Posted on May 15, 2017

The Nature of “Hate”

John Gorman, JNS, May 12, 2017

I just happened to stumble across this picture of Middlebury students turning their backs to the podium where Charles Murray was supposed to have delivered his speech a couple months ago:

You’ll notice the sign protesting the “hate” speech. Murray is deemed a “hater” because of his book, The Bell Curve, in which he acknowledged, in a couple of its roughly 900 pages, that intelligence has a genetic basis, and that there are, on average, differences between the races.

The idea that mentioning an obvious fact makes one a “hater” is one of the more ridiculous propositions that the Left promotes.

I know that men are, on average, physically stronger than women. This doesn’t mean I hate women. And I readily acknowledge that blacks are, on average, more naturally talented at sprinting than whites are. This doesn’t mean I hate whites.

In fact, the very idea of that emotion being sparked by either of those differences in ability seems absurd.

I’m also aware that whites, on average, have higher IQs than blacks; this doesn’t mean I hate blacks. To hate a group of people based on their average IQ would be downright silly. The vast majority of my personal interactions with blacks are positive; I’ve always had the impression when blacks are friendly, it usually seems more genuine than when whites are.

True hatred is an intense, extremely personal emotion. It usually implies a bitter grudge which has grown over time, and is usually based on a series of unpleasant incidents. It would be awfully hard to muster that emotion for someone with whom you’ve had no contact.

For example, I have never — to my knowledge — met an Australian aborigine. So the idea that I could somehow bear them all personal ill will on the basis of knowing their IQs average in the 60’s seems awfully farfetched.

Here’s another way to look at it: if I hate people simply for having low IQ’s, wouldn’t that imply that I love people with high IQ’s — and that the smarter they are, the more I love them?

As someone who went to Harvard and worked at Goldman Sachs, I can assure you — with 100% certainty — that this is not the case.

What’s really going on here is projection. Sociopaths have accused me of being sociopathic, Aspies have accused me of having Aspergers, and gays have accused me of being gay. It’s also true that decent people generally think the best of others, whereas sociopaths tend to think the worst.

In much the same manner, many on the Left assume that because they are filled with rage and resentment, their opposite numbers must be the same. So they accuse those on the Right of being “haters.” Even worse, they label any sort of realism “hatred.”

But I think I can speak for most on the Right when I say I reserve my hatred for liars and hypocrites — like those who lie about race, advocate policies based on those lies, and call the truth “hatred.”