FIERCE COMPASSION: Why It’s Okay, Even Crucial, to Hate Donald Trump
I’ve used our president’s illness as an opportunity to examine my core beliefs and values. I invite you to as well. Because life and death, truth and deception, illness and health, freedom and enslavement, fear and love, are invoked, this is an emotionally intense issue, as is the Covid pandemic generally.
Hatred
Many have both criticized and applauded me for wishing ill upon the president. Never mind that my wishes can’t affect Donald’s life; the lessons are important for shaping how I live and the future I, and maybe you, want.
Some of my friends don’t seem to understood how I came to the decision to wish Donald the worst. It is not, as many have asserted, because I hate him. I do hate him, but hate alone does not drive my ill-wishing. Nor does anger. I will elaborate shortly, but first, let’s take a look at anger and hate.
Hate is a strong dislike mixed with anger. Hate is a matter of degree and does not have to distort us. Feeling hate does not make us bad people. Nor does it mean we have to act on our hate. But we can let it inform us. Indeed, we can’t control feeling hate any more than we can feeling sad, glad, or mad. It is perfectly normal and healthy to strongly dislike and be angry at someone that has caused massive suffering and portends to cause more, and even to destroy the world.
Even if hate did distort us and cause us personal harm, it’s still a worthy force. To not hate, to try to get rid of anger and dislike towards an abuser who hurts many, can be a form of selfishness: I want to feel better at the expense of contributing my vitriol to the fight against systemic injustice. American selfishness, in the form of remaining willfully ignorant, is toxic privilege. To not hate, when hate is truly merited and contributes to justice for others, is selfish. Many would rather be uber-comfy and hate-less rather than fight for a cause beyond themselves. But they will hate on those who make them uncomfortable, who threaten to detract from their privilege and supremacy.
Convincing another that they have to vanquish their hate through forgiveness is gaslighting. Suppressing that hate is like suppressing grief, anger, joy, or fear — it is violent to oneself and others to not allow these feelings to the surface. Irrational hate of others who don’t actually hurt us — for being brown, Jewish, gay, poor, female, Muslim, black, or Catholic — is toxic, a signal that one has significant healing to do. Also consider:
When you’ve committed injustice, it’s easier to control your victims when you make them believe their hate is wrong and sinful. This is an example of victim-shaming. Maybe this is why hate became taboo and how religious and spiritual predators have thrived.
Hate grows when violation grows without self-reflection, amend, or restraint by the perpetrator, which Mr. Trump has mastered.
Bypassing as Violence
The dynamic of spiritual bypassing has been at the forefront of Covid lately, as many spiritual people struggle with the collective trauma of our times. This is unsurprising since much bypassing has been used as a way to escape working through pain and abuse. Spiritually bypassing hate and anger means that we use aphorisms, magical thinking, and imaginative beliefs to escape these strong emotions, as I discuss in depth in my essay Q-spiracy.
It’s not surprising that denigrating fear, anger, and hate has surged in 2020. Fear has been the most challenging difficult emotion during Covid, with anger a close second. Fear and anger have recently spiked during the pre-election drama, and now hate and anger have taken front row through Trump’s illness. His battle, if you can call it that, invokes the consideration of compassion. The New Age community has downright emasculated compassion to only a feel-good experience. This has occurred as much as fundamental religion has gaslighted guilt and hate. More on this soon.
Spiritually bypassing anger and hate includes denigrating these emotions, contorting them to be evil and sinful. Bypassers hate on hating to justify suppressing their hate. In other words, if we can’t deal with the powerful emotions of hate and anger because they are painful, then witch-hunting anger, hate, and fear is a way to justify denying them. In truth, anger and hate have intrinsic, crucial value for our collective welfare.
Hating Hatred
We believe what we are emotionally comfortable enough to believe. For example, if I can’t handle feeling hatred, say because it goes against my values or the image I have of myself (maybe as a peaceful, righteous, loving person), then I will find reasons to shoot down and condemn hatred. I will glean nothing valuable from my anger and hate because I have decided they are bad and have nothing to offer, and that only bad comes from them.
The other extreme to rejecting anger and hatred is to have no control over them, which leads to unnecessary violence and warfare. Indeed anger, ill-wishing, and hatred have gotten a bad rap because they too often lead to such unreasonable ends. Endorsing hatred can therefore be a slippery slope. We may hate our neighbor or ex, and not be able to control the feeling. But to refrain from exacting revenge is wise, save for some mild retribution, which can kickstart our healing and boost morale. Seeking violent revenge against someone who has more severely violated us is also usually unwise, which is why (on a good day!) we have the law, police, courts, punishment, and sentencing.
When a person is able to skirt all the reasonable channels for justice, we have a big problem. When that person is president of the United States, and arguably the most powerful person in the world, we have a a huge, problem. When that person is also a psychopath, sociopath, and narcissist, and has shown no signs of self-reflection, healthy guilt and remorse, or self-correction (even in the midst of contracting Covid-19), we have an enormous problem for which the ordinary channels of hate, anger, and justice are insufficient.
Wise Compassion
There exist individuals, institutions, and policies we should be angry about and naturally hate because they are pervasively violent and lead to widespread, needless suffering. We can employ our anger and hate to protect what we love by halting or dismantling them. We paradoxically mobilize anger and hate for compassion. This is why we neutralize and dismantle cults, despots, egregious polluters, and criminals. It is why Extinction Rebellion and Deep Green Resistance act boldly, even illegally, to change the course of ecocide and near-term extinction — because what’s legal is killing us. So is Donald Trump and his many minions.
Wise compassion is the marriage of soft, unconditional Yin (archetypal feminine principle) compassion with fierce, conditional Yang (archetypal masculine principle) compassion. Yin compassion is the agape-like empathy and care coupled with feel-good action to ease another’s suffering. Yang compassion is confronting, tough love to stop violence and further suffering; it is the paradoxical pivot to popular, lop-sided Yin compassion.Wise compassion is exemplified by the goddess Kali, a female (Yin) who wields fierce justice (Yang).
Yang compassion calls us to feel uncomfortable, even downright awful. Sometimes we have to feel and act violently; this is why self defense is a legal form of exoneration. But when coupled with Yin compassion, which it must be, fierce compassion becomes wise. Whether we incarcerate a serial killer or take out Osama bin Laden, we are exercising fierce compassion because we care about innocent others. The possibility for reduced sentences due to good behavior are because we also have soft compassion; we will give the benefit of doubt when evidence merits. Some crimes are just too egregious, so Yang compassion trumps Yin compassion to ensure liberty for the many.
Compassion must therefore be flexible, not rigid. It must set its sights on the greatest good and be able to accommodate paradox; otherwise it is likely to enable more violence. In other words, it might be uncomfortable and downright agonizing to wish ill, and even to act violently, in order to effect more compassion. Consider mercy for the many over the plight of the few, or worse, of the one.
Compassion is ultimately kind, just not always nice. It is always just, but not always comfortable.
Ill-wishing
Wishing someone ill does not mean we have to be consumed or internally damaged by hate. This is a spiritual lie. Revenge can even be good for us, and for the many, especially when carried out legally! Centering ourselves in soft compassion, focused on the welfare of the many, helps to keep fierce compassion in check so we don’t exact violence in the name of non-violence. Tremendous mindfulness and honesty are needed here, which too many don’t seem to be equipped with, so it’s understandable that vengeance and hate have been relegated to the closet of sin.
Again, feeling anger and hate, and other emotions we can’t help but feel, does not mean we have to act on these impulses. In fact, we should not immediately act on them unless our lives are imminently at risk. I advocate waiting and carefully contemplating action when angry, rageful, or feeling hatred; this is paramount and requires restraint. But this doesn’t mean we dismiss or repress these emotions. It means we work with them: we are patient with and get close to them for a time so we can reflect on and evaluate their implications and direction.
Donald Trump’s seemingly unstoppable violence unto the world causes me to want his violent influence to cease, any way possible. We’ve had almost four years of his presidency to experience not only his violence unto humans and the environment, but his utter lack of care and reform. With the election coming, the stakes are escalating rapidly as he fans violence, apologizes for hate groups, and refuses to promise a peaceful transition of power should he lose. Voting him out may not be enough, because he is already corrupting the election process with voter suppression, messing with the postal service, in the process of rigging the Supreme Court, and has threatened to postpone the election, among other extra-legal behavior.
We have to be dead honest about how dangerous Donald Trump is. Since he has placed himself above the law, surrounded himself with corrupt, enabling liars, bought and cheated and lied his way out of almost all trouble, there are very few choices with which to stop him. Impeachment failed. Lawsuits have failed. Congressional checks have failed. The bloody election (pun intended) stands to fail. Fierce compassion is needed now. Donald’s catching Covid is our best hope for stopping or slowing this runaway train — and, short of a miracle by which he recuses himself — I wish that virus strength on behalf of the many. Justice, poetic justice, is served and no one has to go to jail and the whole world can breathe easier.
I’d rather hundreds, thousands, and millions of other life forms gain a fighting chance for the present and a livable future than for one grotesque, morally-inept human being to have any power for one more day. And yes, this is a true equivalency. I want his stopped; I stand in fierce, Yang compassion. I want him to go away by way of least suffering, an expression of my tender, Yin compassion. Donald’s track record and actions demonstrate that the only way he might be stopped before unleashing more harm is for Covid to arrest him; wise compassion wishes this so.
We can’t abdicate the very emotions that rally for the greater good, especially when it’s a privilege to have the choice to ignore them, when it’s not you or I that is currently under an officer’s knee or on a respirator. A middle ground of emotionally intelligent hate (measured, reasonable and not toxic, based on evidence, and for the greater good) naturally arising in the face of gross injustice seems a wiser choice than abdicating hate and the passion for justice altogether. It is certainly more reasonable than pretending we don’t feel hate, and letting if fly and kill, under the radar and beyond what is conscionable.
The irony is that most of us hate anyway, without admitting it. As a result, that hate goes underground and exacts violence without the crucial mindfulness and careful examination needed to make it wisely compassionate and not just idiotically violent. The result is more suffering. And no, all hate is not justified just because we admit it! By admitting and allowing, at least, our hateful thoughts, we can preclude senseless violence. “A thought-murder a day keeps the doctor away,“ wrote Theodore Reik, a psychoanalyst and one of Freud’s students.
Fierce vs Idiot Compassion
My friend Jim McCarthy brought an important insight about anger to light regarding Donald’s illness. He said, “For those who can’t trust their anger, their only response can be meekness.” This is crucial because if we can’t feel anger, and its expression of hatred, then we won’t be able to mount fierce, Yang compassion. We will only be able to express soft, Yin compassion and thereby enable and promote violence. To not stand down evil is to be complicit in its perpetuation.
A failure to exercise fierce, Yang compassion and instead employ soft, Yin compassion is a form of what’s called “idiot or blind compassion.” Idiot compassion enables. It promotes abuse, violence, and needless suffering in the name of kindness. Idiot compassion is what too much of the spiritual community suffers from because many of its members took shelter in spiritual bypassing to avoiding feeling uncomfortable anger, hatred, fear, and grief in response to their pain. Many men I know embrace idiot compassion because they have not been able to healthily embody, work with, and leverage their anger and rage. So, of course, they would have trouble embracing fierce compassion — because it requires the same fuel as anger and rage.
If one is gaslighted, scared, manipulated, reactive, or otherwise disavowed from the strong emotions of hate and anger (as a result of being harmed by dad, a partner, or other violator in the past who wielded anger abusively, for example), they will be unable to harvest the benefits from these emotions. They will be unable to embrace fierce compassion, thereby enabling cruelty because they can’t take a proactive stand to be compassionate towards those violated by stopping the violator. These are the folks who ask for (manipulatively) and dole out (abusively) idiot compassion.
Here’s a little story about fierce compassion, from the compassionate horse’s mouth himself:
I was at a lunch with the Dalai Lama and five Buddhist teachers at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. We were sitting in a charming room with white carpets and many windows. The food was a delightful, fragrant, vegetarian Indian meal. There were lovely flower arrangements on the table. We were discussing sexual misconduct among Western Buddhist teachers. A woman Buddhist from California brought up someone who was using his students for his own sexual needs. One woman said, “We are working with him with compassion, trying to get him to understand his motives for exploiting female students and to help him change his actions. The Dalai Lama slammed his fist on the table, saying loudly, “Compassion is fine, but it has to stop! And those doing it should be exposed!” All the serving plates on the table jumped, the water glasses tipped precariously, and I almost choked on the bite of saffron rice in my mouth. Suddenly I saw him as a fierce manifestation of compassion and realized that this clarity did not mean that the Dalai Lama had moved away from compassion. Rather, he was bringing compassion and manifesting it as decisive fierceness. His magnetism was glowing like a fire. I will always remember that day, because it was such a good teaching on compassion and precision. Compassion is not a wishy-washy ‘anything goes’ approach. Compassion can say a fierce no!
— Tsültrim Allione, from her book Wisdom Rising
Perpetuating Violence
When hate surfaces, those uncomfortable with it and unable to glean its adaptive value, will find a way to denigrate (witch-hunt) hate. They justify their distance from anger and hate by claiming “Those emotions corrupts the hater, It is not compassionate, That’s not spiritual, Anger and hate lead to irrational violence.” Sure, these extreme scenarios come to pass — and too often — but they don’t have to. They are not the inevitable result of anger, rage, and hate.
Bypassers fashion a similar argument against fear, resulting in the ironically toxic fear of fear: “Don’t live in fear, It diminishes your life, It’s bad for you, Fear is cowardice, It means you don’t love,” on and on — a litany of defensive inaccuracies. All of these are nonsensiscal polarizing and demonizing of dark wisdom, just like the current denigrations of anger and hate.
I don’t think bypassers deep-down believe these proclamations. But they have to use these beliefs systems (all of them magical thinking, to varying degrees) as rationalizations for being unable to embody emotions that they currently cannot — because they judge the emotion, because it feels too overwhelming (but actually may not be), and/or because they don’t have the resources or knowledge.
Embodying difficult emotion is a skill and takes practice. Skillfulness and emotional intelligence can be cultivated to work with these emotions, to embrace and mobilize them for the greater good, rather than ditching them altogether (denial) and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
An inability to see the benefit, the fierce compassion, in hate and anger means we miss out on their value. We become more handicapped and impotent, ironically less humane, and thus perpetuate greater suffering.
We are on the brink of full authoritarian overtake in the United States, a coup by our president and his militant base, and white supremacist and Trump-approved “militia members” (read: mafia gangs) showing up to elections and intimidating voters. We cannot let them get more of a foothold. We have to stop them, and contrary to the popular and inaccurately dangerous popular meme: no, Trump is not just a symptom of our dysfunction. This would absolve him of accountability and allows him a free pass to continue marauding. He is the mafia leader, the creator, instigator, and perpetuator of our Covid, racism, financial, environmental, political, and impending societal collapse crises. If Covid takes out the leader, the movement weakens.
Too many have suffered and too many stand to suffer not long from now. If this could happen without Donald suffering or being locked up or perishing, great. But this is a highly unlikely scenario. He has shown that he doesn’t care about anyone or anything but his own delusional grandeur.
“Hoping for the best outcome” because “God knows best” or “leaving it to fate or karma” and “wishing the highest good” without taking a definitive stand for how to effect these ends on the ground — even by taking a grounded stance in ourselves — is another form of spiritual bypassing and abdication, an inability to embrace fierce compassion.
Donald shows no sign of being amenable to any kind of self-reflection, kindness, humility, or vulnerability. Fierce compassion was designed for moments like this, for maniacs.
There is no rational argument I have encountered for why we should have compassion for one man at the expense of millions and billions of others. As my friend Catherine Welch shared:
“To continue acting as if he will change at any moment is a betrayal to all who are not safe because of him.”
Halting a Hitler
Looking back, most people today approve of Hitler’s demise and the toppling of his Nazi regime. Never again, not should we come close. We are too close today.
Watch this.
The ways we disavow anger and hatred reflect the dysfunctional relationship we have with them: they either rule us or we repress them so much they rule us by our denial of them. These are unnecessarily toxic, either-or, black-or-white orientations. Emotional intelligence and critical thinking allow us to wrestle with them, curb and mould them, so that we can maximize their benefits and mitigate their inappropriate forays into needless suffering.
We can leverage anger and hate for justice. Both must be managed and carefully worked with, not just acted upon, unless in acute self-defense. Like the threat of climate crisis, we become more and more acutely threatened every day by Donald Trump is in a position of power. Indeed, climate and Trump overlap in a positive feedback loop portending disaster for our world, as one study shows that four more years of this menace “could delay global emissions cuts by ten years.”
There exists a grey area between the extremes of repression of anger and hatred and the unchecked expression of them. It’s not true that hatred has to rule and distort and harm us. It’s not true that anger and hatred are always violent, out of control, and unspiritual. These are myths, and ironically, such beliefs ironically and often lead to violence and a lack of compassion. Knee-jerking to either polarity allows these emotions to rule us.
When we learn to work with anger and hatred and employ them skillfully and with forethought and deep inquiry for fierce compassion, and when possible, amalgamate them with soft, agape-like compassion, we can exact equitable justice and create a more honest, caring world.
These are the lessons we stand to learn in the midst of Donald’s illness, regardless if he lives, is immobilized, or disappears. If we could exact justice, we could put all this into play. Since we can’t, we can do all we can to disempower him. We must embrace wise compassion, not idiot compassion. The least you can do is vote safely and securely. Please get on your inner Kali and do your uncomfortable part to topple this reign of terror.
Related Reading:
https://www.jackadamweber.com/imagine-if-you-will-an-exercise-in-imperfect-compassion/
Jack Adam Weber, L.Ac., is a licensed Chinese medicine clinician, climate activist, organic farmer, and celebrated poet. He just-released book is Climate Cure: Heal Yourself to Heal the Planet, also available at Amazon.
