Disliking/Hating Tendency

Disliking/Hating Tendency

If you hate a person, then you’re defeated by them.

—Confucius

In a pattern obverse to Liking/Loving Tendency, the newly arrived human is also “born to dislike and hate” as triggered by normal and abnormal triggering forces in its life. It is the same with most apes and monkeys.

As a result, the long history of man contains almost continuous war. For instance, most American Indian tribes warred incessantly, and some tribes would occasionally bring captives home to women so that all could join in the fun of torturing captives to death. Even with the spread of religion, and the advent of advanced civilization, much modern war remains pretty savage. But we also get what we observe in present-day Switzerland and the United States, wherein the clever political arrangements of man “channel” the hatreds and dislikings of individuals and groups into nonlethal patterns including elections.

But the dislikings and hatreds never go away completely. Born into man, these driving tendencies remain strong. Thus, we get maxims like the one from England: “Politics is the art of marshalling hatreds.” And we also get the extreme popularity of very negative political advertising in the United States.

At the family level, we often see one sibling hate his other siblings and litigate with them endlessly if he can afford it. Indeed, Warren Buffett has repeatedly explained to me that “a major difference between rich and poor people is that the rich people can spend their lives suing their relatives.” My father’s law practice in Omaha was full of such intrafamily hatreds. And when I got to the Harvard Law School and its professors taught me “property law” with no mention of sibling rivalry in the family business, I appraised the School as a pretty unrealistic place that wore “blinders” like the milk-wagon horses of yore. My current guess is that sibling rivalry has not yet made it into property law as taught at Harvard.

Disliking/Hating Tendency also acts as a conditioning device that makes the disliker/hater tend to:

• 1. ignore virtues in the object of dislike,
• 2. dislike people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his dislike, and
• 3. distort other facts to facilitate hatred.

Distortion of that kind is often so extreme that miscognition is shockingly large. When the world Trade Center was destroyed, many Muslims immediately concluded that the Hindus did it, while many Arabs concluded that the Jews did it. Such factual distortions often make mediation between opponents locked in hatred either difficult or impossible. Mediations between Israelis and Palestinians are difficult because facts in one side’s history overlap very little with facts from the other side’s.