Hatred as a disease in the body of humanity

Becoming the necessary medicine

Given time, people will reveal themselves and show their true colors. The truth always emerges eventually, uncovered by the shifting sands of time. In recent weeks, there’s been a lot of revealing. And for those of us with investments in pre-existing beliefs (which is most normal people, let’s be real), this is highly confronting.

I am still struggling to digest many things, like: The farcical nature of representative government. The overpowering force of extractive capitalism. The futile, performative aspect of humanitarian efforts. The ferocious velocity of propaganda in manipulating beliefs. The institutionalized absence of curiosity and critical thinking.

Yet, if I zoom out from my disappointment in the face of many personal delusions shattering, there is also a bigger picture coming into focus.

In awakening, darkness is necessary

Reality is shaped by contrast in a world of duality. We perceive objects in space only because our mind’s eye traces a line between where a thing apparently is, and where it apparently is not. Without contrast, we can’t see anything clearly.

If you’re reading this, you can probably already see that this is a painful, yet powerful moment that we are living through. A moment that has exposed hidden agendas and excavated buried lies. A moment that has shown us things we never wanted to see. And now that these things have been seen, they cannot be unseen.

Seeing darkness is an unpleasant but necessary part of awakening.

We see our righteousness and defensiveness. We see our ingrained biases. We see our fear of difference. We see our failure to learn from history. We see our unhealed trauma. We see our childish over-reliance on external authority. We see our religious attachment to false power. We see our misuse of shared resources.

Huge sacrifices have been made for the sake of us seeing these uncomfortable truths. Thousands killed and maimed. Millions left severely traumatized. It has opened eyes. It has liberated voices. And I believe, it is making way for more life-giving ways.

We start from now because we can’t go back in the time machine. There’s no reversing the harm endured. There’s no returning the price exacted.

Destroyed lives and destroyed dreams are not collateral damage. They are delinquent payment for humanity’s past misdeeds — and a sacred deposit towards our future rehabilitation; or at least I hope they prove to be.

Treating hatred as a disease

Hatred is a disease in the body of humanity. Peace is the state of collective health we seek. Love is the medicine. Forgiveness is the only treatment.

Refusing to see into the dark is what allows the hate-disease to infect the next generation. When we attribute to form what is actually an energy, this is a devastating mistake. This mistake keeps intergenerational trauma cycles looping on repeat.

Why is hatred a disease? Well, think of it this way. When we experience pain, we don’t cut off our arm to try to stop the pain. When we suffer from illness, we don’t ingest fatal poison to try to eliminate the toxicity. Not if we are mentally well anyway.

This is how an organism (or a population, or a species) starts unconsciously self-harming. We become self-harming when we fail to realize that the inconvenience that we’re trying to get rid of is not something foreign and distant; it is something close to us, something that lives in our own body. We are in collusion with the unwanted invader. We prolong its stay with our self-righteous delusion.

If hatred is a disease in the body of humanity, war is the poison pill that kills everyone and everything. It is indiscriminate in life-destroying and life-consuming.

Moving against hatred is a pointless exercise. In fact, we serve hatred’s agenda when we fight against it. Because hatred has to have something to be against in order to continue hating. What can we do instead? We can apply love as a healing balm. We can pour love into places where hatred has ripped holes into the fabric of humanity.

Becoming the necessary medicine

How do we become the medicine needed now, to treat this affliction of hate-disease?

Our heart work is needed long-term to make our inner spaces into inhospitable places for hatred to grow. It requires hearts of compassion and hands of practical support to create conditions where hatred cannot survive, no matter how virulent it is.

We must root out the seeds of hatred that have been planted in us — intensely and en masse over weeks, now extending into months with no end in sight. We must not let this hate grow within ourselves or within others we meet.

We do this with our persistent, steady outpouring of love and generosity. We pour love into the hearts of humanity’s abandoned children, and into the hearts of those children’s children and grandchildren. We pour love into the hearts of everyone who has been affected, and therefore possibly infected by the hate-disease.

Shining care and attention in the darkest places, we make it impossible for hatred to proliferate in the shadows. Only the liquid light of love can prevent violated hearts from hardening. If we fail in this, today’s victims will almost certainly give rise to the next generation’s violent tyrants. Failure in this means the cycle repeats.

Fueled by our love for humanity, we must commit to a vision of collective health, and invest in collective peace. We must bring the medicine of unwavering love. We must offer the treatment of unconditional forgiveness. We must provide this to everybody without prejudice and without restriction. Each spark starts by embodying the healing that we want to see reflected in our external reality.

---

I offer most of my essays here on Substack for free. And, what I give freely does have a cost to me in terms of invested time and energy. If you find value in receiving my word craft, and you want to see me keep going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to financially support me as a writer. Thank you for being here and thank you for reading and sharing.

---

Here are a few other recent essays that you might appreciate if you liked this one: