What kind of hatred is this?

Collective hatred is a symptom of a sick society.

Individuals and society are indivisible parts of the same whole, and the illness, deviation, or disease of one manifests as a symptom in the other. To analyze society without its individuals is as great an error as viewing individuals separately from their respective societies.

Sociology and History can tell us about these symptoms in societies; Psychoanalysis tells us about the symptoms in the individual.

Society, composed of individuals, determines how those individuals live, work, think, feel, love, or hate, and, on the other hand, simultaneously suffers the action of those individuals. In other words, society makes the individual who makes society.

Hate is an individual feeling, but when shared on a large scale, it becomes a social phenomenon. It is the symptom, in the individual or in the group, of the disease of society.

However, this hatred can only become widely shared if there are individuals predisposed to nurture it; and such hatred only multiplies if there are historical and social factors in society that predispose it to it.

The hatred between individuals has been extensively studied by Psychoanalysis. The studies of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan stand out.

Freud's classic teachings show us that the pursuit of pleasure (the pleasure principle) is the fuel of our mental formulations. It is in the erotic pursuit of pleasure that our libidinal energy molds us into this or that form of being. It is through this that we invent ourselves.

As Lacan explains, "it is this erotic relationship, in which the human individual fixates on an image that alienates him from himself, that is the energy and form from which originates the passional organization that he will call his ego" (Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis - 1948 - p. 116).

Psychological or psychotic symptoms are displacements of this libidinal energy. Our libidinal energy, which had become fixed at a certain point in our psychic apparatus and there enjoyed the pleasure of its fulfillment, was forced to relocate due to some trauma. This can happen, for example, after a traumatic event such as a romantic breakup, a sudden death, an accident, or even, sometimes, due to a less intense event that awakens a questioning of our already constructed certainties, such as a news item in the newspaper, a low grade on a test, or a simple destabilizing dream.

In moments of destabilization, our libidinal energies seek a new fixation. They generally seek some point already constructed in our emotional history—a place where we had already been and enjoyed pleasure. Therefore, in moments of trauma, we search our history for a time when we were happy and didn't know it. We have all experienced this at some point. If our emotional and cultural education, fostered by the ego, is broad, critical, and complete, if this "territory" is vast, we can, in the face of trauma, reallocate this libidinal energy to some bearable point and achieve emotional balance. If our "territory" is narrow, our cultural and emotional formation weak or flawed, this libidinal energy will seek its fixation in some structure from which we had already evolved and which we had already rejected as outdated, and which we removed from our ego and no longer recognized as morally acceptable. These are, as Freud tells us, "fixations from which the ego had protected itself in the past through repressions," but, due to the limited options of a poorly educated ego, that is where the libido manages to find pleasure. According to the pleasure principle, that is where the libido becomes fixated, in the past. It then begins to rely on maxims such as "things were better in the old days." A rejection of the present and the future begins to emerge, along with a hatred for all those who seek to break with the past, the locus of its pleasure.

In his classic text "Civilization and Its Discontents," Freud contrasts hatred with culture. Culture, he argues, is a force of Eros (the God of Love), while hatred is the greatest obstacle to its realization. Hatred, however, is a primordial force, preceding love, born from the lack caused by the denial of the pleasure principle. In children, the rejection of the mother's breast and the subsequent castration and Oedipus complexes stem from feelings of hatred provoked by lack or absence.

Jacques Lacan links the concept of hatred to the myth of Kakon. In Hesiod, Pandora is described as Kalón Kakon, which in Greek means Beautiful Evil. Kakon would be evil. Pandora, as we know, is the beautiful woman sent by Zeus who opened the box from which all the evils of humanity emerged. For Lacan, Kakon is a construction we make when we hate in the other the hatred we have in ourselves. Based on the case of Aimée, his patient who attacked an actress in a Paris theater, Lacan develops the idea that "the same image that represents her ideal is also the object of her hatred," since the patient was also an aspiring artist, with her aspirations to literature. The various aspects of her hallucinatory life, fantasizing about delusions of persecution and danger, awakened the self-hatred that she projected onto her victim. "Who were the mysterious enemies who seemed to be pursuing her?" (p. 146). Aimée "carries out the fatal act of violence against an innocent person, in whom he sees the symbol of the inner enemy" (LACAN; pg. 146).

Kakón, the monster that reflects in others the evil that is within itself.

There is, therefore, a primordial predisposition to hatred in the individual. This hatred, as a symptom, stems from a narrow and repressive ego that creates within itself a self-denial that is projected onto the other. "It is nothing other than the Kakon of his own being that the alienated person seeks to strike at in the object he wounds" (LACAN; p. 176).

A healthy society, with human values, solidarity, and acceptance, with critical and universalized education, inhibits the proliferation of hatred in the individual. When there is a strong benevolent catharsis in the social body of the community, a force is formed that Jung called the Collective Unconscious, Lacan called the Big Other, and Freud called the Superego, which causes these values ​​cultivated by society to converge upon the individual. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true: a sick society manifests the symptoms of its illness in the individual.

In a society that suffers from the growth of hate speech, like ours today, we must also look within that society to examine its predisposition to hatred.

In Brazilian society, we can recover traumatic moments from its past that we thought were overcome, but which survive latently in a social unconscious.

In his book *Casa Grande & Senzala*, Gilberto Freire highlights a psychotic pathology in the formation of our society, represented by the slave system. This system covers 3/5 of our official past. In other words, of the 500 years since the arrival of the Portuguese, more than 300 years were under the slave regime.

Given such a long period of existence, it was impossible for slavery not to leave deep marks on our formation.
Gilberto Freire points to a sadomasochistic formation in the master-slave relationship, built upon the long permanence of the slavery system that shaped us. A sadistic and masochistic formation that hides within us as a people. "But this sadism of the master and the corresponding masochism of the slave, exceeding the sphere of sexual and domestic life, have made themselves felt throughout our formation, in a broader field: social and political" (FREIRE, p. 114).

Let's imagine the little black boy, son of a slave, in playful interaction with the master's son. (Milthon Nascimento, for example, recounts the persistence of this relationship, a product of slavery, in his beautiful song "Morro Velho," which I strongly recommend to those who don't yet know it). This little black boy, in playful interaction with the master's son, serves as a stimulus for the sadistic formation of authoritarianism, where the master acts as the lord and the little black boy as the slave. In the game of horsey, the little black boy will be the horse; in the game of hunting, the little black boy will be the prey; in sexual play, the little black boy was the master's object. "Through the submission of the boy, his playmate and expressively called 'beater,' the white boy was often initiated into physical love" (IDEM; pg. 112).

It was either that, or, for the little black boy, it would be the hard work of farming, the toil in the mines, the sun-to-sun work similar to that of pack animals. Faced with the rudeness and stupidity of the regular work in the sugar mills, in the fields or in the mines, submission to the master was almost a lullaby, a caress, a pleasure. Faced with the indigence of daily work, the master's attention was for the little slave the unique thing he knew he would never have again.

The pleasure derived from enduring the cruel and sadistic attention of the master's son may have been the trigger for the masochism identified by Gilberto Freire.

Thus we grew as a people-nation, bound to the certainty of our sadistic authoritarianism and our masochistic subservience.

The abolition of slavery provoked a pathological social imbalance in sadistic power relations. Its symptom was racism. Hatred of races.

The slave owner, however, continued to maintain his status as master, colonel, and authority figure, while the slave, the poor, and the immigrant were unified into a single category: workers. The Black person, included in the category of worker, was, even here, transformed into lumpenproletariat, scum, inferior. We, whites and mulattos, preferred to side with the master and sadistically deepened the exclusion of the Black person through humiliation, mockery, racism, and the pleasure of seeing ourselves as superior. To maintain this sadistic and authoritarian position, we submitted to the social hierarchy. In the name of our pleasure, we accepted being excluded from politics, the economy, and the gains of capital. We relinquished democracy and participation in public affairs. In the name of pleasure, we suffered. And to suffer in pleasure is masochism.

We, from the south and southeast of the country, along with the abolition of slave labor, experienced immense economic development and, even without sharing in this enormous wealth produced, we saw ourselves as superior.

The North and Northeast, predominantly Black and poor, served us in the same way that the little Black boy served the little master. It will be they, the people of the Northeast and North, who will suffer from our social sadism. They will be our most degraded workers, our domestic servants, construction workers, our prostitutes, laundresses, cleaners... They will be the ones we look to for guidance in order to see our superiority.

If this perverse balance is broken, we will inevitably experience various cruel individual and social symptoms.
And that is, in fact, what happened in 2003. The hierarchical chain of command was broken. In a unique reversal in our history, a poor, working-class man from the Northeast assumed the highest position in national politics. A position previously held only by representatives of the landowners. His political proposal was for social inclusion and the integration of former slaves into schools, supermarkets, shopping centers, airplanes, beaches... They would coexist, on equal terms, with whites, people from São Paulo, southerners, and the middle classes.

The trauma displaced the national libido.

A segment of the middle class, those best shaped by culture, initially shifted its traditional sadism to a place of national pride, given the enormous leap Brazil experienced in its international relations during this period. Economic indicators also favored a discourse agreed upon within society in favor of something never before seen: a national project.

However, another part of the population, not so numerous but exponentially more significant in terms of capital, felt the typical discomfort of psychotics and began to hallucinate and promote collective hallucinations. The diversion of their sadistic libidinal energy constructed their monster Kakón, with a dimension equivalent to their economic power and political fear. And as, in Lacan's words, Kakón is self-hatred projected onto the other; and as "the aggressive act undoes the delusional construction" (LACAN; p. 113), that government began to be bombarded daily with accusations of wrongdoing that the accusers themselves had become accustomed to making for decades.

In a short time, the libidinal energy, still poorly accommodated in a new and yet-to-be-better-developed space, shifts to a retrograde point in the national unconscious, and the original sadism surfaces in manifestations of hatred. This is mainly due to the ease of expression, facilitated by social media.

It is for this reason that the posts of those who support hateful positions (which we know well) always manifest themselves with insults and profanities. These are sexualized manifestations from that place where they find pleasure. "Faggot," "cuckold," "go fuck yourself," "go to hell," are expressions that always refer to their repressed sexuality. Manifestations of a libido located in a position distant from culture, there where hatred provides pleasure.

The construction of a differentiated and inclusive political space, within a centuries-old political structure of exclusion and exclusivism of a single social class, can only be achieved with the equivalent construction of ego structures that support it and adopt it as a position of enjoyment. Otherwise, it will quickly crumble in the face of the simple question: what do you prefer, equality or superiority over the other?

The statement that Lula is illiterate (I am not, therefore I am superior), Lula is from the Northeast (I, from the South, am superior), and that PT supporters are like mortadella, a typical food of the poor, compared to which I am superior, is nothing more than this.

Hateful attitudes promote a phenomenal discharge of libidinal energy. However, they do not heal. They are devastating symptoms that invariably lead to fatalities, violence, and fanaticism. For those who hate do not hate the object of their hatred; they hate themselves and want to destroy in the other the hatred they have within themselves. Thus, as soon as they destroy one object of hatred, another will appear. Sometimes it will be the Workers' Party (PT), sometimes pedophilia, sometimes Paulo Freire, sometimes works of art, in a continuous and endless litany of hatred.

As Freud already demonstrated, hatred is the opposite of culture. In this sense, picking a fight against hate activists using counter-hatred as a weapon only strengthens that sentiment.

Against hate, culture!