Hate, as Nick Land rightly says, is a word worth considering: one which "testifies with special clarity to the religious orthodoxy" [1] of an age obsessed with hate speech and hate crime.
With reference to the second of these things, Land writes:
"Perhaps its most remarkable feature is its perfect redundancy, when evaluated from the perspective of any analysis of legal and cultural norms that is not enflamed by neo-puritan evangelical enthusiasm."
That's true: for what is a hate crime - if any such thing exists - other than just an ordinary crime with the word 'hate' attached?
And, one might also ask: "what is it exactly that aggravates a murder, or assault, if the motivation is attributed to 'hate'?"
II.
In response to these questions, Land says that, firstly, a hate crime "is augmented by a purely ideational, ideological, or even 'spiritual' element, attesting not only to a violation of civilized conduct, but also to a heretical intention."
Hate, in other words, is an offense against what Land and his fellow neoreactionaries term the Cathedral [2]; "a refusal of its spiritual guidance, and a mental act of defiance against the manifest religious destiny of the world".
Secondly, Land asserts that a hate crime is something that only those on the right can commit; the left is far too enlightened - or far too woke as we would say now - ever to hate; they are passionate about a cause, or morally outraged about an issue, or justifiably angry about some form of behaviour deemed offensive, but never hateful.
For theirs is the politics of Universal Love; a decadent creed which "with its reflex identification of inequality with injustice, can conceive no alternative to the proposition that the lower one's situation or status, the more compelling is one's claim upon society, the purer and nobler one's cause".
Being one of the wretched of this earth is thus a "sign of spiritual election [...] and to dispute any of this is clearly 'hate'".
I think that's correct and I'd like to see Taylor Swift, or anyone else for that matter, just shake off the truth of Land's analysis of slave morality and the manner in which hate functions for some not merely as a form of political incorrectness or criminality, but as sin.
Notes
[1] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Press, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online - click here - from where I am quoting (see Part 3).
[2] In brief, the Cathedral is an overarching body composed of universities, mainstream media outlets, and many other institutions.
Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here.
Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here.
Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.
