Essay: On Hate

 On Hate

Writing an essay on hate is a sprawling, fraught task, similar yet polar to writing about love.  The many potential uses and definitions of “hate”  form an unruly hedge maze, and even the most stalwart poet, wading in with an incisive pen, is brazenly naïve to attempt it.

My main stimulus for being so foolhardy is an imperative one:  we live in a time of extreme tension and division on a national and global scale.  Genocide is taking place in Gaza, conducted by Israel and the USA.  The latter country was the leader of the free world since the 1940’s.  But as of the election of Trump on that terrible day in history, 11/5, it is sinking into fascism.  There are similarities with the tensions in the 1930s, evidencing a high risk for world war.  In times such as these, many people are going to experience hate, for one reason or another.  Those of us prone to the emergence of this intense state need to find our best, most personal ways to deal with it and strive to use that knowledge for Good.

 

Key themes

Instead of trying to fully untangle the tentacles of the kraken, I work below with some basic points and themes concerning hate.  These inform a broad and somewhat desultory discussion, with overlapping and meshing components:

 

(1) Hate is an intense form of anger.  It can combine with rage, though it also has long-term manifestations, involving animosity, enmity, hostility and so on.  I focus in this essay on the sort of hate that is fully intense:  hate which involves fantasies about killing or torturing people, including oneself. 

(2) Given the above, the next point might seem shocking:  All things being equal, hate is not an immoral or unhealthy state.  It can be worked with therapeutically and artistically.  It is a common and normal human reaction that can be sublimated.  Video games, novels, and other forms of entertainment can be ways of ‘getting out’ hate--but this may or may not be healthy, depending on the context.

(3) Society has stigmatized hate so much that people don’t want to admit they experience it at all.  Even as hate rages around us right now, here in the USA, we don’t directly confront it.  This stigma and denial makes it easier for demagogic politicians to control their constituency through hate-mongery.  It also makes it more difficult to find healthy ways to acknowledge hate and seek out catharsis.

(4) Hate is not innately part of either a conservative or liberal politics.  However, hate is always part of fascism or other totalitarian systems.  These evil systems wed hate to an ignorance-based strategy of ‘big lie’ loyalty tests.  These tests foster a cult-culture of racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ and other oppressions, such as prejudice against certain physical conditions seen as “weak.” The Nazis had a “T-4” program of “euthanasia” for people with mental or physical disabilities.

(5) Although everyone has some kind of dark side, what Carl Jung called the Shadow of the psyche, a lot of people don’t experience hate as described above.  This makes it even harder for people who feel this violent passion to talk about it or get validation.

 

Daring to face the mighty power of hate

We need to face the power of hate, to study it, and elaborate on its nature.  Facing hate is the first step in loosening the grip of hate-mongery, the dark rhetoric plied by dictators. 

As I type these words, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons are poised around the globe, ready to launch.  If we let dictators weave webs of invidious speech, humanity will tilt in the direction of WW3.  Putin in Russia has already launched an invasion of Ukraine.  He has indicated that Poland is next, mimicking the aggressive expansion of Hitler before WW2.

Facing hate allows us to work with it, instead of being controlled by it.  This is crucial, because hate is often instilled in us and manipulated by others.  Two examples, which I discuss below, are (a) racist politicians and (b) the corporate ‘beauty’ industry.  The marketing strategy of the beauty industry attempts to create shame and self-hatred in women and girls.

I can say from my experience as a poet who channels darkly--someone who is a ‘sick soul’ to use the term of William James--that hate is one powerful fuel.   I dance with it as a fierce muse.

By ‘writing out’ my dark side, I find a salve for the soul.  It is an application of a more general therapeutic approach, in which painful emotions are confronted to gain self-knowledge, self-awareness and psychic competence (EQ).

Demagogic politicians want voters to feel hate in a different way, one that only those politicians can direct. They seek mass mobilization of violence-ready people.  Repeated exposure to insidious propaganda is so effective that people targeted by it are not even able to admit they are experiencing hate.

 It is absolutely crucial, from the perspective of such politicians, that their constituents do not find any way to work through their darkness except through the politician’s own needs and worldview.  The Maga movement in the USA claims it is not racist or sexist, even though the leadership is grossly disproportionate in being both White and male. 

If honesty gained any foothold, the entire castle of cards could fall down.

Incidentally, Maga stands for ‘Make America Great Again,’ which bears obvious similarity to Hitler’s own motto, which was “Make Germany Great Again.”

Isn’t hate automatically evil?

Oct 7, 2025 was the second anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israeli.  Israel, in return, initiated a genocide in the region of Gaza.  Home to two million people, Gaza had cities, farms, and communities full of life, family and vibrant culture.  Now it is a torturing field of rubble. 

Given hate’s association with the greatest of atrocities, why not immediately condemn this dark passion?  I argue in this essay that hate does not necessarily manifest in negative behaviors, let alone in vile and wicked ways.  Moreover, it can be a vehicle for virtue, to seek equilibrium and justice, if properly channeled. 

In one capacity, hate can be seen as the most intense version of anger or rage.  I have already written a blog essay defending the value of anger as a liberatory tool for justice and truth. 

I argued against the classic view of Thich Nhat Hanh, who says that anger is always an inferior, ignorant state [1].  He says things like:  “When someone is angry, we can see clearly that he or she is abiding in hell.” and “When you understand, you cannot help but love.  You cannot get angry.”

Anger has such a dismal status in Hanh’s worldview that its very presence in the mind means that you can’t love a person, not while feeling anger toward them.  This view chafes with common sense.   Many of us get angry at people we love, or hold anger toward them. 

Sometimes it’s a cat.  One of my responses to Hanh was, “In succinct retort to the idea that love requires understanding, I hereby state that, yes, I love my cat.”

 

Emotions and passions are not inferior to rationality

Hanh’s view accords with classic Western culture, in which emotions and passions are seen as separate from rationality and far lesser in stature.  Emotions are considered unruly and animal, dumb and willful, while rationality is pure and higher, the one true path. 

Plato said that our passions are like a stubborn horse.  We must rein the horse in and steer wisely with the separate, emotionless faculty of reason.  Christianity built on Plato's view, that the earthly world was a dungeon, associating the carnal with sin.

 

Another way to look at passion

There is another paradigm, a counter-movement, embraced by many philosophers and theologians, especially feminists, and also by neuroscientists and psychologists.  This paradigm recognizes that emotions can be wise and reasonable in themselves.  Philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that emotions and passions are “upheavals of thought” and can be, in some cases, a kind of “evaluative judgement.”

Passion can be blind.  But so can objectivity.  Objectivity can provide reasonable direction; but so can the evaluative judgements inherent in passion.  The best speeches ever given, such as those of MLK Jr, involve a synergy of 'head and heart' which produces searing, compelling arguments. 

 

Recent research:  Embrace your dark side

Recent scientific research shows that dark emotions should be engaged with.  Some articles in the New York Times provide a sample:

Don’t Shut Down Your Anger. Channel It
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/well/mind/anger-benefit-motivation-goals.html

Lean Into Negative Emotions. It’s the Healthy Thing to Do
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/well/mind/negative-emotions-mental-health.html

 

A quote from the second article:

 

The findings add to a growing body of research that indicates people fare better when they accept their unpleasant emotions as appropriate and healthy, rather than try to fight or suppress them.

“Many of us have this implicit belief that emotions themselves are bad, they’re going to do something bad to us,” said Iris Mauss, a social psychologist who studies emotions at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author of the new study. But most of the time, she said, “emotions don’t do harmful things.”

 

 

Our status quo is psychologically immature

In trying to study hate, one must overcome a massive resistance from the status quo.  Common culture, supported by very intelligent thinkers and writers, sees anger and rage as ‘things to be rid of’ or as outrightly and automatically evil.  Even more so for hate. 

We talk freely of love but we shut down our minds when hate comes up.  Love is wonderful. But it can have a dark side.  It can smother or cripple.  Can its counterpart, that is, hate, have healthy expression?  Or is it always just destructive?

Hate can be groomed in people as part of indoctrinating them into fascism.  And yet, consider a different scenario:   what if hate is felt toward racism itself?  And what if this hate--hatred for racism--is channeled into writing, art or physical action in service of protest ("good trouble" to quote John Lewis)? 

Ethicists call emotion toward injustice “moral emotion.”  People who experience intense moral emotion, including hate, and who learn how to sublimate it, can become powerful warriors in the fight against injustice.

 

A bit of a segue,  Leonard Cohen …

 

I don’t know enough about Leonard Cohen to even begin to critique him.  I am using Cohen because a friend recently introduced me to an interview snippet.  In the snippet, Cohen says that he strives to attain a “state of grace” through his poetry amid the “chaos of life.” 

That chaos, he says, never goes away; and yet poetry is part of how he manages, how he seeks out grace.  Cohen talks of getting ”disturbed” and yet poetry helps: 

 

https://youtu.be/5RT2SSw9JRk?si=yjr3yoIutQLVaCbL

 

On wiki, Cohen’s work is described as follows:

Themes commonly explored throughout his work include faith and mortality, isolation and depression, betrayal and redemption, social and political conflict, sexual and romantic love, desire, regret, and loss.

 

A question that comes to mind is this:  where does hate fit into these themes?  Love is mentioned in Cohen’s bio.  But what about love’s opposite?  Did Cohen ever experience hate?  What does he mean when he describes himself as “disturbed”? 

I could use any major artist instead of Cohen to make my point.  Has any wiki, or any bio anywhere, of a famous, well-known artist, ever mentioned hate as a theme?  I am referring to an artist exploring their own hatred, not simply studying it in others. 

Playing off the above wiki, it might go something like this:

Themes explored in their work include isolation and depression, betrayal and redemption, sexual and romantic love, desire, regret, loss, and hate.

I remember feeling a rush of excitement, of joyous truth, when an obituary for Adrienne Rich described her glowingly as “a poet of towering rage.”  For the first time in my introverted, hermetic life, I realized that I wasn’t the only poet fueled by rage. 

And that was fine.  It was a good thing.  My rage.

 

Case studies

Hate is only one of many dark passions that can be very self-destructive or destructive to others.  Sometimes those other dark passions play a role instead of or alongside hate.  In some of the following case studies, hate might not always be present.  Shame, for instance, might be the dark force instead.  Or Iago-worthy levels of envy.  Frustration, too, can boil over into mindless anger.

 

The case of depression

Depression is mentioned in Cohen’s wiki entry.  Depression is sometimes referred to as ‘anger turned inward.’  With suicidal thoughts, it is fair to consider whether it is not simply anger that is turned inward, but more precisely its most intense form, hate. 

When someone is cutting their wrist with a razor, leaving marks, or when someone stabs themself in the stomach with a knife, which someone very close to me did once, maybe it is schizo-delusional, a fantastical belief, such as the need to remove ‘a UFO surveillance device.’ On the other hand, it might be an expression of utmost anguish, and that could include self-hate. 

In my twenties, when someone asked me if I loved myself, I responded with “No, I hate myself.”  The easier response is to simply say “I’m depressed.” In American society, when someone says, “Hi, how are you?” they don’t usually want an honest answer, even less a deep one.

 A response of “I’m depressed” is relatively vague and therefore non-immediate.  What if people who are experiencing anger or even hate, instead of simply voicing the generic, “I’m depressed," could self-divulge and be empathically engaged?

When one reaches rock bottom, the first step up, after breaking out of numb immobility, is to admit the raw truth:  the brutal, agonizing, acute situation.  Vast shame.  Utter pain.  Total hatred.

 

The case of misogyny

The etymology of “misogyny” includes the Greek prefix “miso,” which means ‘to hate.’ 

The time in which you and I live, the early 21^st century, is part of a barbaric, primitive era of ignorance-based governmental systems.   We’ve mitigated some of the extreme cruelty of warlord-ism, but might-makes-right and fanatic loyalty tests still dominate our world.  Machismo and greed still rule. 

An example is how women and girls are flooded by ads from marketers, who are, as an intentional strategy, encouraging them to doubt their own self-worth, using their own bodies against them.  The monopolistic ‘beauty industry’ does its best to make women insecure, even teens or tweens, using techniques such as click-baiting on TikTok.  The main goal of these cupidinous corporations, by far, is to sell product.  They are not spending many millions of dollars on psychologists and marketing experts to advance the well-being or the awareness of society.  Under such constant and precise pressure, self-hatred for those in the targeted demographic, complete with body dysmorphia, is not uncommon.

We are not supposed to talk about this.  Women and girls are supposed to wear a smiley face, even when they hate their own appearance, thanks to the concerted efforts of their own culture to make them feel that way,  a complete disconnect from the façade of happiness.

Misogyny in advertising is yet another reason to seek healthy ways to talk about hate.  To acknowledge hate raises the possibility of finding causes, identifying and neutralizing them, and paving a path of light toward a healthy self-love.

 

A brief mention of shame

 Discussing shame and the hate it can cause, whether self-hate or the projection of hate onto others, is beyond the scope of this essay.  Shame is commonly defined as a “painful emotion.”  In technical articles it is given more fancy labels such as “negatively valenced emotion.” (2)  

Clearly a therapeutic approach to hate should involve dealing with the associated shame.   One recognized dynamic between shame and hate is that the former can cause the latter, whether turning it inward or employing the defense mechanism of projection to label others as shameful or hateful.

 

The case of hate-mongering

We are culturally blind to the power of the hate all around us.  We are not supposed talk about it , even while the President of the United States, Donald Trump, is constantly doing his best to sow hatred for scapegoats. Similarly, major US newspapers hardly ever use the word “racism,” even though racism is a virulent, inveterate, infective force here the USA.

The news sites most likely to use the word “racism” are those like Fox News, which hemorrhage propaganda for the far right. Their message is that White people, not Black people, are currently the victims of racism.

Recently, Donald Trump said, “I hate Taylor Swift.”  When a teen says something like this, it isn’t typically serious.  It isn’t hate at all, just a stark statement of pop-song preference.  But when Trump says these words, it fits a pattern of what is has been called “stochastic terrorism.”  An army of fanatic pro-Maga online trolls will send death threats, or otherwise make life miserable, when Trump indicates a target.

 

The case of personal hate

We aren’t allowed to say “I feel hatred” or “I am full of hate.”  Even saying this to ourselves, in private, looking in a mirror, is hard to do.  Our culture makes no space for it. 

It is not easy for me to do it--to say to myself, “I am full of hate”--despite having worked with this dark energy for many years.  I have felt its power, and channeled it to fight against injustice and its minions, such as society’s dull, miserable walls of silence and conformity.  

When I wrote the phrase “virulent, inveterate, infective force” above, I felt hate coursing through me.  It manifested in the words and so I gained some release.  An important part of that release is knowing my process is ethical and healthy.  I am not hating people.  Or groups of people.  I am expressing hatred for a means of thought control, that is, for racism itself. 

I can work with hate and feel good about the message and courage it took to write it out.  Channeling hate has been part of what has brought me my own self-love.  That said, I still feel shame at times, due to the stigma our culture slaps on hate. 

 

The experience of my darkness has been  essential to my coming into selfhood, and telling the truth about that fact helps me to stay in the light--Palmer Parker

 

Healthy hate versus unhealthy 

This might be the most controversial section.

Hate is good when it is sublimated in the fight against racism, sexism or other forces of evil.  As part of that sublimation one gains truth, honesty and catharsis. 

Hate becomes evil when it is co-opted and cultured by forces of evil to do their bidding.  Both good hate and evil hate provide a rush; for hate is a very strong passion that can fuel mighty behavior.

A demagogue gives their followers permission to hate and get a rush from it.  The demagogue, as well, harnesses that power to feed their own wounded ego.   People who are full of shame and, in some cases self-loathing, are particularly susceptible.  The demagogue supercharges that shame and gets the audience to project it onto others, for instance 'uppity' Black people or 'uppity' women. 

Circular hate

Part of the reason I hated myself in the past, ironically, was simply that I felt hate.  Hate, I thought, was always bad.  It became circular.  I hated myself because I was full of hate, which generated more hate. On and on.

I realize now there is a difference between well-channeled hate and ignorant hate.  Channeling hate in the right way has been part of what has brought me my own self-love and helped me to fight Evil.

Imagine if someone like Trump had found me before I figured this out.  He would’ve given me permission to feel hate--but only ignorant hate, hate for his own purposes and power, binding my soul and my loyalty to his narcissism.

 

Fantasies of killing other people, video games, chess …

In the final episode of Wayward (2025), a Netflix series about a cult that preys on troubled teenagers, the one character who escapes in the end, a Canadian girl named Abbie, says (paraphrase):

I see myself running over my father’s head with a lawn mower and spraying his brains everywhere.  But it’s only a fantasy, I would never do it in real life.

A lot of people have fantasies of killing.  A lot of people play video games or other games that simulate violence, such as the world’s most popular board game, which is the game of chess. 

Are these activities or imaginings wrong?  If we studied anger and hate, we might have a better idea of how to design games or prepare people to play these games with the right perspective.  We might be able to help people experience more healthy wish fulfillments.

I wrote an ethics review of the game of chess.  Considering positives and negatives, I provided a mental framework for playing this seductive game without forming an unhealthy self-image or worldview (3). 

Despite these dismal times, a lot of changes for the better have occurred in the last few hundred years.  One of the greatest moments in all of human history occurred in 1920, when women gained the right to vote in the US.   Incredible progress has occurred and more could happen fast, aided by the internet.   We have the brain plasticity and the cultural plasticity to rise and flourish (4).

In order to do so, however, we can’t let dictators and avaricious marketers control our powerful emotions.  They want to control us for their own broken purposes.  This is the path of immaturity, ignorance, and greed.  This is the path of arrogant, thin-skinned, saber-rattling men on golden thrones, who will push the buttons to launch missiles that destroy us.

A practical application:  Maga supporters

Many people feel intense emotional reactions, including hate, against scourges like racism, sexism and anti-LGBTQ.  But we also can find ourselves hating specific people.  We might experience fantasies of hurting or killing them.  As long as these fantasies are part of a sublimation process, they can be therapeutic.  Of course, such fantasies should never become reality.

It is virtuous and urgent to strive to find empathy for our fellow Americans, to recognize the similarities we have with them.  Martin Luther King Jr talked about agape:  spiritual compassion and love.  Agape works to defuse hate for individuals.  Racist behavior, in contrast, is always inexcusable and contemptible.  Hate the behavior, not the person.

 

We are all very human

The large majority of people devoted to Maga, leaving aside that tranche of their soul absorbed by a dark politics, are virtuous and loving.  They have many qualities that are admirable.  I can say, having read the words of Trump-supporters, hearing their stories, and knowing some of them myself, that many of them have done incredible things that I could never accomplish.  Some have survived brutal, broken dysfunctional nightmares in their own families--beaten, raped, mind-gamed, yelled at to the point of wretchedness--only to rise up and thrive.  Some have fought, been injured, or died on the battlefield, fighting for the ideals of the US republic.

Moreover, both Maga and non-Maga have suffered together as the US Empire has declined over the last decades, driven down by the chains of corruption and greed. 

US citizens endured together when our community members and loved ones died because a pharmaceutical giant, owned by the Sackler family, flooded the country with oxycontin.  In my town of population 1000, seven beautiful teenagers with potential for long, fulfilling lives died from overdoses.  The same happened in many rural communities across America.  In a town with a population of 1000, seven dead children is a vast tragedy.

We endured together when George W. Bush launched two corrupt wars, one to gain oil in Iraq. Each wars lasted well over a decade, due to lies and incompetence.  Bush, as well, in his glaring incompetence and fealty to corporate magnates, de-regulated the economy so much that it destroyed the global stock market, which cratered in an orgy of speculation on junk bonds.  The world was thrown into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

We have endured together, Trump-supporters and non, as the rich just get richer, while we still don’t have a basic right to see a doctor, let alone to afford one.  If we citizens do manage to get healthcare, there is a corrupt and bloated insurance industry waiting to take a huge chunk of our life savings.  Unnecessary insurance monopolies flood the entire medical system with onerous, bureaucratic paperwork designed to frustrate claims.   If someone gets cancer here in the USA, the cost of treatment means you could lose your house, your savings, everything you worked for all your life, all because you didn’t have insurance or the right insurance (and ‘right’ insurance is extremely costly, out of reach for many).

Americans as one--e pluribus unum--have suffered a ravenous greedy cruel and inhumane plutocracy.  I myself, if a benevolent dictator were running for President, would vote for that person.  The system needs an overhaul.  Both our political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, are broken.

 

The Republicans are the main problem

That said, the Republicans, who are now sliding into fascism, are far worse than the Democrats.  They have been for quite a while (5). 

In 2012, Thomas Mann and Norman J. Ornstein were very well respected in mainstream politics.  But they were shunned for writing an op-ed that included these lines:

 

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html >>>

 

The Republican Party is morally bankrupt.  And yet it is not individuals we should hate.  It is, instead, the demagoguery, hate-mongery, and ignorance deployed in order to chain people to avaricious, parasitic snake-oil sellers of corruption and graft. 

If we don’t end racism, it will end us.  The reason is that enervators like Trump will keep using racism to gain power and build armies.  So-called strongmen, more accurately called enervators, have their own albatross around their necks, a sociopathy which centers on macho egotism.  Invariably, a big-ego king, such as Putin, will invade a neighboring country, seeking self-aggrandizement through conquest. 

In another blog essay I discuss our 'Apotheosis Problem.'  (6)

In our day and age, such primitive, dysfunctional behavior could easily lead to an unwinnable nuclear war.  Civilization may soon be destroyed due to our cowardice, our inability to stand up to and say that the emperor has no clothes.

In fairness, what makes it hard to move is as much the menace from dictators--the sword of might makes right--as it is the difficulty of summoning enough courage to face our own fears.  

I myself feel I could go to jail within a few years, a 'radical left elite professor' who is an 'enemy of the state.'  It doesn't matter to fascism that I am an "adjunct," like 70% of the college instructors in America.  We adjuncts are contract-workers, with little or no benefits, constantly worried about not having our contracts renewed. We make about as much monesy as someone in the fast food industry.

 

William James, the Sick Soul versus the Healthy Minded

Not everyone is going to experience hate the way I have described it above.  People are constituted differently in terms of how they feel and express.  In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James distinguished between two kinds of character:  the sick soul and the healthy minded.  The former often dwell on the dark side.  James himself had long periods of depression.  The healthy minded are more peaceful in demeanor, more convivial, less likely to experience depression or hate. 

James never said that one or the other sort of person was better.  The sick soul and the healthy minded are both capable of great accomplishment.

Those of us with sick souls are not condemned to be evil.  But we are saddled with a stormy psyche.  Properly wielded, our violent passions can help us achieve euphoria, truth, creativity and knowledge to counter the dark spells cast by hate-mongers. We can and should be essential team members in the fight against Evil.

There are great powers outside the  government, and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness.  We are not great powers but we are the light.  Nobody can put us out.
     -- Ursula K. Leguin, Dancing at the Edge of the World.

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Footnotes

(1) https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2024/04/toxic-peace-in-every-step-thich-nhat.html

(2) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2025.2484383#d1e288

(3) https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2024/02/ethics-review-game-of-chess.html

(4) https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/05/draft-intro-of-my-book-better-angels.html

(5) https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2012/05/republican-crimson-tide.html

(6) https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/09/essay-apotheosis-problem.html

10/10 and 10/11/25 ... lots of edits all day