Is Hate a Form of Love?

original Huntington Hartford Museum as designed by Edward Durell Stone

It’s been said that Hitler must have loved the Jews in order to want to annihilate them as he did. Is hate merely a form of misplaced love? Dejected lovers can be sad, but the next step can quickly turned into hatred. The famous saw, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” actually derives from a line from the Restoration playwright William Congreve’s “The Mourning Bride.” Originally that woman was in love. Gravity may cause space to bend, but not all hate is a form of twisted love. For instance, you can hate yourself for behavior that's out of your control and you can hate other people for the sickness and helplessness that you can’t do anything about. You hate them since they make you feel both guilty and powerless. There's nothing you can do to help them. You can also hate those who you think hate you. Herein lies the root of genocidal conflicts of the kind witnessed between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, the Bosnians and the Croats in the former Yugoslavia, between the Armenians and Turks and the Shiite and Sunni Muslim sects, in the Middle East. Some boxers need to hate their opponents in order to fight, but there have been some famous rivalries like that between Arturo Gatti and Mickey Ward that were almost collegial. These two fighters were capable of pummeling each other and embracing afterwards. Besides people, one can hate an ideology, a type of food, or a type of cosmetic application like Brazilian waxing which eliminates the delightful and sensuous appearance of pubic hair on a woman’s genitalia. Certainly disease is something that human beings universally hate, particularly the kind of disease for which there are no known cures. Architecture can elicit hatred. Many people hated 2 Columbus Circle the old Huntington Hartford Museum, looking at it as an extravagance that became an excrescence. Natural disasters are fair game when it comes to hatred. On the other hand how can you hate something which is an act of God?