Why We Love The Haters

The key to any good story is a great villain.

Darth Vader. Longshanks from Braveheart. Heath Ledger’s Joker. Kevin Spacey in SE7EN.

Mike Myer’s Dr. Evil…?

Let’s face it: there are just some people that we love to hate. Whether it’s the Dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or a boy’s battle with his own selfishness and narcissism in Into the Wild, the human spirit longs for struggle—longs for a good fight.

Personally, I want my villains smart and cunning. I want a villain who can actually defeat the hero. I want to believe that it’s possible the hero might actually fail. I want The Matrix’s Mr. Smith.

Yes, I’m convinced that we love our villains.

But maybe more than that we love to villainize.

Villainizing is what we do when we leave the movie theater—with its heroes and villains—and begin creating villains in our own world.

Our souls long for drama, so often times we end up creating melodrama.

The typical situation might go like this: have you ever accidentally cut someone off while driving in traffic? Maybe you were thinking about how your mom’s visit to the hospital went, or maybe you were just trying to look at googlemaps on your phone. But you drifted into another lane and—luckily—the car behind you didn’t hit you but slowed down. This happens probably several times a month and we might not even realize it. We often times don’t know what small inconveniences we accidentally are for others.

But has someone ever cut you off? When this happens it’s an entirely different story.

Immediately—if you’re like me— you’re questioning their IQ and their sanity.

In short, they have become your villain.

So maybe you honk at them. Totally justifiable, right? After all, they almost killed everyone. Have they no dignity for life?!

Then they look back at you and are embarrassed. They feel bad, but maybe they don’t deal with embarrassment well. Maybe they react to embarrassment with trying to stick up for themselves. Maybe they were just coming back from a seminar where they’re taught to stick up for themselves because, generally, they don’t and that’s why they’re in an abusive relationship.

So in an effort to grow, they mistakenly overact by giving you the one-fingered salute out their driver’s side window. Horrified at themselves, they speed off, only to be rebuked by their abusive girlfriend a few hours later for the speeding ticket they’ll get trying to get away from you and their never-ending shame.

But that’s not what we see. We see this punk kid nearly destroy the world, then flip us off and speed away.

“The nerve of that guy! I hope he gets a speeding ticket!!”

We always want our villains to suffer.

The act of villainizing is subtle. But it happens all the time. Our friends become Jokers. Our bosses become Longshanks. Our in-laws become Vaders.

As if they have nothing better to do than play the villain in our little story.

This has been a huge learning for me over the past couple of years. Some could call it ‘empathy.’ Others might call it ‘learning to believe the best in people.’

I’d like to call it the journey of finding the hero within the villain.

Fact is, people are rarely as bad, manipulative, conniving as we think they are. Most people make really boring villains. And often times when they do make the villain list, it’s not who they want to be, and the darkness that’s in their hearts is an aching pain that they wish would go away, if only they knew how.

It doesn’t mean people can’t do horrible things. Of course people are capable of that. And of course we all have shadows in our hearts and ghosts in our closets that haunt us and own us in the night.

But that’s not why your boss doesn’t listen more. And that’s not why your kids never call. It’s not why your husband leaves the toilet seat up or why your roommate doesn’t get breathe-rights for his snoring problem [they’re not that expensive, you cheap little…ahem]. It’s not why you didn’t make the team and it’s not why she didn’t return your email.

90% of the time, it’s just not.

Which is good. Because that means people are not as bad as we think they are.

But it’s also hard, because now we have less melodrama in our lives…and our souls are left wanting.

The good news is that there’s plenty of real drama in the world to satisfy our spiritual hunger. There’s the real drama—the real fight—against poverty, drugs, corruption, narcissism. The real fight to love the world into a better condition, to take real risks—not in confronting the person who just cut in front of us at the grocery store—but to get involved in our local communities to help raise the poverty wages that the people at the grocery store get paid.

And, of course, there’s the real fight against our need to villainize. There’s the very real fight to continue to orient our hearts more towards beauty, compassion and risk. Towards Proactivity, understanding, life and wholeness.

Our greatest heroes embody these attributes.

And we become the villains when we oppose them.

When we villainize less, we have more energy to give to those fights that simply matter more, and the less we become the villains of our own stories. The more understanding and forgiving we become the more we open ourselves up to the healing reality that the world is not conspiring against us, even though it sometimes feels that way.

The ancient idea that the fundamental core of the reality—that God—is love, begins to be not a cliché that is parroted in empty church cathedrals and pasted on dirty car bumpers. The idea that God is love begins to become the very truth that we need most to hear.

It’s a whisper that frees us from our need to villainize. It’s a whisper that leads us to greater compassion. It invites us into the adventure of making the world beautiful again…

And it leads us to the greatest Hero of all.




By_Jason Jaggard