Pepe Does Politics

The Science Behind Hate

If I had to name the top ten things in life that people claim to hate, one of the things near the very top of that list would be hate itself. “Love conquers hate!” “Eliminate hate-speech!” “Rise above hate!” Saying bad things about hate is literally the least controversial stand a person can make. If we were to believe every single person who tells us that they “oppose hate” and “embrace love,” we’d be forced to conclude that every single war in history was fought out of love and friendship. When we get into one of our periodic geopolitical skirmishes and carpet-bomb some country in the Middle East, we’re not doing it because we’re in a war and we hate the other side. That would make us bad people, because only bad people do things out of hate. The reason we carpet bomb our enemies is obviously because we embrace love and tolerance and turning our enemies into a fine red mist is the only way to make them see things from our more compassionate perspective. A less enlightened person might see our actions as stemming from hate, but in reality, those were cluster-bombs of compassion. We had to destroy the village in order to save it!

So let me ask you a question. If hate is such a bad thing, why did we evolve it? Most traits that serve no purpose tend to be eliminated very quickly by evolution. Yet humanity has evolved for six million years, and somehow hate is still in our emotional repertoire. A real scientist might almost be forced to conclude that it serves some valuable evolutionary purpose.

OK, enough sarcasm. In today’s blog post, I want to talk about hate from a purely scientific perspective. Specifically, I want to talk about the evolutionary reasons for hate, how hate is triggered in the human brain, and how you can use these mechanisms to achieve political goals.

The reason hate exists is surprisingly simple. Human beings evolved to cooperate. The ability to cooperate and work together in increasingly large groups - first the tribe, then the city-state, then the nation - is what has made so much science, art, and positive cultural progress possible. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the reason we have the high quality of life that we do is our ability to cooperate. You can even measure it in a quantitative scientific way. If you look at a map of high-trust vs low-trust societies, you can see that apart from one or two anomalies, the high-trust societies almost always have a higher quality of life, more scientific and technological progress, and a much stronger social safety net. To put it more simply: trust is important to human progress. In fact, some rationalists hypothesize that this entire thing we call “society” is nothing more than an extended iterated Stag Hunt.

The problem with Stag Hunts is that sometimes, people defect from the consensus, selfishly doing what is best for them instead of what is best for the group as a whole. For example, in modern times, many corporations have often been rightfully called out for their philosophy of “Privatize profits, socialize losses.” In order to prevent such parasitic people from gradually gnawing away at the social trust that binds us all together, human beings evolved the emotion of hate. The reason hate exists is to encourage us to punish parasites who try to erode social trust by stealing from us instead of cooperating with us. In small societies, this punishment may be direct (for example ostracism or stoning) whereas in larger societies we tend to elect politicians to indirectly enact the punishments for us, but the concept is the same: we use punishment to discourage people from forming parasitic relationships with us. People who choose parasitic relationships instead of cooperative relationships with others are bad for society - they are the societal equivalent of cancer cells. Punishing them is society’s immune system response: the equivalent of white blood cells hunting down threats. From an evolutionary perspective, there is nothing wrong with hate - it is actually an emotion that is quite useful in order to have a functional and productive society. If people lost the ability to hate others, society would most likely collapse within a generation, since nobody would get punished for crimes against the collective. All creatures hate: even animals. For example, crows and rooks are known to sentence members of their own flocks to death if their continued existence is bad for the flock as a whole. Again, this is entirely the product of evolution and natural selection.

Obviously, I don’t intend this position as an endorsement of all hate. Like all emotions, hate can be constructively used for its preordained purpose, or it can be destructive when channeled in a wild and chaotic way. For example, hating somebody because they are betraying you or stealing your resources makes sense: it is a logical and rational thing to do. Punishing betrayal or resource theft builds social trust because it signals to people that they can build productive relationships with others, and as a result society becomes more cooperative. Hating somebody because of their race or sexual orientation doesn’t make sense, because it unnecessarily reduces social trust. Put in the simplest terms, it’s good to hate people whose existence is bad for you, and it’s bad to hate people whose existence is good for you.

Apart from statistically rare exceptions like racism or sexism, people tend to hate in a very reasonable and predictable way. This is why hate has a lot of useful applications in politics, because it can be used as a tool to both predict and shape human behavior. When Donald Trump rallies up his fan base with talk of how greedy illegal immigrants are sneaking into the country to steal your jobs, or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez rallies up her fan base with talk about how greedy capitalists are using morally questionable tax breaks to steal from society, they are both channeling the emotion of hate in the exact same way - by highlighting the parasitic behavior of certain groups and pointing out that it should be punished, and offering to use their platform and political position to enact the punishment on your behalf.

When you understand the scientific reasons for why we evolved the emotion of hate, and realize that it can be used quite constructively to build a harmonious and well-functioning society, it’s hard to have such negative feelings towards hate anymore. This is good, because when we demonize hate and view it as an emotion that needs to be wiped out, it’s hard to develop a proper scientific understanding of how it operates. And when you don’t properly understand something, you will always be at a significant disadvantage when facing those who do.