by GIDEON GINRACHMANJINJa-VITUS, Alternate Reality News Service Economics Writer
Hate is hard work. There's the gnashing of teeth and foaming at the mouth as you scream obscenities at people you don't know but just know you wouldn't get along with. There's the effort required to clench your fist and shake it. When you're really into a good bout of hatred, your whole body can clench up. Hate is like walking through a blizzard being pelted with unhappy raccoons.
Love, by way of contrast, lounges on a comfy couch and grins goofily at anybody who happens to walk by.
The difference between love and hate is obvious. But, can you monetize this psychological insight?
"Boy, can you ever!" enthused Ned Feeblish, MultiNatCorp Vice President, Segregation and Monetization. "You can monetize the shit out of it! Umm...that may come across as too aggressively enthusiastic - could you...could you maybe change the word 'shit' to 'heck?' Much appreciated..."
Leo Strauss, the American economics theorist who is much loved by neoconservatives and playground bullies in high schools across the continent, anticipated this idea in a much-overlooked paper he wrote in 1957 called "Hate is Theft." "The energy that the average worker expends on hating his fellow man is energy that he does not have available to do what is required of him in his workplace," Strauss wrote. "This will cost the economy a skabillion dollars in lost productivity by - let me pick an arbitrary date - one far enough in the future that I won't be alive to be held accountable for my ideas, but I won't be entirely forgotten, either - not by people who matter, in any case - let us say...2023...no - too far - that's not credible...let's say...2015. A skabillion 2015 dollars will be lost to the economy. Ayn Rand villains have faced forbidding fates for far less!"
In his paper, Strauss rejected the possibility of educating people not to hate, arguing that it would cost too much for results that were far from certain. "With sufficient indoctrination, the man who hated all minorities might come to accept redheads, Jews and Armenians," he wrote, "but still hate blacks, lefties and the French. The cost of his indoctrination would far outweigh its benefits. Unless you were Armenian, I suppose, but we cannot allow such emotionalism to affect our thinking on this subject." Penalizing workers depending upon how much hatred they carried in their hearts was much better for the bottom line, he argued.
Unfortunately, it would take decades before Strauss' idea could be implemented. Hatred has always been part of the background noise of American culture, which made it hard to isolate and measure. A combination of the civil rights movement, which pushed organized hate to the margins of society, and technologies that can detect patterns of activity in parts of the brain that govern hatred (and, coincidentally, love of chocolate pudding - make of that what you will, General Foods!), made quantifying levels of animosity in individuals possible.
MultiNatCorp, which pioneered the use of biometric key cards to shunt ambitious underlings into dead-end jobs, was in a perfect position to implement a policy of wage discrimination based on the level of hate shown by an employee. However, not everybody agreed that it was a good idea.
"Whaaaaaat?!" shrieked NAACP spokesperson Lashonda Tendentious. "If you hate a Jew, you lose 43 cents an hour on your base pay, but if you hate a black, you only lose 27 cents? I. DON'T. THINK. SO!"
"Oy," replied Rabbi Horatio Heffernen, putting him in the sweepstakes for the shortest quote ever in an Alternate Reality News Service article.
"Weeeeelllll," Feeblish responded, "in the implementation of any new policy, you will inevitably have to work out some kinks - oh! That reminds me: I have to look over how to integrate hatred of people who engage in non-traditional sex acts into our compensation penalization matrix. If you will excuse me..."
Other people have...other problems with the policy. "I got hired as a penguin extruder at a lower pay level than advertised for the position just because I fly a Confederate flag outside my house," said Atticustard Whitbread. "And have a Confederate flag on my car. And have a Confederate flag tattooed on the back of my neck. And I named my daughter Connie Flagg. But, for me, it's just a symbol of my southern heritage. Nothing else."
When asked about his membership in the KKK, Whitbread spit on the ground, but it was the saliva of chagrin. "Oh. You know about that, hunh? Well, shoot, I guess that may have had something to do with my pay."
"This is just one more excuse to drive down wages for the average working stiff!" roared AFL-CIO-MOUSE President Flaherty McDivot. "Well, my twelve members and I aren't going to stand for it! We aren't going to stand for it, I tell you...although I would happily sit for another pint if you're buying the next round..."
Strauss, who refused to be quoted unless he was given the last word - over 60 years later - the man has power, is what I'm saying - wrote: "The loss of wages will give workers an incentive not to hate their fellow man. Who says markets can't solve every problem in the world?
"I believe that Jesus would have approved."