I Hate, Therefore I Am - NYT July 23, 2025

* I find hate to be virtually omnipresent in the current culture. 

* There is love out there to be sure - for Beyonce, 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 waht 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. 
* One may define oneself - one may define the self - through hate. One day you are a blank slate, a void. But you can become yourself simply through hatred. You define yourself through your antipathies. I

* You don't need to have positive allegiances to define yourself: The negative ones will do. 
* Nietzsche says that people would rather have the void for purpose than be void of purpose. Having nothing, having no purpose in the world, may be a more threatening state to the individual than hating. Hating gives you a plan for action. 
* We live in an age of identity. Everyone seems to need to have a profile. 
* Attention is our most valued commodity. Get enough attention and one way or another, the cash will flow. 
... We cultivate the sense of identity in a world where there are very few props for self-construction. Hate is one, and perhaps the most reliable. 

* Freud said that in order to thrive in life he needed a committed friend and a fierce enemy.
* What they offer is an escape, or the prospect of an escape, from the burdens of constructing a self out of the culturally available material. They offer us a break from the fiction of individual unified being. They offer us an escape from hate.