![]() We feel compelled to take some kind of corrective action to scrub away the stain our enemies have applied. Whatever is right, we can’t just walk away and get on with our lives. Why, therefore, has our name been trampled upon and our reputation trashed? Either because we truly are fools (which is an unendurable truth) or because we’re not fools (in which case the hatred is an unendurable error). In our distress, we may keep harping back to the idea (it brings tears to our eyes) that the situation is profoundly ‘unfair’: we did nothing especially wrong, our intentions are benevolent and our work is acceptable. There is no one manning the border between them and us: the enemies are freely in us, wondering wildly and destructively through the caverns of our inner selves, ripping items off the shelves and mocking everything we are. The judgements of others have been given a free pass to enter all the rooms of our minds. In despair, it feels as if we do not know how to carry on, not only because we’ve been called idiots or egotists, but because – as a result – we must simply be idiots and egotists. ![]() Their objections may feel unbearable, like a physical discomfort we cannot correct, but we can’t reject them as unwarranted either. ![]() We may, when with our friends, casually profess to hate the haters (and curse their names with bravado), but in private, over the ensuing months, we simply cannot dismiss their judgements, because we have accorded them a status logically prior to our own in our deep minds. In our psychological make-up, the approval of the world effectively supports our approval of ourselves, which means that when enemies agitate against us, we lose faith not in them (they continue to exert a mesmeric authority over us), but – more alarmingly – in ourselves. We are only ever a few seconds of online search away from pitiless personally-targeted assessments of all that we are.įor the under-confident among us, enemies are a catastrophe. Furthermore, because of technology, we’re now aware of a vast new range of potential enemies scattered around the digital universe. Or we might learn that a friend of a friend, a senior professor, has forceful objections to a paper of ours they called it ‘naive’ and ‘stuck in the 1970s’ and made a series of sarcastic jokes at our expense at a conference. At a bar after work, we might be told – via a malevolent third party – that two people in the office deem us extremely arrogant and disrespectful and, for the last few months, haven’t lost a chance to do us down behind our backs. Learning that someone hates us deeply, even though we have done nothing ostensibly to provoke them, can be one of the most alarming situations we face.
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