Our (MY) Seemingly Intractable Human Tendency to Hate the Other

April 8, 2025

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post.

Have you noticed within yourself, an increasing desire to do violence to whoever or whatever rubs you the wrong way? Do you notice yourself increasingly dogmatic and rigid in your view of  “what’s really going on and who’s responsible?” Do you notice that the more chaotic things get in 2025, the more you try to stave off what’s outside by putting up walls against it inside?

Inside yourself. Inside your own brain?

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed that more than usual, I find myself internally polarizing, needing an enemy to “hate.”  This has been true all my life. Even when whatever is going on around me is mostly harmonious, doesn’t matter. I still find some one person in my immediate vicinity to unconsciously make into my scapegoat, worth judging.

And of course, it all began with my extreme animosity towards my younger sister, Marnie . . . As it always does begin: current issues trace back to early childhood wounds. No matter who we are, how “evolved” we consider ourselves to be; even so, we carry with us this seemingly permanent PTSD in continuous need of healing.

To illustrate my own childhood wound, I offer the following essay, published 21 years ago (if you don’t want to wade through the astrology, just skip that part). This essay traces my own provisional healing from that initial extreme polarity, judgment, etc. But here I am, at 82 years old, still needing to learn the same fucking lesson! — over and over and over again. I am human. I bleed. So is Marnie. So are we all. Let us move into compassion, over and over again. Let us walk in the shoes of the other. Let us rise up to see our small planet, besieged with human hatred, gasping for air.

Marnie & Me 

 

Just as as a child I was the first of eight children who always wanted solitude, so as an adult, I’ve usually chosen to live among other people, and usually these people are not at all like me! On a soul level, I apparently need this kind of somewhat fractious group energy in order to continue to learn the lesson of  not polarizing against someone. Which I haven’t learned, not yet! not even after 82 years! And yet, for the last few decades, when I do manage to NOTICE that I hate someone, that I obsessively focus energy on that one person, as bad, wrong, or worth hating . . I have learned more and more quickly,  to take back that projection, see it as a denied part of myself, which must be integrated.

This sounds exaggerated, especially when you consider how I act around others. Indeed, you’d never know what was going on inside by my behavior outside, which, when my preferred solitude is disturbed, is usually cooperative, adaptable to whatever is needed.

In other words, I live inside the dynamic and uncomfortable intersection of solitude and community. Always have. Always have needed the dynamics of that polarity as my chief learning ground. Learning about myself by interacting with others. Learning how to let go, over and over again, of the chosen hated one. This lesson seems to be what we all need now, wouldn’t you say? How can move beyond the usual warring mentality of 3D polarization that, in these increasingly chaotic times, seemingly inevitably — without each of us conscious noticing our own internal state and desire to heal — leads to at least mental violence, if not worse?

SHOCK POLL: Majority of Left-of-Center Americans Now Justify a Trump Assassination

BEYOND DOGE: Is there a way through the current raging political and cultural divide?

April 7, 2025

Even though I very much appreciate Trump/Elon DOGE efforts to massively, transform the economy before the extreme U.S. debt comes due, and before corrupt people and systems can catch up with their extreme efforts; even though I appreciate them both as hugely successful business people who are quite used to taking huge risks, I’m still, like everyone else who is both paying attention and maintaining an open heart, feeling distinctly ill at ease by the extreme stress it’s causing regular folks, especially the economically vulnerable (that’s most of us) who lose jobs, see prices hiking way up, and so on.

On my morning walk last Friday, I was going past the post office (Hmmm: is it about to be turned over to private hands?) on a street lined with dark skinned young children, very precious, innocent, waiting for the bus to take them to school. Many likely foreign parents waiting with them, looking shy and scared — of me, until my smile caught their eyes, all of them having come out of multistory housing in back of them, their rents likely financed in some way through the federal government (USAID?). What about them? I thought to myself. What happens to them? Are the parents immigrants? Obviously. Are they illegal immigrants? I have no idea. But they sure look scared.

The sudden and extreme human cost of all this fast-acting cost cutting to expose undeniable waste, fraud and abuse is undeniable.

Yesterday, I came across a new substack by Charles Eisenstein. Predictably (and thank goodness!) he has thought his way through the current raging political and cultural divide to rise above the melee for a perspective on the (usually) unconscious mental frame (paradigm) which holds both sides and their predictably— given the nature of this war game mentality—feverish for-or-against opinions; choosing not to dwell on either side being right or wrong, good or evil, he instead imagines the new paradigm that enough of us must embrace, sooner or later (and likely sooner) if we wish to continue to exist as a species on this planet. Given the current and increasingly fractious divide, he’s not hopeful about the outcome, but still, he continues to speak the larger truth that he is known for.

When Politics Becomes War

 

If you read the above first (please do), and only then pursue his recent conversation with Bret Weinstein, you will know why Eisenstein says he’s likely not to want to do a follow-up conversation with him. Weinstein, who loves the mental game of debate, is still caught within the frame, and doesn’t really grok Eisenstein’s more spacious attitude.