Why Do We Love to Hate?

If you vote for one party over another, you’re ”UnAmerican” (e.g. something, of course, despised by “true patriots”)…

 

If you don’t like what someone you know (or don’t know…) has said or done, you don’t just respectfully disagree, you send them hate mail….

 

According to the Department of Justice & The Southern Poverty Law Center, approximately 1 hate crime is committed every hour in this country…

 

The list can go on and on from headlines we see daily: or you can fill in the blank with something you’ve heard, said, or experienced.

 

The fact is, we seem to need to hate, whether it’s someone (demonized oftentimes for things they cannot control like their skin color or sexual orientation), or something (we use the word “hate” often and loosely, whether against a task as in “I hate having to write this report every month” or as we invoke our well worn hatred of taxes…).

 

The question is…why?

 

What purpose does hating serve us?  How does it improve our lives or the outcomes of our endeavors?

 

The obviously rational answer to the latter 2 questions is…it doesn’t.  We know this in our hearts, yet we do it anyway.

 

So that leaves us with the first: Why?

 

Unfortunately, even two graduate degrees in Counseling Psychology from Columbia University do not provide definitive answers to this most disturbing 21st century state of human affairs, but they may help, so here goes:

• Hating elevates our personal standing
  This one we all know or have heard of; when I devalue you, I become better than you in my own mind
  The operative words are “in my own mind”…. because in reality, spending time and energy devaluing others devalues you, not the other way around.  But those who walk through life on the edge, feeling insecure, fearful, inadequate, or otherwise living an “underdog” existence (known as perpetual victim-hood in psych-speak) will see no other course than to hate others to give themselves some needed significance

• It has become far too socially acceptable to “hate”
  From using the word far too loosely as I mentioned above (e.g. when we truly do not mean to “hate”), to getting positive reinforcement from peers for “putting that whoever/whatever in their place” with hateful language/intent, we are perpetuating hate without realizing it.
  Growing up, I was admonished for using the word “hate” in part because my parents understood that it’s far too strong a word to use so mindlessly, and in part because they grew up seeing what hate can do to the world (that would be Nazi Germany) and heartfeltly believed that it was unhealthy to think or speak in such terms.   We Boomers have allowed that to lapse, for ourselves and our children, setting a social norm as we have done so well all of our lives.  Our influence is huge in this.

• It is for too many of us the only thing that can bring us together, feel kinship or commonality
  Whether it’s “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” approach to life, or that we have become so insular in our lives that we don’t have (read “make”) the time to seek out commonality based on positive things like hobbies, community service, or sports – or a combination of both – it has literally become the easiest way to develop a connection with others.

• It’s easiest because we’ve been raised on negative gets the job done, not positive (nurture)
  As human nature would have it, our negative emotions (anger, fear, despair, etc.) are easier to access, remember, and hold onto - in essence, they motivate us much more readily than the positive ones.  For Boomers, that may be an artifact of our upbringing – if we did something right, well that’s just expected so we received no reinforcement…if we did something wrong, we heard about it big time and often didn’t live it down for a loooong time – so we were literally raised to believe that only when something is bad or wrong do we get step up…only when we hate…

• It’s easiest because as a species, humanity is still relatively barbaric (nature)
  Let’s face it….we still abuse animals and each other, we still wage war as a primary means to an end, we still love to see the bad guy get a good shellacking from the good guy whether with fists, feet, guns, or whatever blunt object is close at hand…
  Our basic animal instincts, although improved greatly from the days of the lions eating the Christians for the afternoon activity, are still far from mitigated let alone transcended.  And we seem to have too little collective will to change that.

Why we love to hate is no doubt far more complicated than these few thoughts; as complicated as there are humans on the planet.  But why we would want to continue doing it is for each of us to answer for ourselves.

 

At least you can no longer say you don’t know because you hadn’t thought about it.

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