Since hatred is neither reasonable nor rational, the question, "What did you (they) do to make them hate you (them) so?" is nonsensical, "Why does he hate you (them)?" equally so. The questions assume that hatred is a rational response; it is not. Hatred is a feeling of a hater. It isn't rational, and—if truth be told, it's not even a response to something outside the hater, although haters often (or usually) expertly rationalize their hatreds. Hatred is a possession of a hater, although whether it possesses her or she possesses it, I cannot say.

Crazy?

If hatred is neither reasonable nor rational, does that mean it is craziness? No; and that's crazy logic: if a crazy person wears a hat, does that make every person who wears a hat crazy? no. Hatred is an emotion for which we English-speakers have an even smaller vernacular than our vernacular for love (English is notorious for having so few ways to talk about love; by the same token, French has a very rich 'language of love'). In America, hatred, like death, like love, has been banished to the unspeakable.

Hate is such an unpleasant emotion that most persons would prefer to deny any personal knowledge of it. "I don't hate anyone," said a politician recently, suggesting that hatred is too base for his sensibility, as well as intimating that hatred is something out of control, and that he is always in control of himself.

Of course that is preposterous. To be human is to experience all emotions— to be civilized may be to control them, or to sublimate; but not to deny their existences.

To hate is transitive: rare is the hater who doesn't make her hate obvious, if not felt.

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*Sharon of Israel, speaking of his feelings about Arafat of Palestine.

I've had dealings with crazy persons. When I describe them to sane persons, I get questions. Often they start with, "Is the reason they did that because . . . ?"

There can never be satisfactory answers to such questions! They assume something which isn't true, which is an oxymoron: that crazy folk reason like sane folk. Yet the very definition of 'crazy' is that it is not reasonable as sane folk define reasonableness. It connotes irrationality, too: that the chain of events which sane persons call causality, is messed up.

A person is called crazy because she doesn't have 'reasons' the way a sane person would have them; and because a crazy person's 'becauses' are broken, by the standards of the sane.

You may have noticed that I've been careful to describe 'crazy' relative to what 'sane' means. That I say this doesn't mean that I believe that crazy persons aren't really crazy, or that sanity and madness are really equal, that it's all a matter of your point of view.*

In my experience, crazy people are, for the most part, very nasty characters. They'll hurt you if they get the chance. Whenever I come across a crazy person, I get right away.

There are sweet exceptions, of course, and they're the ones who get all the press: heartwarming reading.

Great Brains Fight Illness, and One Another, in a Lab. Something of a formula seems to be taking hold in the writing of plays about science, and you can feel it at work in "The Secret Order."

  By Neil Genzlinger. [New York Times: Arts]