
I Hate, Therefore I Am
My interlocutor, a genial fellow professor, looked at me as if I'd kicked his dog. Why? Because we (good people, Whole Foods shoppers, composting mavens, pronouns respecters) don't like Elon. In fact, we hate him. Truly, we do. We once aspired to drive a Tesla, but no more. Everything about him is bad.
I find hate to be virtually omnipresent in the current culture. Libs hate conservatives, and conservatives hate 'em right back. People hate politicians, the elite, MAGA hats (and their wearers), social media (though they cannot stay away from it). Some hate the rich. Some despise immigrants. People hate the media.
They hate corporations. They hate capitalism. They hate woke and cancel culture. They hate globalism and globalists. They hate this president. There is love out there to be sure — for Beyoncé, for Pedro Pascal and, yes, even for this president, but hate trumps love by a mile now, or so it seems to me.
Why should this be true?
Descartes had a famous dictum about the constitutive powers of the thinking self: I think therefore I am. Could it be that, today, I hate, therefore I am? What if who and what we hate is who we are now? Why might hate be constructive — crucially constructive — of identity at this particular point in time? And why should possessing identity matter so much to us?
The traditional sources of stable selfhood have been significantly depleted over time. We live in an age of skepticism, often corrosive skepticism, about our institutions and their good intentions. Perhaps we are not wrong to do so. To speak personally, the revelations about priestly child molesting sent me to a level of antipathy to the Catholic Church (in which I grew up) that stays with me still. Many others have had similar experiences — about bank bailouts or Covid school closures or President Joe Biden's reported mental acuity.
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