Haters gonna hate

 

Rudolf Steiner:  "When one person rails at another, and says hard things, the cause is not always—indeed in the rarest cases—to be found in the other person. He may of course be a bad sort; but this badness of his is, for anyone who observes reality objectively, the thing that least of all calls forth the abuse. No, for the most part the cause of the abuse is a need to abuse. And this need of abuse seeks an object, it wants to let itself go. And it seeks to bring its thoughts into such a form that they appear to be justified in the soul of the abusing party. So it is often in the individual intercourse of men with one another. But in the large affairs of the world it is no different; only here we must bear in mind that there are also deeper reasons. You see, it is perfectly intelligible and natural for people in the Entente and American countries now to criticize and condemn root and branch not only individual potentates but the whole population of the Middle Countries, and to say all manner of things in this direction. We can well understand it for, my dear friends, what would the policy of the Entente countries in these weeks look like, if the people [in] those countries were to say: “The people in the Middle Countries are not so bad after all, at bottom they are only human beings, they need only develop the better aspects of their nature, then they are quite alright.” Yes, if they were to say that, it would agree very badly with the policy they are now pursuing. In the world, my dear friends, one must say the things that justify one's action. We must know how things proceed out of realities. That is a deeper way of seeing things. It goes without saying that the entire public opinion of the Entente Countries is as it is, not because it is true but in order to justify their own attitude; just as it often happens when one man rails against another, he does so, not because the man he rails against is such or such, but because he has a need to rail against something and wants to let it out."

Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive December 15, 1918