Joumanah El Matrah: Hate doesn’t only exist at societies’ extremist edges – it’s how we run our politics

By Dilip -

The use of hate in society is a complex phenomenon, but psychologically, who and why we hate is much clearer. The motive of hate is to eliminate the other, whether that be real or symbolic. Hate evolves out of both real and imagined threats. When we hate another, we don’t just hate what they do, we hate who they are: we see them as inherently bad, morally inferior and we believe their intention towards us is malicious. What we hate about the other is their imagined innate nature. Once we come to hate, the hatred persists.

Psychologically speaking, hate has much more currency as a group feeling than an individual one. Hate is the great social glue that binds people together. Research demonstrates that socially, once unleashed, hate can permanently destroy relationships, and that misconceptions and biases once formed against an outgroup don’t necessarily change on meeting people from that group. Hate, like an emotional injury, leaves scars, not just on the hated, but also the hater. At the group level, we hate those who are different from us. We don’t need to know a person to hate them because of what we perceive them to represent.

There is nothing within the emotion of hate that is constructive or redemptive like other negative human emotions. It destroys both the hater and the hated. Hate and the persecution of minorities is something we appear to have accepted as part of our societies; racism, misogyny and the wide array of antis and phobias – such as antisemitism, anti-Arabism, or xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia and transphobia – is hardly an exhaustive list of our capacity to hate.... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/19/hate-doesnt-only-exist-at-societies-extremist-edges-its-how-we-run-our-politics

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