Hate

Why do we hate one another - and how can we stop?

How and when does conflict metastasize into hatred? Dessa picks apart the science of hostility, with help from a criminologist who identifies the tipping point between prejudice and hate, and an Israeli psychologist who's studied one of the longest conflicts in the world today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
It's springtime in Minneapolis, my hometown. The snow is melting
on a lot of signages on display, signs posted on
people's lawns, taped to their windows, attacked to their doors,
and one of the most popular reads, hate has no
home here. Maybe you've seen that sign too. There's an
online map full of pins where they've been spotted, from
South Korea to Somalia. That sign campaign, started in two

(00:26):
thousand seventeen by a group of neighbors in Chicago, means
to resist bigotry and to extend kindness to people on
the margins of our society, and the spirit of the
sign is unimpeachable. But the literalist in me wonders what
that phrase really means, Like do the people who live
in those houses permit themselves to hate a concept like bigotry?

(00:49):
Late at night over drinks with friends, would they admit
to hating extremists of the opposing party? Are we allowed
to hate hate groups? This is deeply human The show
about why you do what you do I'm Dessa host
and fellow human being often overwhelmed by the victual and
violence on the news and in the social feeds. So

(01:09):
the question to jure is how does hurt or anger
metastasize into hatred? Why do we hate one another? And
how can we stop? Also, even though the topic is
necessarily heavy, I promise this isn't a lay face down
on the carpet, because why even try any more kind
of episode? Even the dark stuff needs a little light.

(01:34):
When did kids start saying I hate you? Probably those
words would come out either just before or just after
three years old. That is Emma Carlson who goes by
M she's a clinical therapist who works with kids and adolescence.
The word hate may come out because they don't have
any other language for it. Their vocabulary is so limited.

(01:54):
You have a four year old, I do? Have you
heard it? Oh? Yes? She was very, very ticked off
that I wouldn't let her jump off of her bed
onto the floor she was living. You know, my sweet, kind,
empathic little person just became this ball of rage that

(02:14):
would cry at the drop of a hat and would
throw a tantrum over what I would consider next to nothing,
Such big emotions coming out of this tiny, tiny body,
and she would go I hate you, And then like
does the clinical part of you know, like, ah, this

(02:35):
is just simply, you know, a child struggling with verbal
skills to express frustration. Absolutely, and like my head notes that,
but my heart was breaking. Everything that I had, you know,
thought I had dealt with about my relationship with my
mom just became completely unearthed. And it was the catastrophic
thinking of, Okay, she hates me. Now it is just

(02:57):
going to get worse. The thing is, M does hate
her own mom, or at least she did for a
big part of her life, and so hearing that word
from her daughter delivered more than the standard jolt of pain.
We'll come back to M and her trials with her
own mom, but let's switch gears for a minute. Most

(03:19):
of us, if we're lucky, don't feel hatred towards members
of our immediate family. The place we might be most
likely to encounter hatred his online, and you might be thinking, well,
on social media, hate's gonna hate. That's just part of
the deal. But global agencies are taking it seriously. The
United Nations called for a regulation of hate speech on

(03:39):
social media, as the recipient hate online feels like bedbugs
of the mind, and when you are not around them,
you kind of still feel them crawling in your head.
That's Dylan Marrin, who I met as an actor. He's
tall and slim, thoughtful on a goofy with a signature

(04:01):
flop of dark curls. And in the years since we met,
he's become known as a cultural critic, particularly for a
series of online videos that championed progressive causes so GLBT rights,
media representation, feminism, and some of his stuff has gone viral,
like viral, viral viral. People who say it doesn't exist

(04:24):
are full of today. I'm on boxing, police brutality, the
two biggest videos. I think we're like fifteen twenty million.
The higher his star rows, the spici or the comments
section got, people who disagreed with the ideas in Dylan's
videos started writing some really, really foul stuff about him online.

(04:45):
He created a file on his computer called the hate
folder where he keeps screenshots. Let's see, uh, you are
cancer and another person said, please decapitate yourself. I remember
one person wrote that they wanted to hear the sound
of my septum crushing under their fist. Was there some

(05:08):
part of you that celebrated the haters because it meant
that you were touching a nerve, or that you're doing
something important. Oh my god. Yeah. The first time that
I started getting it, I was like, oh my god,
like I I can't believe like I matter enough to
be hated. If you're going to speak truth to power,
you gotta brace for blowback. And for a second it

(05:29):
was easy to ride pretty high on that buzz of righteousness.
Both of these things are true at the same time, right,
it is incredibly psychologically damaging, and also I felt that
they were proof of my power. You are just like
I am, the king of the world. Over time, Dylan

(05:54):
started to believe that, in an important way, social platforms
were bringing out the very worst people people, including himself.
The most negative thing you can write, which is also
confusingly and dangerously sometimes the funniest thing that you can write,
that is easiest to upvote, because hyperbole and intensity is
what cuts through online. Dylan recently wrote a book about

(06:19):
his experience, and I read it on a plane, nodding
athletically for much of the ride. As an indie musician,
I spend a lot of my time online more than
I would like, promoting tours or albums, and I've seen
how a clever diss rises like a hot air balloon.
Over more nuanced perspectives. And I too have screenshot at
hateful messages where people question my gender or call me

(06:41):
names you can't say on the radio, and I fixated
on those words. I've lost sleep more of them. I've
carried mace, afraid somebody might bring that aggression to the
world outside the screen. And the way that my friends
tried to comfort me sounds a lot like the way
that Dylan's friends tried to comfort him. Forget them. They're
just sad, lonely guys who live in their mother's basement.

(07:04):
And it's like, well, first of all, if they're sad,
I too feel sad many times. If they live in
their mother's basement, I also lived with my mom for
a long time post college. Like I get it, you know,
like that's relatable to me. One night, Dylan started clicking
through the profile of a guy named Josh, who had

(07:25):
written to tell him that being gay is a sin
and also that Dylan is a moron. But sifting through
Josh's posts humanized him. For Dylan, it really is like
sending a hate letter and then paper clipping, you know,
photos from your family reunion, a partial family tree, and

(07:46):
your resume as you send it. There was one post
where he talked about being alone on a Friday night.
There were so many posts he made about like crying
at a movie, about feeling alone and wanting to hang
out with someone, and I just saw myself reflected in him.
Almost on impulse, Dylan reached out to Josh, who was

(08:09):
a senior in high school and having a pretty horrible
time of it. I was just angry about it all.
It was just a lot of it was a build
up of all your multiple videos you made of Dylan
offered that he'd been bullied in high school too. Josh
had a lot of family and law enforcement, and a
video that Dylan had made about police brutality had pushed

(08:30):
a tender spot. How do you feel that people like
you and me can have productive conversations. I think that
if you're trying to have a conversation with someone that's
completely different than you, then take everything away that makes
us different. In the conversation was not a total kumba
yah full of tearful epiphanies, but it was a conversation,

(08:52):
and Josh apologized. It was a person who was like,
this is who I am, and I'm really sorry that
I hurt you. Dylan went on to have lots and
lots of conversations with people who have written awful things
about him, and he just published a book about what
he's learned. It's called Conversations with People who Hate Me.
That's the one I read on the plane. And his
takeaway from all these exchanges. Our tendency to write people off,

(09:17):
to dismiss haters as trolls. It's just fundamentally flawed. It
is this fantasy we tell ourselves that the people who
write negative things online are one type of person, and
the word troll evokes this image of this distant monster
who lives under a bridge, and we are the good

(09:38):
and noble townspeople who are tortured by this monster. As
Dylan writes, their entire lives are not built around tormenting
the villagers. On the contrary, they are fellow villagers. We're
often really eager to recognize other people as haters, but
real slow to name that impulse in ourselves. That's documented

(10:01):
in formal psychological surveys too. When asked if they hate anyone,
most people say no, but a significant number of people
say they've been subject to hate. However, that pattern doesn't
hold in communities that have been locked in long term
violent conflict. In that context, some people will announce flat
out that they just hate the other side. I served

(10:24):
as an officer in especially unit in the in the
Israeli Army. It's mandatory in Israel, so everyone is serving
in the army, and twenty four years ago I was
very very seriously injured in Lebanon in a fight with
Bah soldiers. I was hospitalized for for a very long time,

(10:46):
for almost four years. Both of my hands were paralyzed
for a very long time. They weren't functioning. That is
around helper and professor of social psychology at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem in Israel. He now studies the psychology
at play in long term intergroup conflicts like the one
that's plagued the region he was born into, the one

(11:08):
that's consumed generations of Palestinians and Israelis. And the questions
that have motivated his life's work are the same ones
that came to him as healing injured in a hospital bed.
You really have a lot of time to think do
we have to be in this situation? There must be
something that we can do. People don't want to keep

(11:28):
on hurting each other and killing each other? Why do
people hate? Ran spends his time trying to find out
what hate is, exactly how it works, and how it
might be stopped. I don't see hatred as an extreme
version of any other emotion. I don't think that hatred
is an extreme version of dislike. I don't think that

(11:49):
it's an extreme version of anger. Ran doesn't use the
term in the same way that we do casually, the
way we might hate lima beans or the nasal whining
of a particular up star. That stuff wouldn't qualify. If
I feel hate, I don't hate the action that this
person did. I hate the person it set. They did

(12:10):
something wrong, and they did it because you know this
is who they are. It's in their nature or character
or culture, and this can never be can never be changed.
You might be angry at someone for stealing from you,
or you might hate them for being an irredeemable thief,
and it runs work. To hate another person or group

(12:32):
is to perceive them as intrinsically bad or evil, a
threat to you or those you care about. Are there
certain personal characteristics that makes some people more prone to
hatred than other people? Definitely, people who hate are people
that cannot tolerate ambiguity or complexity, and for them it's
much much easier and in many many ways also addresses

(12:55):
their like psychological needs to somehow see the world as
you know, black versus why, the good versus the people.
Addan has spent his adult life trying to understand hatred
and quantifiable terms, analyzing data and looking for trend lines.
M the therapist we spoke to earlier, spent many years

(13:18):
sorting through the messiness of her own personal hate before
she started working in clinical terms. The relationship with her
mother had been difficult for a long time. M's mom
had berated her since she was little, but there was
a specific moment when all that strife jelled into something stronger.

(13:38):
My mom had stayed home from work, which was happening
more and more frequently, and she was so hungover she
fell down on the floor of the kitchen and had
a seizure in front of me. So like, I called
the paramedics, and I called my dad, and and then
it just never got talked about ever again. M was

(14:00):
sixteen at the time of the kitchen episode. Nobody checked
up on her to make sure she was okay afterwards,
and that disregard broke some last straw inside her. M
was not swept up in a tantrum. She realized that
she just really and truly hated her mother. It was
easier to put all of those feelings into just kind

(14:21):
of like a ball and just bury them down and
hold onto them so tightly. I was so angry. I
was so angry. M cut ties and with a very
sharp knife. Her mom called clearly and precarious situations struggling
with addiction and her own mental health crises. But M
was just done. When she got engaged, she decided not

(14:44):
to invite her mother to the wedding. I clung to
that hate sometimes. It was the only thing that kept
me going. A Hatred can be effectively used as fuel,

(15:04):
and not just by those of us trying to traverse
thorny and painful personal relationships. Institutions with global influence have
tried to harness hate too. It was a fascinating study
that found that after World War Two, only a tiny
fraction of soldiers actually fired their guns at the enemy,

(15:26):
and those that did fire their guns very often intentionally
missed their targets, their human targets. So after World War Two.
When it was discovered this was the case, military leaders
decided to initiate psychological training programs which resulted in a
massive increase in the willingness to kill in a war setting.
That is hate crime expert Matthew Williams. He's professor of

(15:49):
criminology at Cardiff University, and there he was describing the
psychological programs employed by the U. S Military to increase
kill rates after the Second World War. The army started
using man shaped targets instead of bulls eyes and tried
dispersing responsibility for killing throughout the troops or to place
it onto an authority figure like the commanding officer. They

(16:11):
also aimed to recast the enemy. One side is told
that the other side is in some way subhuman. They
are akin to say, parasites, they are cockroaches, their vermin
for example. So if hate can cause violence, and what
causes hate, Matthew identifies what he calls accelerance, social or
psychological forces that push people to hatred. So a social

(16:34):
force might be, for example, a condition on economic condition
where competition is fierce because the resources are incredibly scarce.
In situations where resources are scarce in times of economic downturn.
For example, we saw it in two thousand and eight
with the crash. Division grows in an environment where money
is really tight, For example, people might fight to obtain

(16:56):
resources for themselves in their community and denigrate other people
who are trying to do the same. That's a social excellerant.
The second type of excelerant is psychological. For example, a
trauma that's happened to a person in their lifetime. Say
they've been unemployed for a very long time, and they
feel shame, embarrassment the way their life is developed, and

(17:17):
then they're told by a political leader that it's not
their fault that they are unemployed, and in fact, it's
the fault of immigrants because they're taking all the jobs.
Then all of a sudden, this psychological trauma is being
weaponized in a way that demonizes an outgroup. The social
excelerant job scarcity, compounds with the psychological excelerant humiliation, and

(17:40):
Matthew says that if those forces bear down hard enough,
hatred is forged in the pressure, and hateful sentiment can
become hateful action. I was a victim of a hate
crime around twenty years ago when I was standing in
a gay bar in London. I lit up a cigarette
and someone asked me for a light. I offered, and

(18:01):
within seconds I was on the floor and I looked
up at my attacker and they used a homophobic slur.
Two other men were in on the assault. Queer bashing
was the name for that kind of attack. Then it
wasn't about robbery or personal conflict. It was more like sport.

(18:22):
Matthew remembers hearing their laughter as they left. They didn't
hate him personally. Their contempt was for his general way
of life. The hate in hate crime overlaps or maybe
blurs into other terms like bigotry or moral disregard. After
the attack, Matthew lay on the floor, bleeding from the mouth,
head ringing. He's never held his partner's hand in public since.

(18:47):
He became obsessed with the question of his attackers motives.
What could those guys have possibly gained from beating him up.
I was looking for something concrete to separate them from me.
I was looking to see that there was something maybe
you know they are so different from me because biologically speaking,
they are fundamentally different. I wanted to find that, but
I didn't. The surprise for me was that We're all

(19:09):
capable of hatred. Given the right set of circumstances, anyone
can become the attacker. Because all my attackers were young
black men, one of my concerns was that the attack
may have changed the way I think about young black men.
As the saying goes, hurt people hurt people were subject

(19:33):
to different accelerants, and our ability to cope with them
varies two but none of us are immune to them,
and Matthew was self aware enough to guard against his
own experience pushing him to reactionary or retaliatory attitudes of
his own. There's an onus on all of us to
prevent our particular pains from calcifying into general prejudices. Without

(19:56):
willful intervention, hate can have a very long life span.
Back to Iran, a psychologist ask Israelis today what does
it mean to be in Israel? And five out of
the first seven things they will say would be related
to Palestinians. You know, we're better to them, We're more
more than them. They want to damage or hurt us

(20:19):
in many ways, and we have to stick together to
cope with that situation. Would it be too much to
say that a sense of hatred that feeling hatred can
unite people are definitely unfortunately. I think that in many, many,
many ways, hate is the ultimate glue that brings people
together into groups. Probably the most powerful, extreme and also

(20:44):
mobilizing emotion is hatred. In the cartoon studio of imagination,
it's easy to picture people and the grips of hate
as looming over others, victimizing the less powerful. But according
to Iran, those who actually experience hate understand themselves as victims,
like they're on the right side of a moral battle,

(21:05):
defending a way of life and their virtues from an
enemy hell bent on their destruction. Given that hate is
so morally salient, so effective at connecting us and motivating action,
how would we ever hope to quit it? Matthew the
criminologist says, our efforts have to start early. You cannot

(21:28):
turn off the cultural tap to prevent the information flooding
into the brain. So this is why when trying to
initiate anti racist policies, anti racist initiatives, this has to
be done at a very young age. We have to
start under the age of eleven, at least under the
age of eleven to see real differences That idea rests

(21:50):
on several studies of children's brains which indicate that fear
responses to black faces are learned. They don't show up
when kids are little, but they do by adolescents. But
of course we can't just wait for an improved crop
of ten year olds to grow up and save the world.
What works to stop people from hating? So that's the
million question. I think when people hate it is driven

(22:12):
by a more general idea that, you know, people and
groups simply cannot change. But in his formal studies, and
has found that if you can convince people that change
is possible, not even in the context of the group
with whom they're in conflict, but like generally, that people
can evolve over time, then it's possible to make some headway.

(22:33):
In two thousand eleven, Science magazine published the findings of
one such study. So we talked about the fact that
in the history people change and groups change their views,
their attitudes, and their behavior. We managed to reduce their
levels of hatred towards the other group in almost and

(22:55):
that sort of reduction might have real consequences in the
kind of policies that people would can sit her endorsing,
and by that also to increase their willingness to engage
in actions that would you know, entail making huge compromises,
political compromises in order to promote peace. So just by
convincing that the groups can change, we decreased hatred and

(23:19):
increase people's support for compromises. Now back to M, who
sees no promise of any compromise with her mom. But
this point in her story, she has spent years hating
her mother. The hallmark version of this story would involve
a reconciliation. That's not the real life of the story,
absolutely not. As M moved through her adulthood, the hate

(23:44):
that had at one point served as an engine became
an anchor. When I got married, I was like, I am,
I have to let this go. I have to let
it go. That's easy to say, but hard to do.
For M. That didn't mean mending fences. It just meant
letting go of the electrified wire feelings that I have

(24:07):
towards my mom. It's often easier to feel nothing about
her than it is to feel anything about her, so
I try really hard most of the time to feel
nothing about it. Do you think falling in love with
your husband helped to fall out of hate with your mom. Yeah,
I think so, And in turn it allowed me the
permission to fall back in love with myself. I became

(24:30):
a much better student at school when I stopped hating
my mom. It's probably a correlation not causation thing, but
I had so much more time and energy to put
into school, which I love. Even after everything, I do
have to thank my mom because without her I would

(24:50):
not be in the career that I am now. It's peace.
It's not the best of all possible pieces, or the
one that she designed if she were in charge, but
it's peace. Even when a war ends, it doesn't mean
the underlying conflicts do. The pressures of our lives, social

(25:14):
or psychological, can move us to hate one another. Binary
thinking that casts some groups as virtuous and others as
villains can make us more susceptible to hatred. When we're
de personalized to one another on a forum like the Internet,
or as a product of propaganda, it's easier to hate
somebody who doesn't seem fully human. Moreover, hatred might take

(25:37):
special vigilance to stave off, because when you're in it,
it can feel not only justified, but righteous. I hope
that posting a sign outside that says hate has no
home here is a comfort to our neighbors, particularly those
that look, love, talk, pray differently than us. But we'd

(25:58):
probably do just as well to routinely search insider houses
for any sign that a small tendril of something uninvited
hasn't come up through a floorboard, disguised as high minded
indignation or moral purity, but capable of cracking the foundation nonetheless.
Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American public

(26:20):
media co production with I Heart Media. It's written and
hosted by me Dessa. Find me online at Dessa on
Instagram and Dessa Darling on Twitter. What is a vampire facial?
How did a plastic surgeon come to be one of
Brazil's national icons? Is a makeover a healthy ego boost

(26:43):
or a concession to a pretty messed up cosmetic industry?
On the next Deeply Human, we're investigating beauty ethics and
the intersection between them.