Three Haters

“La haine attire la haine.” (Hate attracts hate.) – from La Haine, dir. Mathieu Kassovitz.

I don’t think I have to dispute the psychological actuality that hate attracts hate. And I don’t think anyone should. I’m not here to repeat the obvious or buttress the already known about human nature stated above. That’s not important and it’s not my business! I’m here to make a change. Someone came into the world, saw darkness and invented light. Thusly do I want to live my life: to be balm to people’s sores is better than arguing like a human psychological documentary.

All humans are haters.

Based on our reactions to hate, we have three kinds of people in the world.

The first are the hot haters: these ones are very weak people; they believe they’re losers if they couldn’t return hate, and they find fulfilment in the fact that they cannot be cheated. They like to give thorn-for-thorn, bitterness-for-bitterness, fire-for-fire. They refuse to believe that we can truly follow peace with all men as the Bible demands.

The second kinds of haters – the cold-haters: they are the very few people who could hate back in a different way. When you send and act of hate to such, they have a congenital big fridge (or call it grace) within them to “cool it down” – before the hate reflects back to the sender it loses enough heat and becomes cold. Then, we say they’re forgiving, even though they still hate back in the cold-form. Do you think that if you slap your pastor he doesn’t feel the heat? Of course, he does. He only allows it to cool down. Rather than slapping you back, he calms down and remembers Biblical injunctions or moral laws and then he begins to cool the hate within him so as not to send it back in the hot form. Because he knows that if he slaps you back or sends back the hot-hate, he’ll feel guilty for breaking moral/biblical laws; and so, he won’t, he would rather cool the hate down. And by the time he’s done refrigerating the hate that was shot at him, it’s already cold-hate, the kind that stops the feeling of anger that would have been sent back as hot reaction or re-hate. That’s just what we call forgiveness – hatred without anger.

Here is the third kind of hate we exhibit: lukewarm-hate(ers). These people would neither retaliate nor genuienly forgive you. You’d never know what they’re up to because they will just be plain quiet, no matter what you do or say to them, and you won’t be sure if they have forgiven you or have a surreptitious plan to fight back. These are people who can be outrightly quiet when you hate them first. But they’re not always truly quiet as they seem, it is just you who is not sensitive enough to hear their heart burning with crackling fire.

Whichever kind, we still all hate back. Either hot, lukewarm or cold, a reaction always goes back from every hate recipient. But that’s not what I’m here to prove, even though I have proven that hate attracts hate. I’m here so we can all reason together and change the recent ills I’ve seen in the world’s relationship. In the recent years, I’ve known quite a lot of relationship experts.

Today in our world, almost everyone vaguely considers themselves a relationship expert, and they often say the same thing: that we should not force ourselves on people; not to call again if they don’t return our calls in four-hour; not to give a second chance. We were told that people don’t deserve us if they can’t simply reciprocate kind gestures when they are due… And that they may not be thinking about us or that we are not important to them if they’re not reciprocating warmness. So, we should just call it quits on them and say “good riddance!” The beclouded advice of the modern relationship experts is one of the pillars that reinforce the believe that hate should always attract hate. If we listen to these relationship experts who are souring the world’s relationships, I often wonder where forgiveness/cold-hate and true love, all that goes beyond the other person’s inadequacies, would be relegated to.

Now, divorce is common in the world! Feminists sometimes over-prepare women and build in them an unwholesome capacity to withstand their husbands acidly. They at times trample the cliché that men are the head of the home. Not that women are the tail: but women are now erroneously told to be as dominant as their husbands. To stand too-tall to him and tell him no one is the head or the tail. To give him love-for-love and hate-for-hate instead of patience or cold-hate for hate. That’s partly why the home which should have refuted the axiom that hate attracts hate by teaching children patience, love, dialogue and peaceful coexistence as the first agent of socialization is now the ring for the wrestling husband and wife, their children the spectators.

I think that we ought not to treat people according to how they treated us, as our self-acclaimed twenty-first century self-esteem experts often suggest, but according to how we deserve to be treated. And we shouldn’t give up on love and true friendship easily, no matter what; not for anything, because a hate for a hate will make the whole world lose its smile.

The world is now full of men and women who create divides and engender pride: men who relegate forgiveness, tolerance, and alternative dispute resolution, all in the name of making us to be ourselves and not cheap to others! That is the darkness I think we should light: to change our mind sets from the cantankerous nature that contemporary society is building in us. That wild behavior and heartless nature that inhuman relationship councilors are gradually encoding on the DNA of humans. I say no when I watched such advice in video skits – it’s better to be cheap and kind than to be expensive and selfish. Let’s embrace true love, honest judgement, cold-hate or forgiveness, and do away with negative mutations.

Even if human nature is imperfect and always sends hate back, our dressings do not have to be so, especially when we wear a smile. Hate is not the problem, but our reactions towards it. Wear a smile, please do. You can throw the smile of cold-hate instead of hot-hate! Let’s not turn the world into a ring where the winners are only those who return heavier punches that lay opponents to rest.

It would not be good enough to write to buttress the congenitally sleazy nature of man in the quote above. This is my business: to change the recent change in the world’s mindsets. To let people know they’re not foolish if they don’t simply hate back. Only weak people think strength is shown in retaliation. Enough of following human opinions that make us inhuman. Even though hate should always attract hate, we can decide to reverse that if only we obey Luke 15:1: “a soft answer turneth away wrath.” The world needs kindness, not retaliation. Forgiveness/cold-hate is the only way to debunk the axiom that HATE ATTRACT HATE!