We live in trying times these days. People are being shot in the streets, presidential candidates are fomenting hatred, racism and division, and government is bitterly gridlocked. Everyone is pissed off at something these days, and we all agree that the solution is to come together, set aside our petty differences and work to create a world filled with love and compassion rather than hate.
This is an overflowing, steaming crock of shit.
Of all the things that civilization can be attributed to, hate is at least in the top two and neither love nor peace is number one. I'm getting very bored with humanity's belief that the world would be better off without hate, and in fact, I think it would be the societal equivalent of eliminating recycling and thrift. Throwing out the hate beehive would mean chucking the succulent honeycomb of ridiculing hateful people into the can with it, and I’m not sure I could be bothered to keep living without some sweetener in the bowl of pabulum we ruminate our way through in the name of “everyday life”.
What we need now is not less hate but more, because the dose that will fix the world's problems isn't going to be peace. It's going to be finding a way to make the world worth chuckling at again by humorously pile-driving hateful people into the ground. Here is an example: consider how much less funny the universe would be without Hitler. Currently, about 120 million people turn out to vote in a presidential election in the United States. The cynical whirlpool of depression that spirals down the nation’s psychological toilet into the sewage spill valve of November would take everyone but the 60 million-plus-one winners down the suicide shitter with it if we didn’t have Hitler memes and fascist rhetoric to keep our spirits buoyant. For the record, that’s around 260 million disillusioned suicides. In contrast, only 60 million people died in World War 2—many of whom were Nazis anyway—which is precisely one less than the number of people everyone wants to kill after an election in this country because we can’t stand listening to the gloating.
Besides, Hitler is the funniest looking and sounding dictator of the 20th century; no mind could ever dream up such a hilariously insane archetype for everything we revel in when ridiculing. He and his regime were and are a perpetual wellspring of hilarity, and without it I doubt we'd have made it as far as we have. Look, in Hitler's absence, who’s the World War 2 person we’d have to turn to for political parody, Mussolini? Really? Try and reimagine the complete works of Mel Brooks but replacing every example of Hitler and the Nazis with Mussolini and find me a funny one. I'll wait... That bald fuck frowned so much that when he barely frowned it looked like he was smiling—and not even that’s a joke. Take a look at this picture of him with an expression I think can be objectively described as "pleased", and then get a piece of string and line it up with the corners of his mouth and see which one of Christopher Robin’s ragdoll delusions he reminds you of.
The only thing remotely laughable about him is that the nickname, Il Duce, is a fairly close approximation of a far more hilarious feminine hygiene product originating in France. Had he known about the product he undoubtedly would have chosen a different sobriquet. However, as his only attempt to invade France ended in shambles before the Italians got a single boot outside the Alps, he was forever burdened with the humiliation of Allied snickering, as well as the profound national shame of being the victim of the only significant French military victory since they annihilated the Syrian army in 1922. Syria… And he probably didn’t know what “sobriquet” meant either. And when British bombers dropped leaflets over Rome reading: “Women of Italy! Your sons and husbands and sweethearts have not left you to defend their country. They suffer death to satisfy the pride of one man", there may well have been some heavy eraser marks around the last sentence.
Now there are probably some women reading that last sentence who hate me because they don’t think it’s funny. Allow me to clarify:
Yes. It. Is.
See how much more interesting your world is now? Because I made a joke and you hate me for it, you now have an entire pig trough full of pointless verbal fodder to shovel into the earholes of your “sons and husbands and sweethearts” while they’re simultaneously trying to watch Italy play France in the EuroCup and feign interest in what you are saying so you don’t flay them alive for implying there may be a second state of happiness in their pallid existence involving the silencing of that particular orifice. By the way, that energy radiating from the side of his skull when you’re talking? Pure hate pooling in his brain. Hate is the only substance in the male body that can bridge the synapses between love and solipsism, and without it he’d calmly shatter your furiously oscillating hyoid bone and gently hang your corpse bowels-out from the roof gutters very much like Mussolini was displayed after his murder. That's how cyclically un-funny the world gets without hate.
So you see, without hate...your husbands couldn't love you.
Too far? Nope. There may well have manifested many, many situations in the future in which you might kill me, but now that I'm just a total, unabashed asshole of the first pressing, you can blow me off as a useless waste of flesh and get on with your life. Without hate someone would probably have to die and the other go to jail for a long period of time. Hell, you'll probably even enjoy the next few days talking about how much you hate me to your friends, that would otherwise have been wasted discussing a patch of yard that's perpetually brown because you can't figure out how to get the dog to stop pissing on it. They don't want to hear about it, you know they don't, and good lord, if only there was something interesting to talk about. Hate is a perfect—perhaps a "final"—solution to murder and social unrest.
I will be fair to both genders and talk about men, as hate is the great equalizer of our species. No man in the history of proto-apes cracking nuts open on the savannah with sticks and rocks has ever been worthy of the toleration women extend to our slothful shiftiness by not smothering us to death in our sleep. Plus we snore too much and pick our toes when we think nobody’s looking. That’s pretty gross, and you have daily opportunities to poison our food when we’re busy drunkenly embarrassing everyone at restaurants, saying offensive social nonsense while watching the news, and generally being horrific examples of the failure of natural selection. Without hate acting as the gatekeeper of wrath, we’d all be dead too.
But for the gift of hate bestowed upon us by our benevolent Creator, the human race would very quickly go extinct. That has to be worth something, right?
What, therefore, is the solution to our current problems? I think a far, far better world would be one where there's the ordinary number of hateful people but everyone else is a billion times better at making fun of them. Hateful people with unchallenged convictions are dangerous, but hateful people who are brutally, publicly humiliated every time they open their mouth tend to stay home eating cereal in the dark, or are found swinging from a ceiling fan after nobody's seen them for two weeks because of the smell. Even better than that, the rest of us will be constantly sipping from the Fountain of Eternal Youth that is smug, intellectual superiority.
I think it's the only practical approach. As populations skyrocket, everyone is going to get more hateful towards everyone else simply because there's more traffic clogging up the freeways, so eliminating hate is a pure waste of time in the long run. Also, technology is driven almost exclusively by hating other people and searching for hilarious ways to deal with them. Why else would we invest 90% of our energy into creating artificial worlds where we can talk all kinds of shit for killing an avatar of some dickhead and taking all their armor? Or Pokemon...things. Or whatever the fuck people are doing now besides learning to speak to each other. After all, the real problem with hate is people who act on it in the real world where it counts, not people who suppress it and allow it to slowly consume their very being from the inside out in the privacy of their own home. In the end, I think the majority of people will always have a sense of humor that we could dump our efforts into cultivating to make the world both more hilarious and more destructive for dangerous people.
Lastly, without hate there would be no more great ideas. The cell phone was developed because we were tired of hating whoever was on the phone having endless stupid conversations when everyone else is staring at the clock approaching the end of the business day. What’s the point of inventing the car if you aren’t losing your shit every morning because some idiot riding a nag is blissfully loping his pile of maturing dog food to work and taking up the entire street when your margin of error is about sixty seconds before you’re late to work? Look, I know how much people love Star Wars, but Yoda is full of shit. Fear leads to annoyance, not anger, annoyance leads to petty hate, and petty hate leads to Ali/Frazier I-III, which brought joy and legend to every generation of observers and prospective fighters clawing their way out of poverty since.
In closing, I offer this lovely original sketch of a famous poem by Emily Dickinson about hate:
“Hate” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And screeches bullshit with its squawks -
And never stops - at all.
And sweetest - in the Gale - is felt -
And sore must be the squall -
That could abash the little Bird
That never shuts its craw.
I’ve felt it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
Did it cause me to do anything but fill the long gaps of boredom between rare, meaningful life experiences with caddy banter and spiteful screed.