotion. It is a complicated phenomenon. I would think, to put it in crass and gestural neuroscience terms that the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex are having a fight, and this is painful. Another way to put this is that I have an emotion and emotions feel good to express but this conflicts with rules I have somewhere in the upper and frontal primate brain areas. There is a conceptual content in addition to the emtion.

I think this makes more sense than to say that if I feel guilty about being afraid of my father, say, I am afraid of my fear. There is truth in this, but there is an intermediary which is conceptual. Religions are great at causing guilt.

I am not sure the fear necessarily involves others. Shame seems to me to fit in there better. I would say more like when she fears her husband, this feels/is conceived to not fit with the ideal of the loving wife who understands her husband’s pain and that he is unemployed, etc. She, yes, has a fear that she is bad if she regularly feels afraid or her husband or strongly in one instance, since this collides with her sense of the good wife or the loving person or seems to much like ideas of a bad person. Shame could also keep her from exploring the actions that fear might incite her to take. Being a failure in the eyes of her parents, etc.

If you have three emotions - desire, fear and anger - you have two quite different ones created by the negative, in your schema, and only one created by the pleasurable. Joy to me need not include desire and is pleasurable. Also emotions like disgust, sadness, contempt for example seem to me to have different physiological components - facial expressions, tone of voice, posture and are experienced differently, even though all are triggered by pain or negative triggers. Ones we do not want.

I am not saying your model is wrong, it just seems to me that having more emotions, like say, 7, is also useful. It explains why incredibly different reactions can take place to pain. Someone lunges and stabs someone, someone else starts to cry, someone runs away screaming, from the same trigger. Action, subjective experience and physiology are markedly different. That seems to justify, at least for certain goals, having more than three.

I also think the three are problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier in this post.

None of this makes any sense.

Hate’s base emotions are Anger and Love. That which cannot be loved cannot be hated.

For instance, when I play shadow warrior and slice my enemies with my katana I feel nothing except a feeling of a casual stroll, and mild relief. But then again, I do not really fear them.

Now for a video game boss that I lose to over and over, I may hate it. Some may argue that I fear it. But what if I dont really fear it, I just am irritated by it making me lose over and over, and just got emotionally attached to it which is sort of a form of love. And that it made me its bitch. And that it’s sort of akin to female thinking patterns of hating men when you really love them.

I don’t think fear is a necessary ingredient in this equation.

For instance, if someone unleashed an army of robotic drones on me, I would fear the drones. But I would not hate them. Which brings me to my next topic, anxiety.

Desire is not a positive emotion. Its a stress emotion of anxiety and cortisol. It is pleasurable in a masochistic sense. Masochism is only pleasurable if there is a certainty to the release (safeword)

The 3 core feelings are anxiety (stress energy), energy (regenerative energy), and release.

Anxiety with no hope of release creates the feeling of being trapped which is a negative emotion.

Boredom is not a neutral feeling. It is a feeling of anxiety.

Relaxation is different from boredom. Both occur during the same activity: Doing nothing. Yet are different emotions.
The first person feels anxiety when doing, and says they are bored.
The second person, feels energy and release when doing nothing, and says they are happy.

I would say physical pain, such as an injured part of the body, would just be concentrated stress, aka anxiety.

The last two parts of the text read:

It’s possible that Troll was thinking of something else when he stated that his hate of humans was alive “at this moment”. But, supposing he was responding to what the Xenos or stranger said, it seems that his hate has something to do with “consumption.” Likely his hate has grown slowly, until he can hardly distinguish it from himself, since he says it is “so alive”, almost as though it were his soul in the Aristotelian sense, and in the sense mentioned in Plato’s Phaedo, where the soul and life are identified. When people become mercenary, or out for gain, they neglect public concerns and offices or duties. If a worker reasons: I am here to make money, and if I can make more somewhere else, I’ll go there, he has no pride in his company or what they do. Things are likely to burn down, and get run down, by a worker who would sooner leave than work unpaid overtime to get things right. His very sense of a job well done becomes a mere empty phrase, and can’t be taken seriously. Only making a bit more counts as serious. He becomes a “money maker”, rather than someone who makes things, or keeps a city running. The intransigently befouling nastiness of consumption is linked to selfishness and isolation. Ergo, it is perhaps isolation that Troll hates. Each one out to get his own back. His isolation is as clear as a mirror. For he regards all others as “from strange parts”, as alien, and unlike himself.

Whereas one could love solitude, one can not love isolation. Isolation cries out, as it were, for hate. For it is unjust. And injustice is what deserves to be obliterated from the face of the earth. What is loved, on the other hand, is what is to be gathered carefully, and preserved.

Reminds me of what a go getter comically disclosed, put or real dog eat dog reality as he saw it:

There was two creatures down under the sea, one a crab, the other a clam:

The crab always teased the clam for not talking, and made him into like a pariah of the depths.

The clam got fed up and he said to the crab , well, here I am talking, what of it?

That is exactly what the crab was waiting for, and as soon as he saw the clam opening up, took the opportunity to swipe with his claws into the meaty innards of the clam and brought it into his volupchious mouth , saying, ’ there is a sucker born every minute’

End of story.

Childishly asinine comments such as that of “Meno” should serve one as a model of a life glutted with inadequate inappropriate and stupid political, in contradistinction to, proper philosophic thirst.

Deprive yourself of love long enough and you only fear hate. This is to say hate and fear are of the same connotation. As before we’ve said fear sponsors fear so does hate sponsor hate. Convoluted are those streams of information and I try very hard to not have convoluted streams of information. It doesn’t matter what I say anyway. When something possesses a soul to have feared hate then one goes on to hate fear. Visa Versa. Maybe we’ve taken too much from older cycles of violence only to forget what triggers humans these days.