As long as you are angry parents, ladies and gentle­men, you will always have this “thing” going between you. The more “right” you feel over the un-rightness of your child, the more right your child will feel over your un-rightness, which poses as righteousness.

And it’s this kind of righteousness, anger, hating wrong to make our­selves feel right, that makes other people hate our wrongs so that they can feel right. And when other people hate our wrong to feel right, the kind of “right” they feel is not a good right. It’s a greater wrong.

They are actually blinded to their own wrongs by their hatred of ours. That’s how you learn to love or hate, and hate to love. But when you find a position of love and non-reaction, you break the cycle between you, and you begin to show that other person to himself.

You begin to show a different side of your own nature, and this makes the other person begin to be aware of what he is doing, what he is wanting, what he is needing from you. He begins to be aware that he wants you to be wrong so that he can feel right himself.

Eventually, he will become aware that he is hating your rightness—playing little games with you, needling you, irritating you, looking for little things to disturb you with—he will see this only because you are not disturbed.

If you were to be disturbed and angry, your antagonist would feel “right” and excited, but if you’ re not angry and you’re not upset, and you reply to every attack with calmness and patience, so that there’s a soul looking out through your “merry eyes twinkling,” he begins to see himself, as though in a mirror, by that contrast.

If he can destroy that contrast, by upsetting you, your opponent feels better, “right”—relatively “right”—but that relative “rightness” depends upon your relative “wrongness.”

And that’s the way we are with one another, ladies and gentlemen, and that’s why America will eventually come to this kind of destruction, in which everyone, being wrong, feels right over the wrongness of others. And becomes dependent upon the wrongness of others to feel right.

HATING WRONG DOESN’T MAKE YOU RIGHT! It only makes you feel right in a way that produces more wrong, and the wrong so produced makes others feel more right. That right in turn is not really right, but is productive of more wrong.

So it’s a vicious cycle. And once this chain begins, there’s very little that can stop it, because we become so blind, hostile, and self-righteous that Reason becomes impossible. And I hope that while things are calm, I will be able to explain this to you.

It’s the same thing between mother and son, father and daughter, husband and wife. The same thing with people against people. White against Green, Black against Yellow. Once this cycle starts, we get enmeshed in it, involved, embroiled, and we become wrong feeling right.

"Hating wrong doesn't make you right! It only makes you feel right in a way that produces more wrong"

Needing, hungering, looking for criticism of the enemy, hating the enemy as though hatred could solve the problem—but really, the only problem we “solve” is our own unrighteousness, because we blow our minds to it by hating what’s wrong.

We blow our own minds to our own failings by hating the failings of others. But in so doing we become the extension of those failings.

When people get angry and crowds begin to form and someone becomes unrighteously indignant and does a little damage, what happens to the opposition? Somehow they get the idea that they have been licensed to do damage to the other side, as though that made things even.

They seem to have the right, and they feel tremendously inspired to do wrong in the name of right. And then the other side gets the same idea. “If he can do that to me, I can do that to him!” And it is a strange kind of “right” that reverberates between the two, a “right” that will lead to total destruction because no one will be able to stop it.

Then come the power-mongers, the hate-mon­gers, that will just egg you on, keep the syndrome going, justify you in your hatreds.

And by that time you’ll need a leader like that! He will be your savior—a man who will pin a philosophy and a badge of righteousness on what you’re doing. Listen, before it’s too late.

You see it in your own family. And don’t you see how these power-mongers and hate-mongers come up and stir hatred amongst the people? “Hate” is a special kind of “love.” We love to hate.

See? Because it makes us feel strong and right. And whatever makes us feel strong and right “can’t be all that bad.”

See? We’re “good” when we’re angry, “strong” when we’re angry, “right” when we’re angry—only because we can’t see that we are just the opposite. And we need a philosophy to justify it, that way of life.

It’s a sickness. It will kill us all.