Relation

Hate and love are both personal; both ways of relating ourselves to others, of explaining them. Hate for those who cannot be known like we know ourselves, those we hesitate to call people and from whom we would withhold basic human rights(rapists, racists, haters); love for those we know, trust, believe in, who share our values and participate in our culture(family, people, in-group).

Hate blinds me, distances me, wrestles me into foolishness and dismissive judgment; I fight it where possible as a means of paying attention, of continuing to learn and gather the benefits of knowledge.

But love blinds as well, and so much more destructively: the conclusion that others are like yourself opens you to being defined by them. To losing yourself in who they claim to be, to showing more than you are shown and being known better than you know yourself. We are imaginary, remember, so being known better or worse amounts to being imagined more or less concretely and predictably; being modeled or framed more usefully, being more malleable. This, I think, is what we all fear from overtures of trust or intimacy, and what we value in them as well: the opportunity to engage in a contest of souls. Hatred may cause battlefields, but only because this loss of identity is so much more fundamentally terrifying than simply being killed; because love is the battlefield we were born in.

I would not hate, would not be blinded to the patterns of...whatever I have left to call other humans at this point. But neither would I have the form of my identity dictated to me, limit myself to the paltry selection of preformed social roles and conventions that lesser mortals would impose upon me to confirm their own self-image. The potentials of the mind, this system of cognition-through-identity, continue both to excite and frighten me, and I am not yet ready to pack it in & start on building my credit score.

So I call myself Philosopher, but little else, for I don't want to bias myself. I learn to love when I am curious, and to hate when my curiosity is threatened; but with little I can admit about myself but curiosity, such threats come very easily.