Is Self-Hatred the Reason for Hating Others?

After reading several articles as well as comments bashing Christians about Christmas, I thought this would be a good time for this article. What most people don't realize, is that those who exhibit the most hatred toward others, are those with the most self-hatred within themselves.

In counseling there is a term known as projection. Projection is when a person projects their own low self-worth, and their deep seeded hatred of themselves onto another person. An example of this would be if a teenage boy was living with an abusive father that always degraded, humiliated, and insulted him, rather then the boy wanting to deal with how that makes him feel about himself, and possibly his father, he may project his hatred and anger onto an outsider. There is less to risk, and less to lose. This boy may find either one specific person, or a group of people to take his frustrations out on, rather than deal with how he feels about himself, and the person who is hurting him.

Many times people who hate a whole group of people such as Blacks, Jews, Muslims, etc., suffer from this projection of self-loathing.. They rarely know much about the group of people they choose. Inside they know many people in the past have hated groups like these, so they are convenient targets of their anger, and self-hatred. Sometimes this type of hate may have been learned through the generations. However, the same principal applies. What started with this projection of self-hate onto others was taught and passed down through the generations. Regardless of how and why, the cycle of hate continues.

I find it interesting that when I lived outside a small town in northern New York, that often times people would be putting down a group of people, namely Blacks at the time, and the ones doing this putting down didn't even know any. One thing I did know though, is these individuals came from backgrounds where they were abused in one way or the other, and prejudices was passed down through the generations.

Do I believe that self-hatred is the only reason for hating others? Of course not, but for the most part, I do believe it is. It is much easier to take the focus off how we negatively feel about ourselves, and put it on to others, than deal with the pain of self-hatred. Those that hate the most, hurt the most. Am I feeling sorry for these people? No, I truly believe it is not our fault as children how we are treated, and what hateful things we may learn form the adults in our life, but I truly believe it is our responsibility to fix it or change it when we are adults. This is especially true, if what we learned is hurting others. Having been abused is NO excuse to hurt others.

I'll tell you one thing, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when Hitler was growing up. Evil is made, not born. He obviously could not deal with his own defects, so instead decided to destroy others he saw as defective in the underlining hope his would go unnoticed not only by himself, but by others as well. His own self-hatred had to have been astronomical. Please know, I have no pity for this man whatsoever. However, he is probably the most interesting case history in regards to hate to have ever lived.

In the end, we only have ourselves to look to. Placing our own hate onto others does nothing to alleviate that which we hate inside ourselves.