Notes on love, hate, and apathy

How logically coherent is it to claim that striving to love with all of one’s might is better than striving to not hate, given that apathy allows great harm to occur yet is not hateful?
*Maybe the gist of the following few paragraphs is that one cannot and should not try to love everyone, but that, in order to empower oneself to do the most good in life, one must strive to not allow oneself to hate? But that formulation doesn’t address the issue of apathy, which is a problem because more unnecessary suffering (especially that which humans impose on nonhumans ) may result from apathy than from hatred. So, then how can it be good enough to just refrain from hating? The largely unnecessary suffering of billions of nonhuman animals results because of apathy, not because humans hate them. Where does that leave us, concerning love, hate, and apathy? If we attempt to deal with the problem of apathy by striving to love anyone and everyone regardless of the situation, how then do we harm and kill others when there is no viable alternative to defending ourselves, our families, and our communities, including the ‘commuinity’ of one’s country?
I try  to not  be morbid, sensationalist, or self-aggrandizing, or indulge in armchair courage, but it might be useful to think about how one might, thru seeking to ‘maxmize loving kindness’, increase one’s strength to endure adversity and increase one’s resourcefulness for dealing with challenges and finding opportunity for happiness therein., despite the undesirable circumstances.
My guess is that part of what saps one’s capacity to deal with adversity is self-pity (“Why is this happening to me? What did I do to deserve this?”) I’m not making light of the challenges of someone experiencing adversity. (What also comes to mind are extreme situations such as those in which one’s loved ones are gravely harmed because of others’ extreme malice or derangement). For example, it may be helpful to look at how the wife and father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl dealt with their grief and rose above allowing hatred to define them. This is a challenging aspect of ethics and human psychology. When people have experienced the pain of knowing that their loved ones probably suffered horribly on top of the pain of having that person ripped away from being in their lives, it seems a challenge to apply the idea of not allowing hatred to be one’s operative attitude.
Theology and other systems of ethics involve the concept of forgiveness, even in extreme situations. But as widely spread as that concept is the idea that revenge and hatred are the appropriate ways to deal with extreme harm being done to oneself or those one cares about as part of one’s family or community. What role has hatred and revenge played in the evolution of the human species?
Further, revenge seems to serve not only a psychological function but also a pragmatic role in terms of serving as a deterrent. That is, if various others or various outsiders think it’s likely that one or one’s community will retaliate, they may in some cases be less inclined to commit the offense.
In light of that, what sense do I make of my ongoing advocacy for ‘maximizing loving kindness’? How can a human being be lovingly kind to someone who is intent on inflicting mental and physical pain on them and trying to kill them? Maybe that is why ‘maximize’ is a key qualification. As for my advocacy of loving kindness, in the least it’s a matter of seeing the theme of kindness as a way to organize my community organizing, and as a way to avoid some of the pitfalls of activism such as hypocrisy, in-fighting, and so on.
As for loving those who have done grave harm to oneself or one’s loved ones, the tentative answer is that a human being can’t and shouldn’t try, but that she can empower herself by striving to base her thoughts and actions on love, in whatever circumstances she’s in, including extreme adversity. It’s not love for her abusers, but love for family, friends, and fellow community members that empowers her. I don’t know if one might include her love for people in general, so long as they don’t seek to harm her or those she cares about. But that might be general goodwill which might not be the same as love.
There is a lot to sort thru concerning, on the one hand, the functions of revenge or retaliation, and, on the other hand, the functions of forgiveness. Maybe one option is to engage in retaliation when one deems it to be a practical necessity for promoting the well-being of oneself and one’s fellow community members, but doing so without hatred.
As for forgiveness, it probably is useful to think in detail about what it means. To what extent does it mean that one assumes there somehow will be friendliness and trustworthiness from the offender from now on? One idea is that, to promote one’s enlightened self-interest, in the protection of oneself, one’s family, one’s community, one’s nation, and so on, one can, when the situation necessitates, retaliate and harm others as a deterrent to additional future offense, but do so without hating the offender.
Instead, for my own benefit of dealing with adversity and for my own satisfaction from helping others deal with adversity, it seems to me that if one’s mind is filled with love, instead of anger and hate, one can reduce, if not avoid, the extent to which one experiences mentally-impairing fear. (But some people can be hateful and fearless)
When we say one empowers oneself when ‘filling one’s mind with love’, to what extent does that include striving to love those that may be causing one’s adversity, such as torturers and other abusers? On the one hand, I’m inclined to think that what I mean by ‘filling one’s mind with love’ involves one’s concern for friends and family, and that it’s unreasonable, and maybe pathological to try to love those that are causing oneself grave harm.
But on the other hand, in my own experience much of the adversity I’ve faced has been self-imposed. In those situations, by being excessively angry at myself and hating myself, I made my situation of self-imposed adversity worse. In those situations, I had to will myself to forgive myself and love myself in order to mentally work my way out of self-defeating or self-destructive patterns of thinking and behaving.
To what extent is there a difference between forgiving oneself for causing self-imposed adversity and forgiving others who cause one to experience adversity?
Maybe we can at least reasonably assume that when we speak of empowering oneself by filling one’s mind with love is that this sort of self-empowerment also involves not allowing oneself to hate oneself (in cases of self-imposed adversity) and not allowing oneself to hate others (in cases in which others cause one’s adversity.)