SELF-PITY AS THE ORIGIN OF HATE

I used to believe that hate comes from love, deep love. When you have a strong bond with something or someone, if that object is prejudiced, aggressive emotions can be elicited, especially when these emotions can be channeled toward a third-party.

However, love is an emotion that leads to understanding, complacence and acceptance. When an object of affection is harmed, the desire to injure or destroy the perpetrator of said harm comes from and egotistical desire of being provided reparation. Such reparation is not an inherent right, it's not warranted, nor is it fair to be enforced, as it will provoke further harm. Negatively impactful events are survived by us, but they carry no ulterior meaning, thus are not meant to be balanced out, particularly not in any perfectly reciprocal manner. Love is an emotion that can help process these facts and facilitate healing and forgiveness.

Self-pity, on the other hand, is a notorious negative emotion that can be generated in the aftermath of such an harmful event. An offended person might feel an egotistical desire to be compensated for being harmed, although compensation will not prevent the harm from having been inflicted. In many cases, if not most, offended parties are not entitled to be compensated. However, in the occasion of harm or offense, having pity on oneself will generate a drive to demand for compensation, as such pity will drive the subject to try to balance the situation. This perception of imbalance is actually false, for as I have stated before, harmful events carry no ulterior meaning, and are an unavoidable part of building a life history. Nevertheless it elicits a sense of injustice that will feed back into the self-pity for as long as that self-pity cannot be managed in the first place - even (decades) after compensation/reparation has been provided for!

Egotism is an innate instinct, but it can be bred by self-pity in these cases. The sense of injustice will feed and accumulate negative emotions, which over time will converge into hatred towards specific parties that are seem as perpetrators of this particular imbalance. This hatred can be characterized as a profound desire to harm or to witness harm, based on a personal assessment of a situation judged to be unfair, and with the goal to provide relief for the individual under its influence. It is the egotistical (and misguided) desire for the relief of negative emotions that breeds hatred. Love, contrastingly, encourages empathy to others, which will diminish the effects of self-pity and halt the cycle of revenge in its origin.

In conclusion, love is an innate emotion that binds us to the environment and to others, and a great source of sadness when unfulfilled. But it provides mechanisms to cope with sadness and the other negative feelings, preventing feedback cycles of negative emotions to occur. An inability to apply these mechanisms in the form of empathy and wisdom will lead to an egotistical longing for vengeance, which will in turn never be truly fulfilled.