The self-hater does not desire attention for the sake of it but simply cannot glue their sense of self together without referencing it to others. No input = disintegration. They do not desire negative attention, but simply cannot tolerate none at all.
I think your point is worth considering. It ameliorates any tendency, the way I described it, to easily sliding into the notion there is something inherent in our natures that has a natural attraction to evil. Still, while in full support of the notion that a state of evil is not a natural human condition, (we are not actually guilty of some say original sin which is a metaphor}, I there is something I will want to add to this:
I believe we are drawn to 'evil' like a moth to a flame and the reasons are complicated and paradoxical and also explain why we can easily be described as loving negative attention and as a part of our sick state. Rather that try to describe this as an intellectual broad spectrum theory, describe it abstractly with words, let me first give some example I will make up to try to describe it in a specific case:
Off the top of my head: Suppose a child breaks his mother's favorite vase and receives a sever breathing with a round of the appropriate (inappropriate) put downs. You stupid fool, you clumsy ox, you disrespectful monster, how many times have I told you to be careful, not to play in my room,etc. Why can't you be good like other kids.
How does a child recover his or her self respect? The source of its loss was in the traumatic event. The only way to heal is to go back to it with the hope of being forgiven. (Naturally the real way to heal will be to go back and understand that in everybody's life things are going to break, that the Mother, in attaching her self worth to the possession of an object, actually, and in reality, may have really valued her child more than the vase, hopefully. To go back properly will only require that the person get in touch with their feelings, that they feel worthless in part over the breaking of a vase. In that way one can experience the event and feel the effects it had but also bring to it an adult perspective. For example, "I have lived my life suffering over a fucking broken vase that cost a buck three eighty at Joe's Vase Emporium.
But absent that, how does a person heal: What are the unconscious effects of such a trauma:
Mental health, the freedom from the scourge of being the worlds most worthless vase breaking child lies on the other side time wise of when the vase was broken, the time when the child did not carry that grief, and it is for that time, really that state of innocence, that the person seeks. And there are numerous ways to do this. One way would be to murder women who beat up children. That might be the path a very small number take for whom a vase is just one in an endless chain of similar abuses. Another perhaps would be to become a klutz, to have one accident after another to stay close to the place and time of freedom. This would be an example of being drawn like a magnet to receive negative attention. It isn't the attention that is sought or drives the action but the unconscious knowledge that ones prison door closed in such a place and can only open there. We called this backing into our traumas, the wrong way to do it. It is why humanity as a whole seeks to get near its self destruction without becoming aware of the real pain. So maybe, rather than saying we love negative attention, we should say we are unconsciously driven to it because we want to be whole again without going through the work and the pain required and in ignorance of our real situation. I spoke in the common language of how we love our addictions and compulsions because we would love to be whole again.