No love for the haters, the haters
Jul. 7th, 2008 06:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfield"But, soon or late, the fact grows plain
To all through sorrow's test:
The only folks who give us pain
Are those we love the best."
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Generally, I think you have to like a person before you can really hate them.
You don't have to be friends with the person or anything. You can just sort of know them, respect them or appreciate them (or something about them), like the president or the guy who happened to get in the ATM line before you did.
Love does make for some powerful hatred, though. Some of the most hated people in the world are parents, siblings, ex-lovers and former roommates. And in the cases of friends-turned-enemies, the intensity of affection and disaffection tend to stay roughly equivalent.
You can hate someone because you like them -- long-term romantic relationships constitute an easy example (we could probably get into a dialectical discussion about whether the hater in this instance is hating themselves or the other person, at any rate it merely provides additional support for my argument) -- but you may not necessarily hate them for the same reason that you like them; for example, you may think a person is intelligent but insufferable, or beautiful but stupid.
As further proof, the notion is commutative: you can grow to like a person you hate, like the age-old naive student/crusty mentor relationship or like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed in Rocky II.
My point is that to truly hate someone, they have to have actively turned you off, abused your trust, thwarted your expectations and disrupted your worldview. Otherwise these people would never even pop up on your radar screen. They would simply roll by like tumbleweeds.
But I have discovered an exception to my own rule: I hate -- honestly hate, a deeply felt loathing -- our office receptionist.
I find nothing redeemable about her whatsoever. I never liked her from the moment she came to work here -- at first I was upset that we hadn't hired someone young, until I grew frustrated by the fact that she didn't know how to execute the most basic computer tasks, and now I am simply astonished that she has the brainpower to find the 12th Floor button on the elevator every day. On her best days, she is a perpetual speed bump between me and my workplace objectives. Her "hobbies" -- conversational French and her precious dog-shaped furballs -- repulse me. She has never said a single funny thing, ever, and I am going back 60 years to her birth purely based on what I consider to be a very safe assumption. The less said about her aesthetic qualities the better; suffice it to say that her visage would make for a pretty scary Halloween costume. And beneath the doddering incompetence is a genuinely rotten disposition, a toxic sludge of treachery and foul air.
Perhaps it is because she subverts my long-held theory -- not just that hate springs from a glimmer of affection, but that everyone is deserving of a glimmer of affection -- that I despise her so. Or maybe it is merely a time-warp trick, and the joy will come retroactively as I am dancing on her moist grave.
To all through sorrow's test:
The only folks who give us pain
Are those we love the best."
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Generally, I think you have to like a person before you can really hate them.
You don't have to be friends with the person or anything. You can just sort of know them, respect them or appreciate them (or something about them), like the president or the guy who happened to get in the ATM line before you did.
Love does make for some powerful hatred, though. Some of the most hated people in the world are parents, siblings, ex-lovers and former roommates. And in the cases of friends-turned-enemies, the intensity of affection and disaffection tend to stay roughly equivalent.
You can hate someone because you like them -- long-term romantic relationships constitute an easy example (we could probably get into a dialectical discussion about whether the hater in this instance is hating themselves or the other person, at any rate it merely provides additional support for my argument) -- but you may not necessarily hate them for the same reason that you like them; for example, you may think a person is intelligent but insufferable, or beautiful but stupid.
As further proof, the notion is commutative: you can grow to like a person you hate, like the age-old naive student/crusty mentor relationship or like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed in Rocky II.
My point is that to truly hate someone, they have to have actively turned you off, abused your trust, thwarted your expectations and disrupted your worldview. Otherwise these people would never even pop up on your radar screen. They would simply roll by like tumbleweeds.
But I have discovered an exception to my own rule: I hate -- honestly hate, a deeply felt loathing -- our office receptionist.
I find nothing redeemable about her whatsoever. I never liked her from the moment she came to work here -- at first I was upset that we hadn't hired someone young, until I grew frustrated by the fact that she didn't know how to execute the most basic computer tasks, and now I am simply astonished that she has the brainpower to find the 12th Floor button on the elevator every day. On her best days, she is a perpetual speed bump between me and my workplace objectives. Her "hobbies" -- conversational French and her precious dog-shaped furballs -- repulse me. She has never said a single funny thing, ever, and I am going back 60 years to her birth purely based on what I consider to be a very safe assumption. The less said about her aesthetic qualities the better; suffice it to say that her visage would make for a pretty scary Halloween costume. And beneath the doddering incompetence is a genuinely rotten disposition, a toxic sludge of treachery and foul air.
Perhaps it is because she subverts my long-held theory -- not just that hate springs from a glimmer of affection, but that everyone is deserving of a glimmer of affection -- that I despise her so. Or maybe it is merely a time-warp trick, and the joy will come retroactively as I am dancing on her moist grave.
