The Difference Between Anger and Hatred

This all started with a comment to a post in Jennifer's blog.

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Shelley said...

I always thought it was if you hate someone in your heart you commit murder...to me there is a difference between hate and anger. Well, at any rate we know that we will receive forgiveness...not that this allows us the freedom to go about hating or whatever...you know what I mean.

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This led me to search for articles on anger and hatred, and I found this one:

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What is the difference between hatred and anger ? Well, anger is perhaps an integral part of life and has served a positive purpose throughout history. It arises when we feel cheated or harmed. For example, it was the anger of Rosa Parks that finally led to her refusal to sit in the "Coloureds Only" seats on the bus. It was anger that fuelled Martin Luther King's battle for civil rights. Similarly, it was anger at British oppression that resulted in the civil resistance movements in many of the previous British colonies. The same anger led to the destruction of apartheid in South Africa.

But it was hatred that prompted the assassins to fire their bullets at Reverend King and Mahatma Gandhi. Anger at relentless discrimination in Europe led Jews to found the State of Israel, but now hatred has overtaken much of the original idealism. Hatred is a taught emotion, and it usually dictates that certain people or groups of people are not worthy of respect, compassion or even life. I admit there is often a fine line between these two emotions, but it is there.

One should have no hatred towards any particular group of people ­ based on race, creed or colour, but one should feel anger at divisive behaviour and oppressive practices, be they racist, sexist, or whatever. I have also found that the more I understand and see, the more angry and helpless I feel.

The people who accomplished certain heinous acts against the people of the United States were filled with more than anger - they also filled with hatred and vengeful feelings. What we are now witnessing in George Bush's ridiculous obsession with Saddam Hussein is to my mind a mirror image of those feelings, a hatred of the ‘other’. Whilst he rants and raves about freedom, hundreds of prisoners lie virtually forgotten, rotting in a prison in Cuba, deprived of basic human rights because they are supposedly outside American jurisdiction and not “prisoners of war” although still prisoners of a “war on terror”....

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While I may quibble with some of the latter thoughts, the author certainly distinguishes between hatred and anger.

Here's a book that Tom Cruise, the man who knows all about psychiatry, will never read:

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Book Review - Hatred
by Willard Gaylin
PublicAffairs, 2003
Review by S. V. Swamy
Apr 12th 2004

Hatred by Willard Gaylin, M.D. is a good introduction to understand the dynamics of hatred. Gaylin, a psychiatrist differentiates hatred from other emotions such as anger, rage, depression, frustration etc....

Gaylin uses mainly two examples in his readable analysis of crimes of hatred, the holocaust of 1935 and the September 9/11 attack on WTC by Al Qaeda. He suggests that anti-Semitism is at the back of most hate crimes.

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In this case I disagree with the psychiatrist - there are a number of hate crimes which don't have anything to do with anti-Semitism. But it is valuable to differentiate between anger and hatred...

From the Ontario Empoblog