Half the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.T. S. Eliot, “The Cocktail Party”
To love and be loved and to hate and be hated are two sides of the coinage that makes us real. Love and hate do not exist on a quantifiable continuum. We do not love a little less or more nor do we hate by degrees, inches, or yards. Our experience of love and hate makes us real because, at great risk to our “self”, we give ourselves over to the others we love and hate and allow them to become a part of ourselves. Loving and hating is being and becoming.
It may be that half the harm that is done in the world comes from the hate that is the flip-side of love but the other half most certainly comes from that absence of either that attends our futile, risk-averse struggle to think well of ourselves by measures of gain.
