The Hierarchy of Hate
When the salesmen from the Store of Hate come ringing your doorbell, as they invariably seem to do every 50 to 100 years, it’s tempting to think they’re selling something new… something different and special… something unique to your problems, needs, and desires. But they’re not.
They’re always selling voodoo dolls. Maybe they’ll say they’ve got new colors this time, brown instead of black or yellow or even white. Or maybe they’ll talk about their different costumes or behaviors or beliefs. These dolls are new because your problems are new, so surely you need new solutions. Something to explain your new problem and the special way to fix it.
But it’s never new. It always starts with blame which in turn requires a scapegoat… someone ‘other.’ And it always ends in one place, hatred of others. That’s the answer to all your problems. When I refer to hierarchy, I mean that, no matter how many branches there are on the tree (or, if you prefer, bricks in the base of a pyramid), there’s always one stem, one pinnacle: hatred of others.
How can such a theme repeat so reliably over the globe… now even in the good old US of A? Plain and simple, it’s our animal heritage. It’s built-in by 4.3 billion years of DNA magic. We are animals, and it’s no etymological sleight-of-hand, but a simple fact that we have the name ‘animus’ for this hate. Somewhere in those billions of years, plants developed the Zen-like habit of staying put, and with it a much more peace-loving attitude (although scientists have found some pretty toxic — barbaric even — behaviors of plants, too). But for the most part, we animals come from the world of kill-or-be-killed. Hell, we’ll even eat our young if it comes down to it. And in America, we’re doing that right now as we relegate many of them back to the pre-industrial world of piecework, financial insecurity, and healthcare roulette. But I digress.
If you put enough pressure on some people they’ll revert right back to our shared animal heritage. And sadly, some people need no pressure at all… they’ve never escaped it. But for most of us, we grow up. We grow out of that heritage of dog-eat-dog, and into one where we-are-our-brothers’-keepers. That progression is in fact the story of civilization, the growth from barbarity to community, even if you draw a personal line at outright charity. But not everyone gets on the bus, and that’s the way it’s probably always been. OK. I’m not delusional, just trying to decode the age-old poetry.
And dog-eat-dog is hardly any sort of exception to our current rules; it is in fact America’s one and only shared ethic! Though we frequently sermonize the notion that this is a land where the broadest, deepest doctrine is ‘fairness,’ that’s somewhere between a lie and a misnomer. We genuinely have the most trust in the self-balancing nature of self-interest… and I mean that seriously, not derisively. That’s why, despite the fact that our Constitution mentions only the ‘general welfare,’ and nothing about capitalism or free enterprise, we act as if any overt mention of ‘social goods’ is equivalent to Pol Pot or choose your favorite genocidal dictator. Then the doll-sellers go on to equate “promote the general welfare” (words 16–19 of the Constitution) with those dictators, but the script for their sales pitch uses the words communism and socialism.
So here we are, with the latest bunch of salesmen at the door with their voodoo dolls. Funny how the door-to-door salesmen are now the unimaginably wealthy, when that trade used to be the last resort of the penniless. Whatever. The voodoo dolls are now brown, or so they say out loud, or gay or lazy (which they don’t say out loud)… and they’re taking your jobs and your financial security, or maybe your white male world. It has nothing to do with automation reaching an Earth-shattering crescendo (and its attendant or concentration of wealth) or ecosphere destruction; pay no attention to that nonsense.
Just buy the fucking dolls and hate the others. Here are some pins for when we take all your money, freedom, water, air, health, and safety.
