I have taken the opportunity on several occasions to point out to folks that telegraphing the word "hate" is a bad idea. It just makes people hateful and puts their minds on hate instead of love. I find it hard to believe that those who came up with this "hate" approach to activism were naive. There are books like *Influence* by Robert Cialdini that speak to this topic, and I think it's pretty 101 social psych. There are signs in Church windows and on lawns in my neck of the woods that read "Hate has no home here." What ever happened to "Love thy neighbour," I wonder?
There's a song called "Passing Through" by Dick Blakeslee but covered by Leonard Cohen that starts:
I saw Jesus on the cross on a hill called cavalry,
"Do you hate mankind for what they done to you?"
He said, "Talk of love not hate, things to do, it's getting late,
I've so little time, and I'm only passing through."
Fabulous as ever. A common aphorism when I was a child was, "it wouldn't do if all the birds said 'cuckoo'" which is a nugget of wisdom, as many such expressions are. In the 60's and 70's we were brought up on the idea that a broad range of opinion and ideas in society was admirable. We embraced the eccentrics and the avant-garde. How would cultural phenomena like Monty Python or punks have arisen in those eras otherwise? Organisations like 'Hope not Hate' are so depressingly limiting - the product of low IQ.
Great piece, although please recall that this is only one particular camp inside liberalism. As a liberal myself, I've been arguing against this for some time. Here's a quote from the section of my book Chaos Ethics, published in 2014, entitled "Intolerant Tolerance":
"We all come to the world from a specific set of circumstances, and the liberal extolling of difference does not transcend this, it is just another one of these backgrounds. When we denigrate the fervent nationalist for their love of a mythic nation on the grounds that this turns them against people from other nations we effectively perpetuate the very same mistake - we wield our own ideal as a weapon and use it to prevent other people from having theirs. If we seek the moral high ground by observing that our ideal is more inclusive, this escalation falls prey of the same problem: why must they accept our ideal of inclusiveness when we cannot accept their ideal of national identity?
Beyond the serpent eating its own tail inherent to this hatred of haters, intolerant tolerance represents a far bigger threat to our hopes of living together because it eliminates any possibility of treating others as genuine equals."
I am also disappointed but not surprised to learn that Foucault beat me to the punch in the inversion of von Clausewitz, which I thought original to this book.
I’ve downloaded and saved the ‘Hope not Hate’ 2024 Report as a classic example of the confusion displayed by those who show a demonstrable inability to appreciate the stupidity of utilising that tired old trope of fascism against anyone who fails to agree with their view of societal governance.
I read somewhere that Mussolini defined fascism as the merging of state and corporate interests and it is surely without question that such a definition applies to the systems of governance that were employed by both Hitler and Mussolini.
If more and more of the globe is falling under such a system of governance, it is because more and more national governments have fallen under the spell of the New World Order (NWO), under the auspices of the ever increasing merger of the likes of the United Nations with the World Economic Forum and the transnational elites who gather at Davos.
Hovering above that, unelected and answerable to no one but themselves, grouping of megalomaniacs, are the puppet masters, in the form of the central bankers of the world. It is they who control the supply of money to the global economy and thus provide the direction of global governance. Money now being a supply of a medium of exchange which long ago ceased to represent any form of value, due to the almost total lack of any form of underlying collateral, other than the labour of generations yet to be born. Indeed, generations so far into the future that they are the equivalent of the twinkle in the eye of our children’s children’s children’s children!!
I note from David’s reply to an earlier comment that he thinks that the likes of Nick Lowles and his band of scribblers probably have a pretty high IQ, but that they are employing it unproductively. I think that he is endeavouring to show a measure of undeserved hope, in the manner in which the word should be employed!!
Personally, I think that Nick & Co. are little more than useful idiots, who are being cultivated by the NWO as a means of providing a pretence that a form of opposing views can be expressed, but only if they represent opposition to conservatism (with a decidedly small c).
Anyway, all power to David’s elbow and his excellent exposés of the present downward descent of the nation into which I was born. A descent which was already in place, but which began increasing in pace following the election of Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair in 1997. By the time that 2016 rolled around, it was depressingly apparent that the nation was bereft of individuals capable of doing anything other than awaiting instructions from the NWO and their puppeteers.
Is it too late to prevent cascading over the cliff? Only if we reject the hopes of the NWO and their useful idiots and rediscover the benefits of acting like responsible individuals, with a penchant for proper conservative existence, founded on doing what has been shown to work in everybody’s best interests.
The Politics of Deviance. It is quite clear that the latest word to be captured by the wokists - following eg gay, rainbow - is 'hope'. It is deeply Freudian that they would link/counterpose it to 'hate'. It is also paradoxical: "We hate your prejudice and hope to expunge you from a polity where acceptance is all"
My thinking: "I still don't know who is sowing the hate" - Or do we know?
A coin has two sides. To get to one side or the other you have to move.
Each side tries to get the other side to move.
All means are used:
First marketing, PR,
then active persuasion
and finally "violence"
The “violence” again develops in degrees.
Mainstream versus outsiders?
The political business always has power as its goal
A force of the ego is convinced that its path is the only true one.
The ego creates a mainstream to bring along as many people as possible in the country.
But the critics are disturbing, disturbing his beautiful mainstream world.
Everything they say is ignored, then defamed, and finally he uses all kinds of violence against individuals.
The article states that everything has been going this way since ancient times.
That's obviously the case.
Power always creates a system that sets exactly this process in motion.
But the reason is the ego, the ego of a numerically small hegemon who has hijacked the political system.
The reason is that people continue to allow a small group to create a system that allows this accumulation of power.
Does the coin have a third side? - Here called liberalism.
I think no. It is an offer from the power hegemon to the critics. The attempt to keep the critics in an orderly pool.
Since ancient times, the hegemon has not seemed to understand that critics also recognize and reject this.
Another level of thinking
Think sociologically. Every community consists of fearful, security-needy, ... people, critics and, for the most part, the mainstream.
The hegemon offers two ideologies, plus a third for the part that is most dangerous to it, the critic.
The critic doesn't want to choose from three fixed offers. He wants freedom, he doesn't want to choose a power system - the system that the power hegemon always needs. The critic wants a system that does NOT give power to one hand.
The critic wants referendums.
Although the power hegemon dominates the mainstream and its consciousness of power, this path is too hot for him and he cannot accept it.
Problems of the mainstream system
The Hegemon begins to introduce a pendulum system.
Sometimes he brings a social party into government to offer security and social benefits to the mainstream. In order to curb this again and limit its consequences, he is swinging the pendulum towards an economically oriented party. But with the swings of the pendulum, the welfare state is taking two steps forward and one step back.
Expenses are rising and rising - Above all, unproductive expenses are rising. The hegemon resorts to debt.
What is hate?
An emotion created by the hegemon.
The hegemon's ego has had a weakness since ancient times. The ego is one-sided, therefore it cannot move, it cannot recognize its own mistakes, because its only goal is power.
The hegemon's activities, working with the social/economic pendulum, accumulate unmistakable damage.
The mainstream is slowly realizing where this is going and is listening more to the critics
The hegemon is now using the tools of HIS system to keep the critics down - power: laws, courts, police, secret services, influence on children's beds, kindergartens, schools, universities.
"Another way to put this is that people tend to be naturally conservative about the things they love. One loves one's home, one's family, one's country, one's community, simply for the fact that it is familiar."
I miss nature here. Because if you use the term, then it is, as described, “familiar”. But I think the more appropriate word is "natural."
Is writing about parties the perfect way?
I think that this only anticipates the hegemon's system. Wants to circumvent the hegemon's power ego or has not recognized it. The power hegemon is the basic problem.
The way out is a purely natural system. Predominantly known as FREE referendums (FREE, without manipulation, without lobbies, without donors. Votes without yes/no/abstention, but consensus). A natural system, a power-free, decentralized system is the only thing that enables peace, happiness and abundance. Let's walk through the forest, nature and experience this natural peace, happiness and abundance.
Then we will not philosophize about hate, which is not a cause BUT an effect of the power hegemon system. Of the political system.
But the discussion about hate = impact is helpful in bringing in perspectives and looking for the causes. I would like to encourage you to search on a neutral, systematic, meta level.
I have taken the opportunity on several occasions to point out to folks that telegraphing the word "hate" is a bad idea. It just makes people hateful and puts their minds on hate instead of love. I find it hard to believe that those who came up with this "hate" approach to activism were naive. There are books like *Influence* by Robert Cialdini that speak to this topic, and I think it's pretty 101 social psych. There are signs in Church windows and on lawns in my neck of the woods that read "Hate has no home here." What ever happened to "Love thy neighbour," I wonder?
There's a song called "Passing Through" by Dick Blakeslee but covered by Leonard Cohen that starts:
I saw Jesus on the cross on a hill called cavalry,
"Do you hate mankind for what they done to you?"
He said, "Talk of love not hate, things to do, it's getting late,
I've so little time, and I'm only passing through."
Great point.
Fabulous as ever. A common aphorism when I was a child was, "it wouldn't do if all the birds said 'cuckoo'" which is a nugget of wisdom, as many such expressions are. In the 60's and 70's we were brought up on the idea that a broad range of opinion and ideas in society was admirable. We embraced the eccentrics and the avant-garde. How would cultural phenomena like Monty Python or punks have arisen in those eras otherwise? Organisations like 'Hope not Hate' are so depressingly limiting - the product of low IQ.
Sadly, I think they probably have relatively high IQ but are deploying it very unproductively. That's the tragedy of it.
Maybe rooted in childhood trauma then!
suffering from left hemisphere capture!
Great piece, although please recall that this is only one particular camp inside liberalism. As a liberal myself, I've been arguing against this for some time. Here's a quote from the section of my book Chaos Ethics, published in 2014, entitled "Intolerant Tolerance":
"We all come to the world from a specific set of circumstances, and the liberal extolling of difference does not transcend this, it is just another one of these backgrounds. When we denigrate the fervent nationalist for their love of a mythic nation on the grounds that this turns them against people from other nations we effectively perpetuate the very same mistake - we wield our own ideal as a weapon and use it to prevent other people from having theirs. If we seek the moral high ground by observing that our ideal is more inclusive, this escalation falls prey of the same problem: why must they accept our ideal of inclusiveness when we cannot accept their ideal of national identity?
Beyond the serpent eating its own tail inherent to this hatred of haters, intolerant tolerance represents a far bigger threat to our hopes of living together because it eliminates any possibility of treating others as genuine equals."
I am also disappointed but not surprised to learn that Foucault beat me to the punch in the inversion of von Clausewitz, which I thought original to this book.
Stay wonderful!
Chris.
Please do a piece on Led By Donkeys next. I really HATE their brand of smug centrist Twitter dadness.
Cracking piece, David.
Thanks!
enviably well-rounded.
Another cracking polemic!
I’ve downloaded and saved the ‘Hope not Hate’ 2024 Report as a classic example of the confusion displayed by those who show a demonstrable inability to appreciate the stupidity of utilising that tired old trope of fascism against anyone who fails to agree with their view of societal governance.
I read somewhere that Mussolini defined fascism as the merging of state and corporate interests and it is surely without question that such a definition applies to the systems of governance that were employed by both Hitler and Mussolini.
If more and more of the globe is falling under such a system of governance, it is because more and more national governments have fallen under the spell of the New World Order (NWO), under the auspices of the ever increasing merger of the likes of the United Nations with the World Economic Forum and the transnational elites who gather at Davos.
Hovering above that, unelected and answerable to no one but themselves, grouping of megalomaniacs, are the puppet masters, in the form of the central bankers of the world. It is they who control the supply of money to the global economy and thus provide the direction of global governance. Money now being a supply of a medium of exchange which long ago ceased to represent any form of value, due to the almost total lack of any form of underlying collateral, other than the labour of generations yet to be born. Indeed, generations so far into the future that they are the equivalent of the twinkle in the eye of our children’s children’s children’s children!!
I note from David’s reply to an earlier comment that he thinks that the likes of Nick Lowles and his band of scribblers probably have a pretty high IQ, but that they are employing it unproductively. I think that he is endeavouring to show a measure of undeserved hope, in the manner in which the word should be employed!!
Personally, I think that Nick & Co. are little more than useful idiots, who are being cultivated by the NWO as a means of providing a pretence that a form of opposing views can be expressed, but only if they represent opposition to conservatism (with a decidedly small c).
Anyway, all power to David’s elbow and his excellent exposés of the present downward descent of the nation into which I was born. A descent which was already in place, but which began increasing in pace following the election of Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair in 1997. By the time that 2016 rolled around, it was depressingly apparent that the nation was bereft of individuals capable of doing anything other than awaiting instructions from the NWO and their puppeteers.
Is it too late to prevent cascading over the cliff? Only if we reject the hopes of the NWO and their useful idiots and rediscover the benefits of acting like responsible individuals, with a penchant for proper conservative existence, founded on doing what has been shown to work in everybody’s best interests.
The Politics of Deviance. It is quite clear that the latest word to be captured by the wokists - following eg gay, rainbow - is 'hope'. It is deeply Freudian that they would link/counterpose it to 'hate'. It is also paradoxical: "We hate your prejudice and hope to expunge you from a polity where acceptance is all"
I think it is sheer genius the way the Rulers of Our Universe
hide in plain sight all of their plans to totally control us, knowing
we'll believe they're trying to hide something from us...
I think it is sheer genius the way They are using our distrust to
manipulate us...
"I still don't know what hate means"
My thinking: "I still don't know who is sowing the hate" - Or do we know?
A coin has two sides. To get to one side or the other you have to move.
Each side tries to get the other side to move.
All means are used:
First marketing, PR,
then active persuasion
and finally "violence"
The “violence” again develops in degrees.
Mainstream versus outsiders?
The political business always has power as its goal
A force of the ego is convinced that its path is the only true one.
The ego creates a mainstream to bring along as many people as possible in the country.
But the critics are disturbing, disturbing his beautiful mainstream world.
Everything they say is ignored, then defamed, and finally he uses all kinds of violence against individuals.
The article states that everything has been going this way since ancient times.
That's obviously the case.
Power always creates a system that sets exactly this process in motion.
But the reason is the ego, the ego of a numerically small hegemon who has hijacked the political system.
The reason is that people continue to allow a small group to create a system that allows this accumulation of power.
Does the coin have a third side? - Here called liberalism.
I think no. It is an offer from the power hegemon to the critics. The attempt to keep the critics in an orderly pool.
Since ancient times, the hegemon has not seemed to understand that critics also recognize and reject this.
Another level of thinking
Think sociologically. Every community consists of fearful, security-needy, ... people, critics and, for the most part, the mainstream.
The hegemon offers two ideologies, plus a third for the part that is most dangerous to it, the critic.
The critic doesn't want to choose from three fixed offers. He wants freedom, he doesn't want to choose a power system - the system that the power hegemon always needs. The critic wants a system that does NOT give power to one hand.
The critic wants referendums.
Although the power hegemon dominates the mainstream and its consciousness of power, this path is too hot for him and he cannot accept it.
Problems of the mainstream system
The Hegemon begins to introduce a pendulum system.
Sometimes he brings a social party into government to offer security and social benefits to the mainstream. In order to curb this again and limit its consequences, he is swinging the pendulum towards an economically oriented party. But with the swings of the pendulum, the welfare state is taking two steps forward and one step back.
Expenses are rising and rising - Above all, unproductive expenses are rising. The hegemon resorts to debt.
What is hate?
An emotion created by the hegemon.
The hegemon's ego has had a weakness since ancient times. The ego is one-sided, therefore it cannot move, it cannot recognize its own mistakes, because its only goal is power.
The hegemon's activities, working with the social/economic pendulum, accumulate unmistakable damage.
The mainstream is slowly realizing where this is going and is listening more to the critics
The hegemon is now using the tools of HIS system to keep the critics down - power: laws, courts, police, secret services, influence on children's beds, kindergartens, schools, universities.
"Another way to put this is that people tend to be naturally conservative about the things they love. One loves one's home, one's family, one's country, one's community, simply for the fact that it is familiar."
I miss nature here. Because if you use the term, then it is, as described, “familiar”. But I think the more appropriate word is "natural."
Is writing about parties the perfect way?
I think that this only anticipates the hegemon's system. Wants to circumvent the hegemon's power ego or has not recognized it. The power hegemon is the basic problem.
The way out is a purely natural system. Predominantly known as FREE referendums (FREE, without manipulation, without lobbies, without donors. Votes without yes/no/abstention, but consensus). A natural system, a power-free, decentralized system is the only thing that enables peace, happiness and abundance. Let's walk through the forest, nature and experience this natural peace, happiness and abundance.
Then we will not philosophize about hate, which is not a cause BUT an effect of the power hegemon system. Of the political system.
But the discussion about hate = impact is helpful in bringing in perspectives and looking for the causes. I would like to encourage you to search on a neutral, systematic, meta level.