An excerpt from Václav Havel’s 1990 speech to the Oslo Conference on “The Anatomy of Hate”. Click through for the full text.

“When I think about the people who have hated me personally, or still do, I realize that they share several characteristics which when you put them together and analyze them suggest a certain general interpretation of the origin of their hatred.

“They are never hollow, empty, passive, indifferent, apathetic people. Their hatred always seems to me the expression of a large and unquenchable longing, a permanently unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire, a kind of desperate ambition. In other words, it is an active inner capacity that always leads the person to fixate on something, always pushes him in a certain direction, and is in a sense stronger than he is. I certainly don’t think hatred is the mere absence of love or humanity, a mere vacuum in the human spirit. On the contrary, it has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them, and in fact, the delegation of a piece of one’s own identity to them. Just as a lover longs for the loved one and cannot get along without him, the hater longs for the object of his hatred. And like love, hatred is ultimately an expression of longing for the absolute, albeit an expression that has become tragically inverted.

“People who hate, at least those I have known, harbour a permanent, irradicable feeling of injury, a feeling that is, of course, out of all proportion to reality. It is as though these people wanted to be endlessly honoured, loved and respected, as though they suffered from the chronic and painful awareness that others are ungrateful and unforgivably unjust towards them, not only because they don’t honour and love them boundlessly, as they ought, but because they even or so it seems ignore them.

“In the subconsciousness of haters there slumbers a perverse feeling that they alone possess the truth, that they are some kind of superhumans or even gods, and thus deserve the world’s complete recognition, even its complete submissiveness and loyalty, if not its blind obedience. They want to be the centre of the world and are constantly frustrated and irritated because the world does not accept and recognize them as such; indeed, it may not even pay any attention to them, and perhaps it even ridicules them.

“They are like spoiled or badly brought up children who think their mother exists only to worship them, and who think ill of her because she occasionally does something else, like spending time with her other children, her husband, a book or her work. They feel all this as an injustice, an injury, a personal attack, a questioning of their own sense of self-worth. The inner charge of energy, which might have been love, is perverted into hatred toward the imputed source of injury.(…)

“It is said that those who hate suffer from an inferiority complex. This may not be the most precise way to put it. I would rather say that they are people with a complex based on the fatal perception that the world does not appreciate their true worth.

Another observation seems worth making here. The man who hates does not smile, he merely smirks; he is incapable of making a joke, only of bitter ridicule; he can’t be genuinely ironic because he can’t be ironic about himself. Only those who can laugh at themselves can laugh authentically. A serious face, quickness to take offence, strong language, shouting, the inability to step outside himself and see his own foolishness these are typical of one who hates.”

Hável’s words offer the best explanation for anti-social behavior that I have ever read. Among others, they could be applied to:

1) The Hitlers of the world.

These are mercifully few, because the perfect storm of circumstances which sweeps them into positions where their hatred can directly affect millions is a rarity.

2) Bullies, abusers, and racists

In schools, in corporations, in politics, in families, their influence is limited to their direct sphere of influence and usually constrained somewhat by social conventions and the need to hide their meanness from all but the victims whom they affect.

3) Internet trolls

To anyone who frequents the internet, there seems to be a disturbing abundance of these, and I have mentioned them previously. Again fortunately, the vast majority of these are wretched, impotent losers who fill comment boards with their piss and vinegar but are capable of nothing more. The few who venture past invective into the realm of stalking or cybercrime are usually caught and dealt with.

4) People who behave poorly in public

Not Always Right is dedicated to stories about the horrible customers that retail and customer service workers have to deal with all the time. My favorites are always the ones where they don’t get away with their douchebaggery, like this one.

I don’t often focus on hatred and ignorance, preferring instead to fill the space around me with positive energy, but in order to fight hatred, it must be seen for what it is. Near the end of his speech, Hável said, “We must struggle energetically against all the incipient forms of collective hatred, not only on principle, because evil must always be confronted, but in our own interests.” Echoing these thoughts, John Howard Griffin, concluding his epic work Black Like Me, wrote, “If some spark does set the keg afire, it will be a senseless tragedy of ignorant against ignorant, injustice answering injustice – a holocaust that will drag down the innocent and right-thinking masses of human beings. Then we will all pay for not having cried for justice long ago.”

The Old Wolf has spoken.