Why is there so much Hatred in the World?
There are myriads of reasons why there is so much of hatred in the world today. However, I have tried to highlight what I think are the significant reasons and how they can be addressed.
Our Trust has been Broken
We are afraid of one another. We no longer trust one another. Our trust has been betrayed.
Trust forms the basis of all relationships. And the desire to experience fulfilling relationships is at the core of life. The child trusts the parents to look after her/him. The husband and wife trust each other to be loyal and to have each other’s concerns at heart. We trust the educational institutions to give the best education to our children. We trust the government to provide the basic infrastructure to live, commute and work. We trust corporations to be fair and just in treating employees and creating a safe working space. We trust institutions to ensure justice, transparency and accountability as they go about trying to ensure society lives in a fulfilling manner. We trust law enforcement bodies to protect our rights. We trust our money in the bank will be safe. We trust our religious leaders to guide us. We take so many things for granted because we trust.
Life lives because of trust.
However today our trust stands shredded in almost every sphere of our lives creating a deep hurt which has developed into a suppurated ulcer. Having continuously been let down, our anger wells up within us and a spark is enough to transform that anger into a conflagration of hate. It may be a trivial incident of a car grazing another car which is sufficient to throw the floodgates of wrath open and result in the killing of people. There are too many frustrations fuelling our smouldering hate. It’s a blur. We are blinded with rage. The whole of life has let us down.
We need to rebuild our trust capital through being authentic. We need to listen with empathy and act with concern. We need to care. Each according to her/his capacity. Begin with oneself.
We are Superior; You Inferior
We have a penchant for dividing ourselves into categories which are binary resulting in an “us vs them” situation. Either black or white, good or bad, right or wrong, friend or enemy, superior or inferior and so on. And these binaries are applied to most areas of our lives like race, religion, gender, culture, caste, country or nation. This becomes the source of our identity. Anything which threatens its survival causes an upheaval within us. A revolt very often of unprecedented proportions.
Each of these areas viz. race, religion, gender, culture, caste and country or nation comes with a history. And manipulative leaders draw attention to wrongdoings perpetrated in the past and use them selectively to evoke a sense of righteous anger or fear of a potential threat. Both of which generate hatred. African Americans are blamed for the majority of murders of white Americans giving rise to the Whites targeting the Blacks. While the fears of the white working class are fanned by creating the impression of a lurking danger from “outsiders” coming to displace them from their jobs. As a result the Whites target the “outsiders”, migrants et al.
Because of our innate habit of generalising or stereotyping, we hate not just a specific individual but the entire category whom we have positioned ourselves against. So we will hate not a particular person but all Blacks, all Whites, all Muslims, all Christians, all Jews, all Chinese and so on as the case may be.
The sad part is in many cases we have created myths to justify our superior — inferior belief systems. For instance If we analyse the genes of all human beings they are the same. J. Craig Venter and Francis Collins who were responsible for sequencing the human genome have jointly announced at the White House on June 26, 2000 that human beings are 99.9 percent identical genetically. It is we who have created this artificial superior — inferior meaning for our racial differences. The differences, if any, arise because of our cultures and not our genes.
We are first in foremost human beings. To be respected and treated as such. We need to review our structures of meaning. We need to build a new civilisation.
Survival of the Fittest
We have become so firmly entrenched in our belief that the underlying principle of evolution is purely ‘survival of the fittest’ and that too in the context of the fastest, strongest, cruellest and so on that we fail to realise that Darwin also saw cooperation and ‘sympathy’ in evolution. He stated “Those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
We need to understand that we can realise our true potential and uniqueness not through adversarial relationships but through moving towards union with all the rest. As Teilhard de Chardin, the famous palaeontologist said “In any domain — whether it be the cells of a body, the members of a society or the elements of a spiritual synthesis — Union differentiates. In every organised whole the parts perfect themselves and fulfil themselves…The more ‘other’ they become in conjunction, the more they find themselves as ‘self’.” In cooperating with the ‘other’ we discover who we truly are and experience fulfilment. Our common humanity and unique individuality. Without the ‘other’ we will never know who we are. We need our enemies.
It is not ‘against’ but ‘with’ that we need to move forward.
Media Immersion and Weaponisation
The 1999 Columbine school shooting orchestrated by two students, Eric Harris aged 18 and Dylan Klebold aged 17 was based on the viciously violent video game “Doom”. In a videotape recorded before the massacre, Harris said the planned shooting would be like “Doom”. He also pointed out that the shotgun was “Straight out of Doom”. Both were avid enthusiasts of the ‘Doom’ series. Subsequently there have been many more school and other shootings in which addiction to media violence has played no mean role. The vicarious satisfaction one gets through seeing violence in media gradually metamorphoses into motivation to enact the same in real life.
We also see how social media is being weaponized. In Myanmar, Facebook was used to spread rumours and hate speech against the Rohingya population. Trolling to create discord and posting inflammatory messages online seems to be the new normal. Media taunts interact with gang violence. The new battlefield of ideologies is social media. We have reduced conscious dehumanisation of opponents in media debates to active entertainment. Even death has become entertainment in media as we see how often the video of the knee lock used on George Floyd has been shown on TV and other media platforms.
The use of media to spread hate threatens the well-being of humanity.
Martin Luther King Jr. said
“Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder the hate.”
To extricate oneself from the vicious cycle of hate one needs to understand that the hater and the hated are both suffering intensely. And for that we need to cultivate compassion. As Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk said
“Compassion is a mind that removes the suffering that is present in the other.”
We need compassionate minds to create a civilisation of love.
