“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
– Nelson Mandela (1994)
Psychiatrists have lately been asking “Is grief a disease?” Duh! They want to sell more drugs, of course, by “treating” someone who is distressed and grieving. Apparently, they think it is OK to grieve for a time. But once a certain number of days or weeks have passed—time’s up! You have now overstepped the boundary into madness.
Another example: being overly concerned about what you eat is a newly diagnosed disease—avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID). Personally, I think anyone who does NOT have angst over what they eat in our modern ultra-processed world is crazy or, at the very least, dumb! There will be more daft diseases emerging in years to come, I am sure. I half expect to see the recognition of woke aversion psychosis (WAP), or something similar.
But psychiatrists have missed or avoided a HUGE mental affliction, which is hatred.
It seems to me that hate has far more of a claim to be a diseased state than many contrived mental disorders. It doesn’t come naturally to people. It’s not a genetic condition. Kids are not born hating — because they haven’t yet met the world, never mind met people to dislike!
As Jacque Fresco put it:
“No one is born with greed, prejudice, bigotry, patriotism and hatred; these are all learned behavior patterns.”
In other words, it’s something peculiarly human. Animals don’t hate. Who does not know that wolves involved in a brawl will desist immediately when one of the antagonists offers his neck to be slashed. The behavior of orcas (and even some domestic cats) is a little bit suspect, in that they play with their victims and seem to deliberately torment them before death. But it’s a very human over-interpretation to call that an emotion of hate.
Nelson Mandela. A man with every reason to hate—but he didn’t
Basically, we are taught to hate, as Nelson Mandela said. It comes from dysfunctional adults who lay it on their unfortunate offspring. As if a true parent would go laying anthrax or rabies on their kid; yet they do it with hate.
Of course peer pressure and modern memes (thought viruses) also play a very powerful part. We all want to belong and sometimes we are willing to do despicable things, just to earn approval from the group. That is the core of mob mentality which, as we know, is deranged and dangerous.
So it is that people grow up hating, but are not born with the tendency. They are, to use modern parlance, “radicalized” into hating. And, yes, I chose the word advisedly, since the majority aggression in the world today is religious in origin.
One can point the finger easily at Christians, Muslims and Jews. The behavior of some members of these religions is clearly motivated by fanatical hatred. Their treatment of women moreover—and this includes the other big religion Hinduism—is clearly an expression of sexual hatred.
But I have always excluded Buddhists, and considered them to be gentle and kind people… Until lately. When I was living in Sri Lanka I was shocked beyond measure to learn of Buddhist monks attacking and murdering individuals who failed to make the necessary religious observances. And then came the pitiful state of affairs in Myanmar, since the collapse of the military order, where Buddhist mobs have been attacking and killing hundreds of Muslims.
As commented by Time magazine (July 1, 2013):
“In the reckoning of religious extremism — Hindu nationalists, Muslim militants, fundamentalist Christians, ultra-Orthodox Jews — Buddhism has largely escaped trial. To much of the world, it is synonymous with nonviolence and loving kindness, concepts propagated by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, 2,500 years ago. But like adherents of any religion, Buddhists and their holy men are not immune to politics and, on occasion, the lure of sectarian chauvinism.”
What got me started on all this, if you are wondering, is the atrocious Jan 1st 2025 attack in New Orleans, in which a crazed Muslim fundamentalist drove a truck down a crowded street of party revelers seeing in the New Year, killing 15 and injuring many more.
This man had apparently been “radicalized” a year before, meaning he had been taught to hate so deeply and profoundly that he was happy to surrender his own life in the pursuit of killing as many Christians as possible. Ironically he also killed a couple of Israeli women who, I suppose, in the sick mental state of these people would be counted as a bonus.
One has to ask: how it is possible for Muslim leaders to convert a person so rapidly from normal to a killer hatred mentality? The person in question, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was a former US solider, so perhaps PTSD was a factor in sending him over the edge. At the time of writing it is not clear if he was a psychiatric patient or not. But my first thought in these mass killings is to ask the question: is this person taking psychiatric drugs, which are notorious for causing murderous aggression and which lie behind the rise in mass killings?
The secret to radicalization, or mass killings of any stripe is, of course, that there is pre-existing psychosis. Individuals susceptible to violent outbursts are already on the edge or beyond it.
Talking of weirdy medical conditions, when I was in med school we learned of “involutional melancholia”. I can’t say I’m surprised that the Americans have dumped that term and now group it as “major depression”; there are too many syllables for the average American and Ancient Greek is not part of their education.
But it’s a very sad disorder in which a middle-aged man gets to feeling that life is all played out, there is nothing left, and he commits suicide by blowing his head off with a shotgun or driving his car into a tree. You read cases in the newspapers almost every week. More rarely he shoots his wife and kids first and then turns the gun on himself.
It’s hard to fathom the psyche in which everything is so appallingly black that to destroy your whole life, including yourself, is the only release from the pain. The point is that the others, who are innocent victims, appear basically as projections of the perp’s own miserable being. He thinks they must be suffering terribly as well and it’s better to “put them out of their misery.”
All has come to nothing.
Melancholy by Pieter Codde, 1633, via Wikimedia Commons
Now in Jabbar’s case, I don’t think the diagnosis applies. He’s the right age group; he’s divorced (two wives); suffering business and financial problems; ex-military and he had apparently posted videos of his intention of killing his family. All fits. But he made a point of associating his attack with Muslim fundamentalism, flying the ISIS flag. I think he was just suffering from hatred!
I find it strange that people here in the US enjoy one of the best lives in the world, the highest standard of living, the envy of almost every other nation, yet they want to destroy it! Makes no sense.
But I am reminded of the wise words of American writer and humorist Leo Rosten:
“I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is only to be expected from the strong.”
Everything about Jabbar shouts sad, failed, ex-human being.
Cheer up everybody! Make it a HAPPY New Year…
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor
