What K-drama zombies figured out before me
Artful Wobbler
How did I not see this before?
I honestly thought hate is a poisonous emotion that harms both the hater and the hated. It never crossed my mind that for some, hating just feels good.
I don’t mean people who’ve actually harmed you. I doubt that ever feels good. I mean wishing harm on utter strangers who have no impact on your life. People you’ve never met and will likely never meet.
So much I’ve struggled to understand makes sense if hating is just fun. And if that’s true, it’s a really big thing because who willingly gives up what feels good?
Obviously this is simplistic. Throw in complexity this or that, I could never understand the waves of history, how despite knowing the results of brutality, slaughter and suffering, we just keep doing the same things. Sure, mad king/emperor/oligarch/leaders etc. Greed, power, boredom and petulance explain them. But why do so many help? Why do people cheer them on? They can’t all be oblivious to the suffering but it makes sense if the answer is pleasure. Then pain isn’t the point, exactly, which is why hate often dresses up as some moral fight against a fictional threat. Who wants to believe they just like the feeling? But the pain of others isn’t a deal-breaker either because pleasure hits are mindless. Nothing else matters.
All this makes the carelessness of those who peddle in stoking emotion so nefarious, and the tolerance along the way so negligent given the consequences. Life is hard, when something feels good people seek out more of it. Until we’re here, again.
So what does this mean? I don’t know, you may have known this forever but I just got here. The book Be Angry by the Dalai Lama says that people reflect their leadership. If leaders are decent and good, people tend to be too. If they’re cruel and selfish, so are people, so be careful to choose wise leaders. I think this can be true in the many places we look for inspiration, like sports, movies, books, music, radio. But noticing what we take in and being watchful of our reaction is more than many are willing to do, and weaning someone off zaps of pleasure won’t happen unless they want it themselves.
This is dismal but clarifying and oddly hopeful. Not understanding why some want others to suffer is terrifying in part because it seems so irrational, indifferent to logic, compassion, moral argument or real blood. But it becomes rational in the context of pleasure. Chasing what feels good is what we do when we’re not just dodging our own pain which in this case might be the same thing anyway.
In the K-show Happiness a virus causes infected people to act like blood-hungry zombies, but some are able to resist the urge. A detective asks one of the infected if attacking people felt good or horrifying. It felt good. So it’ll be hard not to do it again, he concludes.
This changes nothing about the consequences and doesn’t explain why some are vulnerable to this form of pleasure-seeking while others, hopefully most, are not. But it offers clues for a way back.