Love or Hate. Really?

          At the supermarket, I reached for a jar of Marmite and saw that it had an unfamiliar look about its branding. The label was adorned with rainbow graphics and the words “Elton John Limited Edition”. I looked more carefully and found a QR code on the back which links to a site where you can donate to E.J’s. Aids Foundation (though I haven’t yet made it work).

          The question is not whether to donate but why did they choose Marmite jars for the appeal? After all, the powerfully flavoured yeast extract has become synonymous with the expression “you either love it or hate it”, so why would the EJAF choose a product towards which many people feel hatred, thereby alienating a group of potential donors? They could have picked a universally neutral product, such as toilet rolls.

          Anyway, it’s a bit OTT to either love or hate something that you spread on toast. It would be more reasonable to take the emotion out of a simple consumer preference and say that you either like or dislike it. (To give the benefit of doubt to those who really are emotionally invested, it’s true enough that some tastes and smells can evoke memories of times that were significant to them in some way.) For my own part, I prefer to save emotionally charged language for those occasions when my blood temperature rises.

          I also like to question the necessity for a binary ‘either/or’ verdict. There must be some people whose reaction to Marmite is ‘meh’. This gradation of judgment is illustrated by Elie Wiesel’s pronouncement that “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference”, which introduces the idea that you can neither love nor hate unless you are engaged with the object in question. Indifference is, per se, lack of engagement and akin to being in a state of limbo from which you are unqualified to make a definitive value judgment.

          Of course, it’s not possible to engage with everything, everywhere, all the time, so we have a biologically inherent filtering mechanism based on personal capacity and the freedom to choose ‘which hill to die on’ or, for non-binary types, which hill to um and ah over.

          Last week, there was a protest in London (and other places) against the government’s decision to proscribe the group known as Palestine Action under anti-terrorist legislation – an act that many people see as an OTT reaction to the activities the group has been engaged in. I had, as they say, ‘skin in the game’ (I can say no more, for fear of prosecution under section 14 of said legislation), so I found channels on YouTube that broadcast live and continuously from the London event. Whilst they mainly showed just extended versions of what was subsequently condensed and broadcast on mainstream news platforms, one of them included a live, unmediated comments pane below the footage. The hatred and vitriol expressed in some of those one-line comments was hard to come to terms with.

          I subsequently sought to quell my seething outrage by rationalising the hatred. Was it genuinely felt and expressed by people with first hand experience of terrorism? Was it the product of ignorance and prejudice? Was it a form of mob feeding frenzy? Was I watching a channel sponsored by partisans? It may have been all of the above, but one thing seemed obvious: those who expressed hatred (towards the proscribed group, its supporters and the Palestinians on the receiving end of Israeli firepower) had missed the point that the protest was also was about the right to freely express dissention from government legislation. In contrast to the bloodlust expressed by the online haters, the police tasked with the arrest of 522 peacefully protesting citizens displayed what might be described as disinterest.

          By the way, in case anyone is interested, I’m partial to Marmite, I really like some of Elton John’s early recordings, I’m trying hard not to hate the haters and I’m indifferent only to that of which I know nothing.