Podcasts · Stream of Subconsciousness
Love, Hate, and Projection (podcast)
· 13 min
Episode Love, Hate, and Projection (podcast)
“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”— attributed to Albert Einstein
Love
On the face of it, love is an immature emotion but there are various kinds, so I must be more specific. There are different things to love and ways to love, and some are more enlightened than others. A person can love from different aspects of their being, and each of us expresses these aspects to different degrees.
There’s physical love which is generally thought to mean sex but really means having a physical connection. Physical love develops a sense of peace and trust based on being physically present and mutually supporting. If you live with someone and rely on them and they are suddenly removed, there is a fracturing of a physical bond.
Intellectual love, which doesn’t sound compelling, is a real thing. It means more than just being agreeable. It can mean supportive, enduring, and reliable. If you’re an intellectual person and you strive to create a world that makes sense, then being in partnership with someone who understands you and supports your understanding creates an important bond. It’s fair to call this love because breaking this bond will cause heartbreak.
But it’s emotional love that we think of first because this is the most common, dependent, deceived, attractive, rewarding, and frequently denied form of love. And it is all of these things not because it’s the most difficult, but because it’s generated by one person’s fantasies. And while there is nothing wrong with fantasy, as it’s a necessary part of creative thinking, it serves a temporary function.
Hate
Hate is also an immature feeling. By hate I don’t mean simply an adversarial attitude, I mean a mental obsession. A specific, negative projection about a person, place, or thing. And it’s not the negativity that’s immature—there may be good reasons to be negative—it’s hate’s obsessive and unexamined nature that makes it immature.
Hate can also be physical, intellectual, or emotional, but these are not simple opposites to love. You may hate being in pain, and that’s a real hate. The simple presence of certain people may cause you anguish. The longer you remain in the presence of these people, even if nothing is said or done, the more anguish you’ll feel. At some point, your hatred will grade into anger.
I’m not sure about intellectual hatred but it seems possible, it’s just not something I can easily identify. It would be an overwhelming, intellectual negativity that clouds your thinking. It would not be emotional.
My attitude toward people who endorse slavery is something like intellectual hatred. It’s an antipathy that’s cold and calculating but not passionate. Manipulative people who lie to achieve their ends trigger similar feelings. Donald Trump elicits intellectual hatred and this seems to be his intention. But when the feeling becomes passionate, it becomes emotional hatred.
Emotional hatred is what we’re familiar with. This is the red hot feeling of being personally, physically threatened. Politicians incite intellectual hatred because it always spills over into emotional hatred, and it’s emotional hatred that turns people into puppets.
Whoever controls your emotional hatred controls you, and if no one controls your hatred, then the hatred itself controls you. Your hatred can be directed to motivate you to war, or your hatred can motivate you to violence. It’s interesting that despite being one of our strongest motivators, hatred accomplishes nothing more than creating distance. You’d think there would be easier ways to accomplish this.
Projection
Projection is simply applying an attitude as a way of description. It’s a way to illustrate what you feel, but it’s not a property of the situation. This means that what you project only endures as long as you continue to project it. It is not something you’ve recognized as part of a relationship, it’s how you’ve decided to connect the dots. The dots may be real, but the way you connect…
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