There should be a way to trace self hatred. Everything has a pathway in the brain- emotions, decisions- you don't really need to know all about the pons in order to see why a person is doing something. racism doesn't really exist. Other people aren't ready to hear it, and that's a discussion for another day, but racism is just an aggregate of emotional pathways all arriving at the same point. I'd compare it to parallel evolution but it's really not the same. anyway this post isn't about racism.
there has to be a reason for self hatred. in a biological sense, it doesn't make any. humans/monkeys/cavemen/missinglinks with self-destructive tendencies, well, shouldn't they have self destructed? yet here we are. and man, we ALL got it. how is it ever beneficial to go against your self..did it help us survive somehow? If you think about an enlightened person, they are no longer afraid of death. they see that we are all part of a great cycle. the thing is, I think the rest of us killed them. I mean, think about actual altruism and enlightenment in a hostile wild. those people are going to die, and we're going to be the ones convincing them to die, since we see them as smarter more desirable mates. evolution is about whatever makes it through, not the 'best' making it through, like we sometimes mistakenly think. I think we made it through, and we did it through cunning. I mean, maybe that does make us the best. we're the ones standing here. semantics, I suppose. but we brought something along with us. we brought personal demons. we brought guilt. perhaps the most cunning were too ruthless, and were cast out, and when you were cast out, that was death. we were and are soft and pink. this desperation at not being cast out, well I dont have to explain how many things that touches in our daily behavior. also the urge to cast a competitor out, with the instinct that they are, afterwords, finished. but maybe the too-cunning were cast out, and all that remained of the surviving cunning was a group whose brains had developed a clumsy failsafe- a way to stop them from screwing too many people over. a chemical response that triggered a bad feeling about ruthlessness and thus preserving the caveman/ape/kingmonkeyawesome from being shunted out of the tribe for being a danger to its members. can you think of any other biological imperative for self-hatred? I can't for now, but rest assured I'm not done thinking about it.
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I can think of biological imperatives for most of this stuff in the short-term. Just like hating someone else makes sense (largely) in the short-term. There has to be some way out of it, unless you want to totally destroy them. And perhaps that's the goal of self-hate - to totally destroy some part of yourself. But in the case of self-hate, it's a paradox. It is, really, too strong of an emotion. You can't destroy part of you the way you can destroy an enemy. In the short-term, it's a motivation edge, sure. But in the long-term, it's too much, too hard, too destructive. Same with long-term guilt... pointless. It's supposed to keep you in line, and ask for forgiveness from the community, etc. But long-term guilt... it's an overactivation of the pathway.
ReplyDeleteEven the words "hate", as in self-hate, is insanely strong. If you hate someone, you try to find a solution, or avoid them, or destroy them. But these things are largely impossible when its "self-hate". (It's like cancer - makes sense as part of a negative feedback loop, but when it becomes a positive loop - game over.)
I agree that we needed to cut down on our cunningness. In fact, I think most of depression is basicaly saying to the world, "don't hurt me! i'm licking my wounds. i won't do anything. i'm too sad." i think that's actually one of the toughest parts of depression - it takes away the "fight" and naturally directs you away from conflict.
But of course, following your dreams generally involves challenging and conflicting and some scrapping. So it's totally against the direction that someone (like me) needs to go.
food for thought:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html?em
the comments are best, as usual.
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