Free Hatred by Willard Gaylin

working part-time in a department store, he lured an eight-year-old girl who had come to visit Santa Claus into the back stockroom where he worked.
    He had the child undress and masturbated while looking at her nude body. At this point he had no desire to touch her and made no attempt to harm her. After twenty minutes of frustrating inability to reach an ejaculation, he became anxious and agitated. The frightened child began to whimper and cry. He then felt threatened by exposure and urgently told her to be still, which only further frightened her. In an attempt to silence her, in a combination of rage and terror, he picked up a knife that was at hand and stabbed her repeatedly and incessantly to death.

Humiliation
    The added indignity that frenzied this adolescent boy was the humiliation of having exposed his impotence to the child, who,
then, through her cries, threatened to further expose him to the community as a child molester. Every aspect of our behavior about which we are ashamed—the psychological conditions that confront us with a sense of our inadequacy and the danger that represents—are compounded when these deficiencies are made public. When the “fact” that we are less than lovable is exposed to the public eye, that we are less than potent is announced in the public space, that we are deprived and inadequate becomes part of the public knowledge, we experience humiliation of the most painful order.
    Obviously this exposure invites potential exploitation by those who would take advantage of our weakness. But I do not believe that fear is the emotion that underlies humiliation. Shame is unquestionably the emotion present in this situation. We define ourselves, after all, not just as individuals, but as members of groups. We take pride not just in our accomplishments but in the recognition and acknowledgment of those accomplishments by the group in which we abide, in the appreciation of our worth by the community. To be reduced as an individual in our own eyes is bad enough. To be shamed before the group compounds our pain in a way that can readily convert anger into outrage, hurt into a humiliation, and that can ultimately pierce the boundaries of our constraint.
    The rampage of an ex-employee at the workplace is often a product of such a perceived public humiliation, where the “public” may be only his fellow employees at the post office. Even here it is unlikely that this rage would lead to deadly and random shootings of innocent members of the community if it were not operating within the context of a paranoid ideation, the next stage of our consideration of hatred.
    Just as an individual may be humiliated, so, too, may a population held in scorn rise to assert its indignation and restore its self-respect. There are such things as righteous indignation and
righteous rage. These can lead to insurrection, revolution, and outright war.
    I offer these categories of the dynamics of anger, not as a definitive list, but as a first step in understanding hatred, or at least the emotional underpinnings of hatred. As such, they are admittedly somewhat arbitrary and often overlapping. They do not pretend to be all-inclusive. They are only intended to indicate the multiple ways that individuals or groups can feel threatened. All threats lead to anger. All threats may be steps on the ladder to hatred.
    Beyond direct threats are the equally frightening symbolic ones. They are proposed to explain how seeming “overreactions”—a response that seems inappropriate to the stimulus—can make sense when the metaphoric and symbolic nature of human existence is brought into consideration. These days we are rarely threatened by direct force, unless we are mugged or robbed. We are more likely to feel threatened by an assault on our reputation, our status, our livelihood, our manhood—or even a misperceived assault in these areas. We all live in the world of our own perceptions, where