Love and hate

are what holds the herd together

I am a ranch horse and I enjoy my life over here. But I must say that I admire my wild friends. There is something to wild horses that is even closer to nature than us. They truly respect family values and stick with the herd no matter what challenge presents itself. They love their relatives, but they will also stand their ground. Sometimes they will bite each other vying for the same resources and stallions will fight over mares. Their fighting is much more serious than rolling eyes. Yet in spite of occasional macro-aggression, I love watching their herd, and when they are cuddling each other, I see pure love.

Wild Exmoor mare and foal. Photo by Nifanion, licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike Unreported.

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A great herd knows the balance between hate and love. The intrinsic manifestation of balance has been known for ages and is maybe best represented by the yin and yang symbol. Sundry entities in this pretty binary universe consist of pairs of seeming opposites that in reality complement each other. So does the pair of love and hate. Looking at the yin and yang symbol through the lens of love and hate, we see that each side needs the other to maintain balance. Moreover, each side embeds a small portion of the opposite side. And finally, the symbol is a wheel. A wheel can spin, which means that the dynamics between both sides can change. However, one thing the yin and yang symbol does not depict, is a solid monochrome disc. We would not know what love is if we weren’t occasionally experiencing hate. Yet a “hate-free society” is what many political factions these days pretend to be the ideal state. It may sound good, but is is utterly unachievable, and the collateral damage from the steps taken to implement it is detrimental to society rather than beneficial.

The yin and yang symbol

We have discussed the situation in Brazil before, where the excuse of “uprooting racism” is being used to stifle unapproved speech. But there is more. Recently, a new law was passed in Brazil that criminalizes bullying and cyber-bullying. Also, the Brazilian Supreme Court has approved legislation against the spread of “harmful information,” which includes disinformation, “hate speech”, information that is promoting Nazism, fascism, racism, homophobia, or is “anti-democratic.” We have pointed out before that democracy can only exist in a world where competing opinions are allowed to circulate, so a law that bans information that the government deems to be “anti-democratic” is more anti-democratic than any information it bans, even when assuming it would be applied in good faith.

Spain has a regrettable tradition with legislating against “hate crimes” too. Legislation was progressively enacted there, which has meanwhile led to prosecution of opinions. Father Custodio Ballester was recently charged with a “hate crime” for expressing his views that convey the existence of a connection between Islam and Jihadism, which is deemed “islamophobia”. Father Ballester could end up incarcerated for three years merely for publishing his essay entitled “The Impossible Dialogue with Islam” [2].

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Scotland has passed a “hate crime” law in 2021, which they just recently vowed to enforce. The law entails the crime of “stirring up of hatred offences” for protected characteristics, which are the usual suspects: “age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and transgender identity.” The law is worded with prepense opacity, which will lead to a wide variety of interpretations and may end up incarcerating people for banal utterances like calling somebody a “grumpy old man”. While Scottish police can’t cope with raging crime, due to which a list of real offences are not being prosecuted, police are trained to enforce the “hate crime” law and will be supported by a network of “third party reporting centres”. I was not aware before that the Scottish National Party took training in the Soviet Union, but apparently they have.

Scotland, rough and rugged, but the days it was inhabited by Braveheart are unfortunately long gone. Photo by Pixabay.

Neither the extensive Brazilian nor the corresponding Spanish or Scottish laws against “hate” will succeed to eradicate hate. Hate is a fundamental feeling in this universe that will exist and manifest itself no matter which laws are being drafted. Hatred also has a function being the natural opponent of love. We will appreciate love more when we occasionally encounter hate. As it will be absolutely impossible to “uproot hate” through legislation, the effect that these laws are likely to have is to stifle spontaneous expression of it. This leads to a very dangerous situation. When spontaneous expression is permitted, including feelings of hatred, it can offer a relief valve: people who are frustrated may feel relieved by just venting their opinion. When the latter is illegal, they just keep building up resentment until the situation explodes. Also, when a person holds despicable opinions, isn’t it better to be aware of the latter? I am sure that Kanye West would still have a much broader fan base if he hadn’t testified publicly to admiring Hitler. So allowing him to freely express his abject opinion actually furthers the cause to oppose neo-Nazism.

As worrisome as the situations highlighted before may be, Canada’s recently proposed bill C-63 trumps them all. While not passed yet, this proposal does not stop at criminalizing hate. It does make “hate” a primary offense and introduces a life sentence for “hate” if concomitant with another offense. But it also introduces a provision that allows the government to take action against people whom the government deems probable to commit a hate crime in the future. You read that right. Citizens who have committed no offense at all can be placed under house arrest and around the clock surveillance because the government labels them “pre-criminals”.

The notion of “pre-crime” is yet another phantom concept that I can trace back to the stupidity community. It derives from the anti-terror surveillance architecture set up in the early 2010s, when the then-intelligence community was fighting jihadists. I can’t stop but notice that they themselves could now be arrested in Spain for islamophobia. That said, when they had accomplished the primary objective of identifying terrorists, they switched to attempting to flag “pre-terror” individuals. Since terror is thankfully not as successful as it was ten years ago, the administration built to fight terror had to come up with another justification for its own existence. They decided to switch their focus to domestic denizens, who pose no real threat at all, but could be classified into “good citizens” or “pre-criminals”. Note that this infantine binary thinking is prevalent in the stupidity community: “you are either with us or against us”. There is no grey zone in their world. Of course, a glimpse of an eye at the yin and yang symbol teaches us that nothing is entirely white or black and that even the white section embeds a black entity.

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While the notion of “pre-crime” is already noxious when resources are dedicated to it, it becomes outright oppressive when codified. We hope that bill C-63 will never pass, but if it does, it will inevitably have a chilling effect on Canadians’ freedom of expression. Living in a society where everybody can be convicted at any time of a crime they have not even committed yet, has only existed before in totalitarian extremist regimes such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. We have previously elaborated that these regimes share more similarities than dissimilarities.

The fundamental issues with the approach to criminalize “pre-crime” should be obvious: at first, there is no certainty that the application of this law prevents crime, as the corresponding citizens might already feel better by just venting their opinions and never become criminals. Secondly, in this setting the government decides what amounts to the profile of a “pre-criminal”, which will most likely consist of someone who expresses opinions that the government does not approve of. But finally, how about legally contesting these charges? I don’t see a way to set up due process to either prove or disprove these charges. But maybe the self-aggrandizing Liberal administrative class in Ottawa does? Or is it time for them to admit that all they are accomplishing is to construct a dystopian nightmare that protects the rights of the ultra-wealthy under the guise of “diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism and the end of hatred”? I am sure that some well-rooted Canadians already see this, and my advice to them is: “Truckers, you are not done yet! Honk, Honk!”

Pre-crime does not exist and it is impossible to eliminate hate. So what these laws are truly intended at, is to stomp out dissent by dint of codification of imaginary offenses under the guise of the intent to attain the impossible.

We can’t “upend hate”, nor do we need to attempt it. When I watch the wild herds, they show some of the most adorable spontaneous behaviour I’ve seen anywhere. They bud heads, but they overcome their adversities. Eventually, it strengthens them against external threats and makes the herd stick together.

(Investigative journalism Stack “Public News” has a post on this subject that is worthwhile checking out too)