Fear and Loathing in Liquid Modernity

Abstract

Hatred is an ambivalent phenomenon. It comes in many faces. Hatred is at its best when it masquerades as love and compassion. As Max Scheler suggested, on the level of human interaction, love and hatred relate human beings to one another (see Scheler, 1973; Donskis, 2003). Slightly modifying St. Augustine’s definition of evil as insufficient good, we could metaphorically describe hatred as love gone astray. It might be suggested that love and hatred, both profoundly problematic from the point of view of tolerance, are interchangeable. For hatred is a kind of love, which, having lost its object and direction, finds itself unable to leave the world in peace. Instead, it starts searching for what is supposed to be a threat to an object of love and devotion, still unable to identify that object.

Evil and fear are Siamese twins. You can’t meet one without meeting the other. Or perhaps they are but two names of one experience—one of the names referring to what you see or what you hear, the other what you feel; one pointing “out there”, to the world, the other to the “in here”, to yourself. “What we fear”, is evil; what is evil, we fear.

—Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear

Our sense of existence is a plate photosensitive to black light. It is made up of self hatred and its immediate reparation.

—Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000–2004