Morality Monthly: Why Does Hate Exist?

A Dose of Rationality Newsletter and Enquiries

“…Only the unloved hate. The unloved and the unnatural…”

—Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator

As someone who, as a general rule I have not yet found an exception to, does not experience the emotion of hatred against classes or groups of humanity, the existence of such a state of being has naturally puzzled me for as long as I have realized it is an actual thing that exists. Even when I consider the group of people that constitutes the hateful, I don’t hate them in and of themselves; I’m just disappointed, I guess, to know that there are people who hate the people that I love and also people that hate me personally despite never having met any of us.

As best I can tell, the numbers of hateful are increasing, and at an increasing rate. This is, I believe, an existential problem for our species; and as such, it is an excellently topical topic for today’s Morality Monthly, a publication which seeks to influence the direction of our ethical evolution.

What is hate? We may as well start there. Hatred does not seem to be the same thing as mere aversion. There is a popular saying, “The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.” I don’t know that that’s actually true. If it is, then would the other case hold true as well, that the opposite of hate is also indifference? Eh. Maybe so, maybe not; but in any case, it’s semantics. Hatred is active opposition. The working towards minimization of whatever the subject of the hatred is, with the ultimate goal being its local or universal elimination.

When it comes to my own personal nemesis—wasps—I can actually dissect the feeling of hatred from a personal vantage. How I feel about wasps is simple: I don’t ever want to hear or see or touch a wasp ever again in my entire life. Maybe it is more a phobia, but close enough. Any hatred carried to its logical end necessarily implies the nonexistence of that which is hated within the sphere of existence of the hater. This does not necessarily imply a universal elimination; a hatred of wasps does not mean that someone wants to rid the entire world of wasps, as that is quite impossible to do with our current scientific capabilities. Most people are happy to be NIMBYs with the target of their ire. But it is highly likely that if such a thing were possible, they would not oppose it. I would not oppose a wasp-free world; it would make future travel plans much more amenable, hypothetical ramifications for the environment and food chain be damned.

What gets lost in translation for me is the transfiguration of a hatred for insects into a hatred for fellow humans. These are not the same category of thing. To me, it is like trying to apply a color adjective to a dimension of time; ten minutes cannot be purple, and intrinsic classifications of humanity cannot be hated. Is ‘dehumanization’ a necessary part of the process somehow?

I guess I’ve never been able to view any member of our species as ‘subhuman’ as some do. Certainly it is a common trope in racist propaganda, ex. for antisemites to relate Jews to vermin or for white supremacists to call Africans ‘monkeys’ or other such nonsense. But it literally doesn’t make sense. Objectively, factually, it’s not at all true. We are all homo sapiens; intra-species differences between us are so minuscule as to be statistically insignificant. At best, it’s a convenient excuse for prejudice to try to shoehorn any of us into a different category of scientific species. The best science fiction reflects this reality; to an entity truly alien, all eight billion-plus of we humans are highly likely to be indistinguishable from each other.

Maybe hate is, as opposed to indifference, an unhealthy, unnatural obsession. An obsession with people whose business is no business of your own; and who in reality share so much in common with your own person that your prejudice against the most minute of differences can only be categorized as absurd. It seems to go hand-in-hand with an unignorable, unquenchable desire to permanently remove the target of the ire. Anger at the mere existence of the hated seems to be a related emotion; but again, it’s not the same.

I have felt anger against, for example, the perpetrators of October 7th. And against those who committed the Babi Yar massacre of ‘41. But do I hate them? I don’t think so. I think they were or are sick, sick individuals. I think there is something deeply, deeply wrong with someone that can commit atrocities like that. And it makes me angry, what they did. So very angry. But do I hate them? I…I don’t think I do. I genuinely don’t think I do or can. Hate them, that is. They’re people. Fucked up people, but people.

Maybe this is where I fail to understand. I don’t view groups of humans as purely groups; not really, because that is not fundamentally what we are. I view us as we really are: individual islands of consciousness, with idiosyncrasies that cannot be captured in a ‘collective psychology’ analysis alone. Group dynamics and group behavior are certainly important factors to consider; they seem to be where a great number of our pathologies originate. But when it comes to a singular individual, their own individual psychology is the defining, deciding factor.

This isn’t a “culture wars” argument. It is the individual decisions of hundreds, thousands, or millions of individuals that makes a culture in the first place. The many differences between a ‘collective’ society like Japan and an ‘individualistic’ society like America are still ultimately the result of millions of individual choices. The choices that an individual makes are what matter. They are all that ever matter when one is considering the “moral value” of a human life, if such a thing is actually a thing.

I want to make them better. Genuinely. I believe that no one individual of the human race is beyond saving. We are, ultimately, all only human. You don’t have to show me videos of the interviews with captured Hamas terrorists; I promise, I have seen them. Even then, I want to show them the light. The Nazis who lived during the existence of the Third Reich are mostly gone now; and honestly, good riddance. I mean, even in captivity, when all was lost for their ‘cause’, almost to a defendant at Nuremberg they demonstrated their unwavering allegiance to hatred. But even then—even then, I do not believe I could bring myself to have hated them.

Did Eichmann deserve to hang for his crimes near Jerusalem, in the Jewish state? Very probably, yes. Could he have been ‘saved’ from his hatred in any meaningful sense? Probably not. But would the attempt have been worth it anyway?

Ah, but I have rambled for long enough. There is, probably, much time left in my life to elaborate on the finer details of the philosophy of curing humanity of its hatred. And if there isn’t: well, at least I have begun the work. You can finish it.

This has been A Dose of Rationality’s Morality Monthly for June, 2026.

For a better humanity,

AR

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“Love is my religion.”

—Ziggy Marley