Hate is a big word
From hate to pity and concern
Hate is a big word and I do not like its misuse. I do not like to see it trivialized by silly teenage girls, race-hustlers and wannabe censors. Hate is a serious business. I only hated one person in my life, you are looking at him.
This post isn’t really about him or me, but about how damn complex the world that makes us can be.
I very much like the concept of
’s Substack (that he just cancelled) ‘The books that made us’, but the concept could go far beyond that. To a great extent, we are the products of our times, our genes, various influences, the vagaries of good and bad luck, the choices we made and the consequences of those choices.If you wonder about the Hitler moustache on the picture, it was in fashion when he started growing it and he stuck with it ‘till the day of his death. I will refer to him here as MJ.
He was not a good man; primitive, aggressive, often clearly sadistic. A big-time abuser of my mother, sister and I.
He was born in 1926, to a big city maid from a small village on the Northern border with Czechoslovakia.
He never learned who his father was. I think that the fact, that he was a bastard, like me, played a role in marrying my mother. Bastard seeking redemption in marrying a fallen woman with a bastard.
I don’t think that there is many of you reading this, who can really understand what a stigma that still was not that long ago. I went through school knowing only one person who was raised by a divorced mother and one raised by a widow. All the rest were from traditional families.
I was raised by my grandparents (and aunt and uncle who were only 14 & 12 years older than I) ‘till I turned four; MJ was raised by his grandparents ‘till adulthood. He had only the compulsory four years of schooling after which he started working as a shoemaker’s apprentice. The skill served him well, he was doing shoe-repair on the side of his regular jobs most of his life.
He was 19 when the war ended. He got a job as a policeman.
He was THE policeman who hid the rifle in the kulak’s haystack during the night so that they can arrest him next day for possessing an illegal weapon. How do I know this? From him bragging about it!!! With true schadenfreude, without a hint of shame. He put those ‘enemies of the people’ to where they belong. He also liked to tell the story of how they amused themselves in the boring nights at the village police station.
When they arrested a gypsy, for some drunk and disorderly conduct, while he was sleeping, they put some straws between his toes and set it on fire to amuse themselves how the gypsy was jumping around trying to get rid of the burning straws from his feet. Again, no shame. I only remember a few of his stories, the ones he told the most often.
In 1953, after the death of Stalin, he was unceremoniously dismissed from the police force. We don’t know why, but we do know that there was a purge of the force, to get rid of those who may have been a little too enthusiastic doing their job under the Stalinist era. The people I was working with in the seventies at a sociological research institute told me that he must have done something that could be embarrassing for his superiors.
We lived a block and a half away from a most notorious place of torture and extrajudicial killing.
The place today is a museum called the House of Terror. I went to school in the building right next to it. (If you ever go to Budapest, it is definitely worth seeing.)
As an adult, I always wondered how did we end up so close to it. I wanted to find out more, to have some sort of explanation for the despicable conditions of my childhood.
A few years ago, I requested from the Hungarian state security archives all available information about myself, my father and my stepfather. I got 299 pages on myself, 142 on my father and 2 on my stepfather.
Absolutely nothing about his time as a policeman. I learned nothing ……. except the fact that the state will never release information that could embarrass the state itself.
I will never know, but I was speculating about it a few times. Would I feel some satisfaction, some justification for my emotions if I learned that he was indeed a henchman of communist terror?
Based on what I DO KNOW, I can perfectly imagine it, but I will never, actually, know. When you go to the House of Terror, you will learn a lot about the victims, but practically nothing about the perpetrators.
MJ got tuberculosis sometime in 1955-56, lost half of his lung but he was out of the picture during the revolution. I went to live with them in the spring of 57.
While in a sanatorium, recovering after his TB operation, he learned carpentry. He also started drinking heavily. The drinking got progressively worse, he died at the age of 52, when he fell into a ditch, dead drunk, in the middle of the winter. Luckily, I was out of town with my boss, but with the urging of his family, the police still came to question me.
But here is the interesting part:
He had amazing skills as a shoemaker, carpenter and book binder. He was binding books for fun, fixing shoes for booze money and making things for the fun of it. Things like wood-inlay replicas of these 19 century romantic era paintings:
An incredible amount of work went into these pictures. He had the most exquisite tools to cut out millimeter size pieces from just the right kind of wood using just the right kind of stain to approximate the colors on the painting. A task requiring an exceptional amount of focus and attention. He was, in some ways, a perfectionist.
He made, as presents to friends, small piano replicas, about 8” in size. When you opened the top, there was a tiny monkey orchestra in it carved from peach-pits. We had a few magazine subscriptions, every year, he bound them into one volume. He had this strange world of creation, but when he stepped out of it, he was a violent, angry and sadistic bully. He found it funny to extinguish his cigarette on my mother’s thigh. Yes, he did that in front of my eyes.
He was the kind of person who found the misfortune of others hilarious. He loved slapstick comedy, the Laurel and Hardy style.
I was never able to resolve these contradictions and kept wondering whether his life could have been different under different circumstances. Shortly after the war, still very young, he wanted to create a shoemaker’s cooperative, but his timing was wrong. A self-organizing worker cooperative was a socialist idea and the communists didn’t like socialist ideas. Once firmly in power they allowed some, but by that time, MJ was a policeman.
I cannot picture him not drinking, not being an alcoholic. Communist countries had a serious problem with alcoholism, but there were no charities or self-help organizations like Alcoholic Anonymous.
The communists looked at any spontaneous organization with great suspicion. I wonder what would have happened if he had a better chance to control his demons or gotten some guidance with his exceptional skills.
As I mentioned in my post about The Collector, eventually, A LONG TIME AFTER his death I made peace with him in my dreams. I have no hate in me, but I think I can understand it better than most.
Hate is the feeling perfectly depicted the Lord Of The Rings. Hatred is what Smeagol (Gollum) feels towards the hobbits, who have “his precious”.
I often wondered (and sometimes still do) whether I could (would be able to) talk to him. How would he see the world we are living in? Or me in it? I am still wondering how he saw himself in the world. Did he see himself as a good parent? Was he evil, misguided or just out of control?
While I am done with hatred in my personal life, I am not done with the subject.
It seems that I am encountering the problem with increasing frequency.
Just a few minutes ago I came across it in this post of
“Any political worldview that’s worth a damn necessarily includes a deep and visceral hatred of Dick Cheney, and an abhorrence toward any ideology which sympathizes with him. (emphasis mine)”
I don’t hate Dick Cheney, especially not in a visceral way.
What I have for him and both Bushes is contempt.
What I have for Justine Trudeau and Barak Obama is nauseating disgust.
I have plenty of negative emotions, but hate requires an emotional commitment that is no longer in my emotional arsenal.
I find the state of the world alarming and worrisome, depressing and anxiety-inducing, but I do not hate it.
Apparently, that would not be enough for
Hate is dangerous. I tried to describe it in my post Kiszolgáltatottság. I consider the lack of power, the lack of agency essential parts of it. What I find most worrisome about the times we are living in is that it is a fertile ground for it.
Various societal, cultural, economic and political forces are systematically depriving us in an ever-expanding way of agency over our own lives. When we will own nothing, we will be powerless and, eventually, full of hate of those who made us powerless.
If we keep expanding the divide between what we call left and right; if we make it impossible to find ways to resolve our differences in a mutually agreeable and CIVILIZED manner, we will be left with the worst of all options: hate for each other. And just like with Smeagol, hate and the yearning for power will eventually destroy us. …and I am sorry that I have to say this, but I blame the left for most of it.
I am done with hatred. How about you?
Are you free of it or are you still an unhinged leftist?
Let me know in the comments!
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"I am still wondering how he saw himself in the world. Did he see himself as a good parent? Was he evil, misguided or just out of control?"
Everyone in this world sees themselves as a good or righteous person.
Any hideous crime people commit, will be considered in the perpetrator's mind as a necessary evil, that is done in service of a greater "value". They might even think themselves brave, for doing the evil thing, because they value "the thing" so much, they are willing to do whatever is necessary, to move the greater goal forward. But there is always something, that justifies to them what they do.
(Then of course there are other issues, like the commitment principle, that will drive anyone more committed to anything they have done (accepted and justified to themselves) once, the person will be much more likely to do that thing again, and even accept doing something even worse, with greater ease, as long as it's in the same vein as the original act. That, and desensitizin themselves to what they are doing over time.)
Mind you, the value can completely be a misguided one. It can be the communist ideals, if they beleive them. It can be the wellbeing of the world (in whatever way someone might imagine it).
It can get muddied as well, if the "value" is internal, such as self-preservation, or recovering agency in one's life, like how abused people can feel an internal need to feel in control of their life. It get's even more confusing, when they cannot fully understand it themselves...
And of course on top of this all, there's the issue of the "way" of trying to achieve the betterment of the "value". The way of expressing the value may be weak, only slightly improving it. Actions can be inefficient, not doing anything, causing great frustration for the person, who is doing so much, to "make things better. Or they can be straight up counterproductive, where additional blindfolds are on the person not realizing, that what they are doing, is the reason for their problems, or perceived transgressions to their "value". But the person will continue to carry out the action, as long as they beleive it's "the right thing" to do, or they learn of a better way.
So to sum it up: everybody feels (at least unconsciously) justified to do the things they do, led by an internal value system, and express it in the best (albeit possibly limited) way they know. If every single one of the 3000+ personal stories of my clients are any indication: in his mind, he was the righteous or good person.
fascinating deep dive, thank you!