Hate

South Korea to Somalia. That sign campaign, started in two 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? 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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

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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.