Hate is Sticky

Do you remember the rock group, the Turtles? Turn, turn, turn. Is there really a time to hate? I swear it’s not too late.

If you haven’t been under a rock during the past election cycle, you might admit that the Turtles were ahead of their time… fifty years ahead of their time, to be exact. We must have set a record for the most people saying, “I hate {fill in the blank}.” And for our nation, it seemed like it truly was a time to hate.

This got me wondering—what exactly is hate?

The Turtles correctly cited Ecclesiastes 3… according to the Bible, there is a time to hate! And for anyone who’s about to say, “Love the sinner. Hate the sin…” hold on to your sweet bippy! Hate isn’t a sin, and the Bible actually has quotes where God hates the sinner (Psalm 5, etc.).

Shocked? Read on.

Hate can be perfect, like when you hate something that’s bad. It can also be sinful, like when you hate something that’s good. And both kinds of hate happen all the time. You may even hate me for pointing that out.

;-)

Every language has a word for hate. It’s that universal. The French actually have a phrase, J'ai la haine which means, “I have hate.” Crazy, huh? But when pressed, few people, including the French, can really define what hate is—even psychologists admit hate has been understudied (The Psychology of Hate).

Let’s start with what hate isn’t—it’s not an emotion. Emotions are typically relatively short-lived, and their purpose seems to be to help shape the choices we make. While emotion plays a role in the choice to hate, hate is not an emotion. It would be better to describe hate as an attitudinal disposition—like “like” (pardon the wordplay).

To better understand attitudinal dispositions, think about the common phrase, “Eh… I can take it or leave it.” How many times have you said that?

Like and dislike are temporal dispositions of attitude where emotion isn’t required. As such, they can fade fast. You might like something today, and decide you dislike it tomorrow. That happened to me and bell-bottom jeans in ‘79. And I disliked Brussels sprouts pretty much my whole life, but recently I have started to like them—go figure. Yet, I used to say, “I hate Brussels sprouts,” and never really questioned what that meant.

If you reference the Attitudinal Disposition diagram above, dispositions can be measured on a scale of fundamental force polarity…

• It’s like what we see with two magnets—they either attract or repel depending on their polarity. There’s no emotion involved. And like magnets, we are attracted to, repulsed by, or indifferent to any object or person we encounter.
• Like vs. dislike are the unemotional attitudinal dispositions we develop towards something or someone that demonstrate different polarities. I was attracted to bell-bottom jeans for a season, but I wasn’t very emotional about them—I liked them.
• Emotions have a different scale to them. This scale intersects fundamental force polarity. We have words… many words… for the vast intensity-range of any single theme of emotion on this scale. For example, hostility may be simply a mere unfriendly feeling that’s less intense as the strong displeasure we feel in anger, which in turn, pales to the even stronger feeling of animosity.

An interesting thing happens when we choose to mix stronger emotions like anger with non-emotional attitudinal dispositions such as dislike… the two separate things combine, crossing a threshold into something different—almost like iron and carbon alloy, under heat, to make steel. Upon making that choice, any time we think about the person or thing in question results in activity in the middle frontal gyrus, right putamen, bilaterally in the premotor cortex, in the frontal pole, and bilaterally in the medial insular cortex of the human brain—all at the same time.

Simply put, hate is a mental alloy of anger and dislike.

A good question about hate is which of those two binding agents comes first into our minds? Do we first feel anger towards something (curve 1 in the diagram) which drives repulsion, or do we first feel a repulsion (curve 2 in the diagram) which drives up anger?

Curve 2, the idea that a disposition can drive emotion, faces some interesting challenges, like if we dislike something, what would cause an increase in emotion? Is it perhaps continued exposure to it, or could it be gained knowledge of more details that increases emotion? This would require an evaluation of persistence vs. learning that result in emotion to better understand.

Regardless of how you may arrive at hate, it seems to be a matter of choice—to combine anger and dislike, resulting in something very sticky and long lasting. Once it’s forged, it can be very difficult to un-alloy it, and, frankly, it’s totally impossible if you don’t want to un-alloy it. It requires another choice to be made to un-alloy hate, separating it back into anger and dislike—and even then it’s going to take some effort… like me and Brussels sprouts.

What can we do with this revelation?

Sticky hate can be either perfect (hating something bad) or sinful (hating something good). If you think of hate as a permanent warning light on your dashboard, wouldn’t it be annoying if it went off every time you were driving well? That would really tick me off. Sinful hate is just like that… a warning light that just keeps going off all the time when something good is trying to happen to you.

Realizing how sticky hate is, and how easy it might be to get it wrong… shouldn’t we carefully think before making a careless choice to hate?

Perhaps we should take a sober inventory of all our prior “times to hate”—turn, turn, turn.