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 attest 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
Israel. 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, conjure a synergy of 'head and heart' to produce 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 21st 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 buttons to launch the 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, because you didn’t
have insurance or the right kind of 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 money 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. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World.
==================================
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
10/16... changed a few words
10/10 and 10/11/25 ... lots of edits all day
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