Sign into an existing account

There's different ways in which hate can be expressed.

Not just through violence, but also through other means.

Like getting up and telling the truth, be it whistleblowing or speaking something true but suppressed or ignored because it's unpopular.

Or forwarding a philosophy that's In stark contrast to the most acceptable ones.

Setting boundaries, such as that you shall not engage in some interaction with a person or group that offends you, on a temporary or permanent basis.

Leaving or leading an exodus, as in the example of the abused partner in a relationship.

And a variety of other ways.

The poin here is that hate is not as stupid a thing as people think it is, it's actually a lot more conducive to survival than the alternatives, which get you killed.

The universality of the capacity for hatred is a testament to that reality, making decisions based on statistical likelihood and pattern recognition is smart, even when it leads to some amount of false positives, coming to every instance on its own with no prior is a recipe for ones own destruction and repeatedly being taken advantage of.

A good compromise is to come in with priors, but modify your initial assumptions based on likelihood and patterns of experience to suit the instance using the information gleaned about it from one's experiences of that instance.

For example, if every green candy makes you sick, you might avoid eating green candies if you don't want to get sick, if you live in a culture thay views the avoidance of green candies as a moral evil, and views the claim thay green candies make you feel ill as an immoral statement, then you might feel trapped and form one of two positions.

Pretending that all candies are complete unknowns, with no statistical chances of causing illness being attached to them, or the attitude that you should take the resolute stance that all green candies make you ill, or the attitude most supported by society that all green candies are 100 percent safe, or just as likely to cause you illness as any other color of candy.

But let's say there are some green candies don't make you sick, and while they may look like the green candies that do, there's some tell signs that give away the safe green candies.

The former situation closes off the idea of inspecting the green candies in particular before eating them, as it shows that you doubt green candies safety.

You are forced into either eating all green candies and being far more likely to fall ill, or refusing them, and suffer the negative consequences from your society as someone who doesn't eat green candies.

From the evo psych perspective, in the absence of social pressures, avoiding green candies altogether is the course favored by natural selection, your inspections might let pass a green candy that makes you sick for one which doesn't.

But with the addition of societal influences, now we have a selfish gene situation where we have two survival instincts at odds with each other, you need to avoid being sick, but also to avoid being attacked by a society whose morals you had violated.

Inspecting each candy also comes at a cost beyond the risk of a false negative getting through and making you ill of you do it regardless of color, we have limited time, energy, and resources available, furthermore, we'd lose social standing by doubting every candy we come across, just as if we rejected a candy color that our society favors.

We can also see the more far reaching consequences of such thinking, it spreads around, in that any society runs on trust, without it, people will fail to follow the laws that exist, or treat authorities as authoritative, people will not help one another, and will grow distant from one another, as relationships are formed on trust as well, in fact, every facet of society gets worse.

That's the true result of approaching everyone as if they were a complete unknown without any prior assumptions, that's not a world where everyone universally trusts everyone else to be good, it's a "who goes there?" Type situation of universally applied paranoia.

That's also evolutionary, you have a better chance of survival with approaching new and unknown things with caution and worst assumptions than with taking the opposite approach, which gets you a darwin award with one encounter of a dangerous instance.

It's not stupid stupid have prejudices, it's stupid not to develop them, however, it's best to be able to modify your prejudices over time as new data comes in.

This third path is completely shut out of discourse by both halves of the political divide on this issue.

Ironically the problem is that everyone makes assumptions and their prejudices lead them to the blanket rejections of prejudice.

Just as the anti racists spew the most hateful language against the particular groups that are deemed acceptable to hate in our culture, and call themselves fighters against hate.

Because as I said the instinct to hate is innate, and when certain channels are denied, others open up with far more pressure, like the anorexic that will become a binge eater if they could be given one food that doesn't count as food.

Like how a lot of our violent impulses are redirected to increasing extremes in entertainment and leisure activities, like sport, or how pornogrqphic tastes become so much more depraved in those who are denied sex.

If a robot that is exactly like a human doesn't count as a human, what kinds of things would we then do to them that we are denied to do with other human beings?

People will fanatically defend discrimination based on race, in the name of combating racial discrimination, because that's their pressure release valve, they need some exception that doesn't count.

If hating someone doesn't count as hate, then all those natural passions instilled instance bh evolution yet denied to us by society will come out in full force upon them.

The hate towards this specific target becomes more and more vicious and irrational, as we were when white people get blamed for things that other races had done, and even for their mere existence.

That's the nature of a scapegoat, you kill the goat for the crimes of the townsfolk, so that they will not have to deal with the messy matter of who had done what, and what should be done about it.

In many ways, the need to preserve social harmony by refusing to address such problems is also innate and an intense instinct that we cannot shut off, merely redirect.

If we could have a humanity free of the capacity for hate, it would spell the end of good people, and the never ending reign of whoever is most psychopathic.

If there's one person who is free of hatred, it's an utter psychopath, we've seen it, someone unable to hate is someone unable to see other people as truly being other people.

Tied to hate is our morality, our sense of fear, the amygdala, the very purpose of the conscience and moral instinct is to avoid that which harms our success in spreading gene copies, the instinct to hate serves this same purpose, and it exists because it does so effectively.

Lots of people notice thw same patterns that are social unacceptable to notice, so they instead put all the blame for rge consequences of the realities they pretend to ignore upon a specific group that is used as the exception to this rule.