There are two types of enemy: those you know about and those you don’t. In warfare, both sides know who they’re dealing with, and the fact that war gets ‘declared’ only makes the enmity the clearer. But that’s nations. Among individuals, things get murky. Yes, there can be sworn enemies, but often personal enmity remains undeclared. One privately loathes one or two vile characters, but refrains from telling them. After all, to reveal such information is to risk making open warfare a reality.
A number of consequences flow. First, having secret enemies is a form of cowardice. You’re not brave enough to confront the enemy, saving your contumely for your own private consumption. Second, this loathing-at-a-distance might even be a form of pleasure - a consoling hatred that might come undone were you to confront your enemy with it. Third, and most disquietingly, the fact one has secret enemies almost certainly suggests that one will be despised by certain others in turn, and never know it. The world of enemies is a shadowy one, and quite unwittingly one can become the dark profile in someone else’s mind.
But what is enmity about? It needs to be distinguished from rivalry, in which two or more people find themselves competing for the same thing - the job, the girl, the medal. Whereas rivalry is a rational result of competition, enmity often has its roots in the irrational. I’m thinking of psychoanalysis and the concept of ‘projective identification’. It’s a process whereby you come to hate an aspect of your own character - laziness, greed, power-grabbing, bitchiness - and in order to protect yourself from it, you ascribe it to someone else. People who can’t take criticism are therefore more likely to have enemies - admitting a flaw in themselves is so painful that it has to be deflected.
To put it in tabloid terms, your enemy is you, or at least that bit of you you can’t stand. No wonder that we feel so attached to our enemies, that we can become so preoccupied with them. Just as hate can make you as obsessed with someone as love, having enemies is a negative form of bonding - attachment in a minor key.
Robert Rowland Smith’s Breakfast with Socrates is now out in paperback (Profile Books, £8.99).
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