Hate opinions, ideas, actions, institutions, and things. Don't hate people.

I just recently had a revelation and I just thought I'd share it with you people since I think ATS would understand how I feel. Right now I realized that we shouldn't be hating individual people.

We shouldn't even hate dictators. Why should we not hate people? HATE IS A DISTRACTION. Hate keeps us from acknowledging the flaws and benefits of the system in a realistic way and it pressures us to believe that everything about other people that we dislike is negative. We should think more in terms about their power-positions, we should hate their beliefs and what they can do with it.

The thing is pretty much almost everything works within a system. People interact with different systems in their daily lives. You do it. I do it. We all do it. It is the natural inclination of most people to want to seek for more power. They want to be loved, or hated, depending on their individual characteristics. Sometimes someone has so much overwhelming power over a certain group that their beliefs and their ideas suppress dissenting views. Allan Greenspan for instance claimed to be a free-marketeer, but in reality was anything but, however since he had so much power within the institution that he was in he was able to do what he wanted to.

John Aschroft, the attorney General for the Bush administrion and Eric Holder have their powers and are able to do what they want to do because of the institutions around them. The Supreme Court has its powers because of the ideas that shape the justices ideologies and because of the US constitution itself. They get to decide what goes on and how to deal with it.

I believe that people have free will and have control over their own decisions. Bush did what he did because he believed it was right. So did Obama. But, the only reason that people have this much power is because the institutions give them that much power, and if we are upset about that we need to either constrain or define the institutions' power in a more narrow way.

Some of you guys may already know about system theory anyways, but, I thought I'd tell the people that already don't know about it what it is.

From wikipedia:

Science systems thinkers consider that:

a system is a dynamic and complex whole, interacting as a structured functional unit;
energy, material and information flow among the different elements that compose the system;
a system is a community situated within an environment;
energy, material and information flow from and to the surrounding environment via semi-permeable membranes or boundaries;
systems are often composed of entities seeking equilibrium but can exhibit oscillating, chaotic, or exponential behavior.

A holistic system is any set (group) of interdependent or temporally interacting parts. Parts are generally systems themselves and are composed of other parts, just as systems are generally parts or holons of other systems.

Science systems and the application of science systems thinking has been grouped into three categories based on the techniques used to tackle a system:

Hard systems — involving simulations, often using computers and the techniques of operations research/management science. Useful for problems that can justifiably be quantified. However it cannot easily take into account unquantifiable variables (opinions, culture, politics, etc.), and may treat people as being passive, rather than having complex motivations.
Soft systems — For systems that cannot easily be quantified, especially those involving people holding multiple and conflicting frames of reference. Useful for understanding motivations, viewpoints, and interactions and addressing qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions of problem situations. Soft systems are a field that utilizes foundation methodological work developed by Peter Checkland, Brian Wilson and their colleagues at Lancaster University. Morphological analysis is a complementary method for structuring and analysing non-quantifiable problem complexes.
Evolutionary systems — Béla H. Bánáthy developed a methodology that is applicable to the design of complex social systems. This technique integrates critical systems inquiry with soft systems methodologies. Evolutionary systems, similar to dynamic systems are understood as open, complex systems, but with the capacity to evolve over time. Bánáthy uniquely integrated the interdisciplinary perspectives of systems research (including chaos, complexity, cybernetics), cultural anthropology, evolutionary theory, and others.

en.wikipedia.org...

Basically systems can change. We can change the federal reserve if we wanted to. We aren't powerless. The people that have the power over the federal reserve might be able to stop us from changing it but that's only because those institutions allow them to do that, but, if we wanted to, we could hijack the system and take it over from ourselves. This is what people are doing in Egypt and in the revolutions throughout the Middle-East. They are making a stand for what they believe in and they are trying to change the oppressive system that exists there.

Remember, yes, it's hard not to hate the people that are in power. But, HATE is a distraction. These people that exist that want to do evil things or bad things or however you want to call it because of a flaw within our human nature, and, we can correct systems to prevent these abuses.

Anything corrupt that might come out from an action was created by an ideology or an opinion. Actions are moved by ideas. People might say that the material world and the idealistic world are two separate things... but they would be wrong to discount the power of ideas. That's not to say that people wouldn't have their own beliefs anyways, but, that the ideas and ideologies help them.

So, just remember not to be prejudiced. Prejudiced is forming an opinion about people without looking at the facts. This way you can hate their opinions, their ideas, and what they do or where they work without hating them as a person. Hate blinds us a lot of the time and prevents us from having civil debates.

reply to post by Frankidealist35


Fantastic insight. As another human being I am incredibly proud of you. And you are absolutely correct.

I need to hold onto this myself, as lately my misanthropy has been on "high." Not when I am around actual people, oddly enough but TV, the internet, etc., have definitely been having a negative influence on my opinion of my fellow man and woman.

reply to post by Frankidealist35


Your revelation is something I discovered and try my best to live by for quite some time now. I said "try". I believe I am getting really good at it. If you go saying such things like love the messenger, even when the message is hate, you're gonna have quite a few people scoff at you. Just saying. Wouldn't worry about it, though.

reply to post by Frankidealist35


This is excellent advice that is hard to follow. We identify people by their ideas sometimes.
Watching the Actors Studio and heard Sean Connery say the enemy of mankind is CERTAINTY.
After thinking about it, it makes sense. When people are so certain of this or that ideology or anything really, they do things and say things probably better left unsaid and undone.
If we simply do not know, we are easier on everyone around who may hold a different opinion. If we are CERTAIN our religion or thinking is the best or correct we are likely to become forceful over it. If we were not CERTAIN we wouldn't. It is a little bit like the same thing.

Good stuff, Frank.

And to add one thought... don't hate opinions, ideas, actions, institutions, and things, either... Don't hate at all.

Just because we disagree with something doesn't mean we have to HATE it! We don't get some kind of score for hating anything. There's no need or reason to entertain hatred. Having hatred in our lives just takes away from us. It detracts from the good that we are.

All living beings are God in action, are all part of creation, all are moving, progressing, regressing, experimenting. All are equally lovable. All is one.
You can criticize a behavior but leave the author inviolable.
The Earth is a school. We are all students learning lessons. Some have learned more than others. What do you do to a student that is failing the exams? Help him improve or condemn it?
People have very little guilt about what they are and what they are is what determines what they do. But we live under the law of responsibility, which is why we have free will. It is very complex ... There is no guilt... if you want to do something for people, help them evolve.

I sense that this hate is some kind of mis-wiring in people, as if, they are good, but there is something within thier physical beings that has turned their polarity in the opposite direction. It all seems to link to genetic tampering, as if their souls have remained unchanged, but thier physical beings have been mutated, causing numerous problems to develop when they attempt to translate thier beings into the physical world. I get the idea that there are forces that are operating in this universe that have gotten carried away with physicality, refusing to accept the idea that this universe was created by a consciousness, that consciousness creates form. If we were free to create our own forms, and were not bound by the physical universe, then we could become free, however, in order to master the physical universe, we must learn to consciously engineer the energy dynamics of our bodies to correct any errors inherrent in our births, and that is a skill that takes many lifetimes to achieve, and only really necessary when the body has been artificially tampered-with or has suffered a mutation. In other words, evolution is about fractional differences in DNA over millions of years, and the genetic tampering has basically created a massive genetic mutation, that has created a massive shock to the natural progression of our species. Although, when done right and with the right guidance, it can be a gift - I think those that have been experimenting with us of recent are novices compared to the masters that had originally designed us.