Hate, Like Love, Binds Us Together

On the morning of May 28, 1995, Sinedu Tadesse, a junior at Harvard, stabbed her roommate, Trang-Ho, 45 times as Trang lay sleeping in her bed in their Harvard dormitory. By the time police arrived, Sinedu had hanged herself in the bathroom. Unlike most killers, the Ethiopian student left a detailed diary of her emotional state in the years leading up to the killing.

Sinedu was not a popular student. She had difficulty finding a roommate and was elated when Trang-Ho agreed to share a suite with her. But they did not get along, in part because Trang’s boyfriend frequently slept over, and Trang was looking for another roommate. Sinedu found the humiliation intolerable. She wrote in her diary, “You know what I fear? I fear that shitty cringing feeling that accompanies me….Should my rooming thing does [sic] not work out in a way that makes me hold my head high & speak of it proudly.” (All quotes in this article are from Melanie Thernstrom, “Diary of a Murder,” The New Yorker, June 3, 1996, 62-71).

If she could have, Sinedu would have inflicted this terrible cringing feeling on her roommate. Only that, it seems, would have made her feel better, and that, she knew, was impossible. “Our situations would never reverse, for me to be the strong & her to be the weak. She’ll live on tucked in the warmth & support of her family while I cry alone in the cold.”

It was a situation made worse, or at least more pathetic, by the way so many seemed to confuse them, regarding the roommates as virtually identical non-Western exotics. Even at the memorial service, Harvard’s minister could not seem to keep victim and exe-

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cutioner straight, referring to both as victims, asking the Lord to forgive them both. “Media accounts made them sound like twins, petite, hardworking foreign-born premed junior biology majors.”

Unable to become Trang-Ho, unable to trade places with her, Sinedu decided to kill herself, while taking Trang-Ho with her. Only that would feed her hatred. “The bad way out I see is suicide & the good way out killing, savoring their fear and [then] suicide. But you know what annoys me the most, I do nothing.”

In his novel Immortality, Milan Kundera has one of his characters say, “hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.” What Kundera (or perhaps just his character) fails to understand is that this is just what is wanted, hatred allowing us to pretend we want to be free, but never giving us the chance. In hatred, we transform interpersonal bonds into bondage, and relationships into prisons. For a little while, hate allowed Sinedu to come in out of the cold, as she cocooned herself in the warmth of her hate.

Sinedu’s strategy didn’t work for very long; it usually doesn’t. Hatred culminates in violence when the one who hates comes suddenly and late to reality, recognizing that the intensely desired fusion is impossible. By then, however, the one who hates has given up so much of herself to the desire to be the Other that there is no going back. The self of the hater has been depleted, and no return is possible, only the perverse satisfaction that the one who is hated will share the annihilation—fusion in the realm of entropy.

Hatred is not the opposite of love, love’s eternal enemy. Hatred is the imitation of love, creating and preserving imitations of those love relationships upon which psychic structure depends. Hatred is self-chosen bondage to another, bondage serving to structure the psyche. As though slavery was the only alternative to psychic fragmentation. Hatred is self-structure on the cheap. In this regard, hatred is a more complex relationship than is often appreciated.

Some may object to the term psychic structure, as though the term must reify an entity that does not exist. With the term structure I mean nothing more, or less, than history, the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives, and so give them continuity and purpose. The structure created by hatred is history, the history of our hatreds, narratives of our malevolent attachments that help hold self and world together.

Frequently these narratives are expressed in an almost lov-

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ing recitation of harms suffered and revenge inflicted. The history of one’s hatreds constitutes the single most important, most comprehensible, and most stable sense of identity for many people, and more than one nation.

Humans are creatures of attachment. Love is not universal, but attachment is: connection with others. It is an insight that begins with Aristotle’s Politics, which defines humanity as zoon politikon, a political animal, realizing him- or herself only in a community of others.

Hatred also creates communities: the community of those who hate the same Other, and the community between those who hate each other. Or, as Aeschylus has the Furies put it in The Oresteia, when encouraging the Athenians to unite: “Let them hate with a single heart. Much wrong in the world thereby is healed.”

Kevin Phillips, political advisor to Richard Nixon, who knew a thing or two about hatred, constructed a winning political coalition for Nixon in the 1968 election on the basis of who hated whom. Phillips knew that the strongest coalitions are built not on mutual interest or affection, but shared hatreds. In his office, Phillips had a map of who hated whom: Polish Catholics hate the Jews, who are hated by the blacks, who are hated by just about everybody but the Jews, who really hate the Catholics, who hate northern liberals, except in Massachusetts, where they are the liberals, except when it comes to homosexuals, which makes it hard to be liberal, except that the Massachusetts Catholics hate southern rednecks more, and they all hate the hairy young people, especially the suburbanites, many of whose children are young and hairy (remember, this is the 1960’s), which just means that they hate them all the more, only they can’t show it politically, so they hate someone else. And so it goes.

Hatred is a political phenomenon far better understood and appreciated by politicos, men and women involved in the practical politics of securing and maintaining power, than by psychological and social theorists.

Hatred as a political force has received far less attention than love and fear, its emotional complements. Love, we learn early, may be translated into patriotism and loyalty, fear into obedience, and the corruption of national spirit in diverse ways, from militarism to appeasement. But what of hatred? What is needed is not a new sub-discipline, the theory of hatred. What is needed is a

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better understanding of how hatred infiltrates and corrupts all the political virtues, such as patriotism, community, loyalty, tolerance, and citizenship. What is needed is an analysis of the way in which each of these virtues has its dark side, its correlation rooted in hatred, as when loyalty to one’s own nation depends on hatred of others.

Hatred is capable of simulating not just love, but almost all the virtues. Sometimes hatred takes the place of these virtues, as when patriotism is defined as hatred of the enemy. More often, hatred infiltrates these virtues, so that hatred of the enemy becomes so confused with love of country that it becomes almost impossible to sort them out. A better understanding of hatred is not enough, but it’s a good place to start.

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