The reason I can’t bring myself to hate anyone is that I have kids and I now have a deeper understanding of what people are.
People are whiny babies and if they live long enough get to wear big boy pants. They might use big words but deep down
they and we are all insecure scared babies.
You can’t hate people. You can hate certain habits. Like the habit of bullying, the habit of stealing, the habit of denial or willful stupidity that causes self-harm and harm of others, and there’s the fact of the limits of one’s ability. These habits and cases are all adaptations. To try to thwart or change these habits is also an adaptation. All disagreement comes down to two competing adaptations butting against each other. Knowing this, it’s hard to hate people, anyone, for simply being the machines they are; and yet we find a way to hate. That, too, is an adaptation.
You can rail and reason and cajole and punish to break these habits or beliefs down. That’s something you have to do at times, you don’t have a choice.
It makes no sense to whine about hating, or complain about the way a person or group is, although that, too, is an adaptation. You’re complaining about human nature itself and it’s a waste of time. Wasting time in this way is an adaptation.
well-meaning people with certain values get busy chopping through the foliage of fallacy with various machetes. There are two and only two conversations. One with reason, the other, with ideology. Issues of reason are annoying because you have to untangle a thicket of fallacies, and work to make sure you’re on the same page, and you never are, for reasons both intentional and not.
Issues of ideology are interesting to discuss because they are not just obvious logic problems or issues of soundness and validity. They are mysterious. Sometimes an ideology isn’t informed by a fallacy. It’s simply a reflection of a value, which is an extension of the nature of the organism. If you unpack the ideology and it’s internally consistent and ultimately based on opinion or taste/value that is subjective, you must accept the ideology and co-exist, or set about to convince or inspire one to find a “taste” for a different ideology. Developing taste in alternate ideology is like developing a taste for certain foods. Before you can learn to love wasabi you have to try it, you are indoctrinated by a loving expert who shows you the moves. Getting a conservative to develop a taste for liberalism is as hard as getting a kid who likes only hamburgers and fries to develop a taste for subtle Indian or Korean spices. Not so easy. No amount of logic will do. Either you “like” it or not. Often, people simply like liberal policies b/c of their emotional, psychological, even physical makeup. And upbringing and community play a part, too. None of us are immune to even Isis if we were raised and abused in certain ways, and born without the requisite neurons to make us immune from the baser ways to exorcize our anger.
So when a liberal and conservative tries to pretend it’s all a logical disagreement, and that the opponent through their weakness or stupidity or ignorance REFUSES to acknowledge that 2+2=4, they miss the point and prolong the inevitable. Even if all logic was untwisted from its prisons, even if we can prove on a petri dish which things actually work to achieve our so-called shared goals, even if everyone was honest, accountable, and responsible, we’d STILL have fundamental disagreements on what to do and why, because in the end our goals are not and can never be equal.
We are indeed under a tyranny of the plurality in the USA, but the far worse tyranny is in thinking you alone hold the clear light of reason. Thinking your side has a special relationship with honesty and reason and SANITY ITSELF and that your opponent’s side doesn’t. Next time you debate policy don’t get mired in a logical debate or focus on facts since all systems built with facts by humans bear the stench of confirmation bias. It’s an impossible job, at least today, to piece together a logical philosophy, political or otherwise, that is universally normative. Walk with humility, and see your opponent as the brother or sister they are, we are all children in pajamas arguing over cave shadows. In light of this, the first order of business should be, if not love, at the very least, compassion, and forgiveness, even as the enemy’s dagger slips into our own hearts. Perhaps with this notion in mind, there will one day be less daggers, more hearts. It’s not a perfect solution but it’s the only one.