Hate

I have been reading Howard Cohen’s weekly reflections at The Cohenization Project for several years now. His honest, inward looking writing got me thinking about hatred differently, not as something that invades from outside but as something already present in all of us. What follows is where that thinking led.

I always considered hate a virus. It spreads through contact, replicates in new hosts, mutates into new forms. But the metaphor is wrong. A virus invades from outside. Hate does not invade. It is already there, latent in the structure of the brain, woven into the dynamics of human groups, waiting. It is better understood as a force, like gravity or electromagnetism. It can be measured. It follows patterns. It can be amplified or dampened depending on conditions. And like any force, it will never disappear. It can only be contained.

The brain has a hate circuit. Neuroimaging studies show that when humans experience hatred, specific regions activate in the putamen and insula, areas associated with disgust and aggression, alongside frontal cortex regions involved in calculating how to harm. The brain prepares the body for action, mobilizing motor planning systems as though readying for combat. This is biology, not metaphor. The capacity for hate is part of what we are.

But hate is not binary. It exists on a continuum, and understanding where you fall on it matters.

At the mildest end is annoyance, transient and gone when the situation changes, leaving no trace. Dislike is more stable, a settled negative view of someone you can still tolerate, and it becomes part of how you categorize the world. Contempt goes further, placing you above and the other below, restructuring your sense of hierarchy and worth. Resentment adds the dimension of time, a chronic grievance that rewrites your personal narrative, casting yourself as victim and the other as perpetrator. Active hatred sustains the wish for harm, recruiting the brain’s reward systems so that the suffering of the target produces a dark pleasure that reinforces itself. And at the far end is obsessive hatred, consuming and identity defining, where the hater cannot let go because hating has become not something they do but something they are.

Each level carves deeper neural pathways. The brain learns to associate certain faces, groups, and ideas with threat and disgust. These associations become automatic, firing before conscious thought can intervene. The frontal regions that might moderate the response show reduced activity, as though the brake pedal has worn thin. In obsessive hatred, the patterns function like addiction, the hater returning again and again because the brain has learned to need it. Annoyance can be released. Dislike can be reconsidered. Even contempt can be challenged by encounter with the humanity of the other. But the further down the continuum, the harder the work to stop it because you are no longer changing a feeling, you are rewiring a brain that has organized itself around the hatred.

What activates this force? Fear. Prolonged fear, economic insecurity, the sense that one’s world is becoming dangerous and uncontrollable. These conditions trigger what psychologists call the authoritarian dynamic, a latent tendency to gravitate toward strong leaders who promise to restore order by identifying and eliminating threats. Fear makes people desperate for safety. Hatred offers them a target.

But fear only activates. Something else must feed the force to sustain it.

Propaganda feeds it by pairing despised groups with imagery of death, disease, and filth, activating ancient disgust circuits that bypass thought. Dehumanizing language feeds it by stripping moral protections from those categorized as less than human. Repetition feeds it, producing psychological numbing that reduces empathy regardless of who is suffering. And algorithms feed it. Social media platforms discovered that anger and fear keep users scrolling. They built feedback loops where engagement with divisive content produces more divisive content, where mildly inflammatory material pulls users toward the extreme, where outraged voices are amplified and moderate ones vanish. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that polarization began increasing precisely with the advent of smartphones and social media, that increasing social connectivity through platforms designed for engagement rather than connection actually accelerates the fracturing of societies.

Now artificial intelligence has multiplied these dynamics. AI systems are generating content calibrated to individual psychological vulnerabilities. They flood information ecosystems with synthetic material, making it impossible to distinguish authentic expression from manufactured manipulation. They automate dehumanization itself, producing hate speech faster than any moderator can remove it. If you are building tools that enable hate to expand its physics, you must ask whether you are doing good in the world or making it worse. If the honest answers disturb you, then you must decide what kind of person you want to be. You can choose your response to your circumstances even when you cannot control the circumstances. That freedom remains. There are people building in the opposite direction. My friend Peter L. O’Dell, CEO of Perdata Inc, is building Conexus with his partner Johan to connect rather than divide. Their motto: “People are here to connect. We are here to help.” Every engineer, founder, and investor faces the choice of what to build and why.

All of these forces were building for years. Economic inequality widened for decades. The 2008 crisis shattered expectations. Wages stagnated while costs soared. Platforms optimized for engagement. News media chased clicks. Politicians stoked grievance.

Then America elected Donald Trump.

His campaign deployed the classic pattern identified in studies of authoritarian movements: elicit victimhood, divide the world into two groups and demonize one as the cause of all problems, then promise cathartic release through defeat of the enemy. This transforms the discomfort of fear into the empowerment of anger, and anger into the intoxicating solidarity of collective hatred.

The data (thanks Perplexity) on what followed is unambiguous. Reported hate crimes nearly doubled after 2015. FBI data showed an anomalous spike concentrated in US counties where Trump won by larger margins, the second largest uptick in 25 years, second only to the surge after September 11th. Counties that hosted a Trump rally in 2016 saw hate crime rates more than double compared to similar counties that did not. Studies showed that exposure to his rhetoric made people more likely to express derogatory views not just about the groups he targeted, but about other groups as well. He refused to condemn white supremacist marchers. He called immigrants animals, the press enemies. Each provocation sent signals that the old rules no longer applied.

After his first term, the force was partially contained. Courts rejected his attempts to overturn the election. January 6th seemed like a breaking point. But the hatred kept festering because the root causes were never addressed (thanks Congress… thanks Biden…). Platforms kept optimizing. The Big Lie spread. Guardrails were dismantled. Infrastructure for the next attempt was built in plain sight.

Then Trump returned, and when you step back and see the whole picture, the scope of damage is staggering.

The American Psychological Association found that more than three quarters of adults rated the future of the nation as a significant source of stress, higher than personal finances, health, or work. Therapists report that intake forms increasingly cite politics as a primary trigger for anxiety, insomnia, and panic attacks. Federal workers have described overwhelming stress and suicidal ideation. The administration cancelled over 12 billion dollars in federal grants that funded mental health services, then moved to restrict the collection of hate crime data itself. Trust in the federal government sits near a 70 year low. A population trapped in perpetual alarm cannot deliberate, compromise, or innovate. That is not a side effect. It is the strategy. Shock and exhaust the public until resistance feels futile.

Meanwhile, Americans are spending more time alone than at any point in modern history. Twenty percent of adults have no close friends outside of family, up from 3 percent in 1990. Only about half regularly spend time in a public space like a coffee shop or park, down from two thirds in 2019. Church membership, union membership, and civic participation have all cratered. Those who report societal division as a significant source of stress are isolated at a rate of 61 percent and lose sleep at higher rates. Hatred thrives on exactly this kind of distance. It is harder to dehumanize people you actually know, easier when your only encounter with them is through a screen designed to show you their worst.

And the damage has gone global. The Trump administration made supporting European nationalist parties a stated element of its National Security Strategy. Vice President Vance attacked European democracies. American officials intervened in elections in France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the United Kingdom. The NSS described Europe as facing “civilizational erasure,” language that reads like a far right manifesto issued from the White House. The Alternative for Germany became the second largest party in the Bundestag. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won 142 seats in France. The Freedom Party of Austria won its parliamentary election. In my new home Portugal, the far right Chega party surged to 22.8 percent. The EU was forced to develop a “Democracy Shield” to protect itself not from Russia or China but from the United States. European favorability of America dropped by 8 points overall after Trump’s reelection, by 20 points in Denmark. A plurality of Europeans believe Trump has authoritarian tendencies. Another 39 percent consider him a dictator outright. Only one in ten believe he respects democratic principles. He welcomed Vladimir Putin onto American soil without a word of criticism, then withdrew from the World Health Organization, the UN Human Rights Council, and the Paris Climate Agreement.

Carnegie Endowment researchers describe a United States that has “repositioned itself to support autocracy abroad” while “indulging authoritarian instincts at home.” Think about that sentence. Then think about where we fall on the continuum.

Pew found that 80 percent of Americans say the two parties cannot agree on basic facts. Seventy two percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats view the opposing party as more immoral than other Americans, nearly double from 2016. The percentage identifying as politically moderate hit a record low in 2025. Sixty five percent say they feel exhausted just thinking about politics. The Polarization Research Lab found that reducing this animosity is remarkably difficult, that individual efforts run up against systems that reward outrage. Genuine dialogue remains the single most effective tool, and it requires long term investment. There are no quick fixes.

This is the sound of a population sliding down the continuum, from annoyance and dislike toward contempt and resentment, with significant numbers tipping into active hatred.

So where are you? Not in the abstract. Right now, today. When you think about the people on the other side of whatever divide feels most real to you, what do you feel? Annoyance? Contempt? Something darker? Do you feel satisfaction when something bad happens to them? How much of your day is spent consuming content designed to provoke outrage? When did you last have a real conversation with someone who thinks differently from you, not an argument, a conversation? When did fear begin to curdle into contempt?

The work that remains is personal.

Notice when you feel the activation, the rush of righteous anger, the disgust toward a group, the dehumanizing thoughts. Do not suppress them. Observe them with curiosity rather than identification. Going inward is the one domain not controlled by others exploiting you. That inner world can free you, even if you must eventually come up for air.

Seek out the humanity of those you are tempted to hate. Remember they too are afraid, they too have families and hopes, they too respond to a world they experience as threatening. This does not mean agreeing with them or excusing harm. It breaks the spell. Listen more than you speak. Ask about lived experience rather than debating abstractions. Shaming hardens more than it changes.

But be careful. Believing hatred is only a problem for the other side is the first trap. Progressives who pride themselves on tolerance can harbor intense contempt for conservatives. That contempt is itself hatred feeding the cycle. We believe we are black sheep, different from the flock. Painted any color, we are still sheep. Naive exposure is the second trap. Forcing people to encounter opposing views without structure often backfires. You will find that social media users exposed to posts from political opponents grow to hate the other side more. Believing facts alone change minds is the third. Identity and emotion are more powerful than evidence. And hopelessness is the fourth. Despair breeds passivity. But societies have recovered from periods of intense hatred before.

The great moral traditions converge here. Buddhism teaches that hatred is one of the three poisons, ended not by more hatred but by its opposite. Christianity teaches to love enemies. Ubuntu (no, not Linux) teaches that our humanity is bound to the humanity of others. Viktor Frankl observed that even when everything external is stripped away, one freedom remains: choosing one’s attitude, one’s response, one’s way of being. That inner freedom is the foundation of resistance to hatred, both from outside and within.

Hatred will not disappear. It is a force, and forces do not vanish. They can only be contained.

Start with yourself. I’m trying myself, and it’s difficult… just read my posts to see how difficult…