Personal Perspective: Hatred hurts, but it may also have a bright side.
Posted January 30, 2025
Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Key points
Does hatred deserve its bad reputation? Or does it also offer some positive tools?
Typically associated with violence and ignorance, hatred helps us feel righteous, inspired,
and strong.
Hatred can be as pleasurable as it is painful, however hard this is for some of us to admit.
With patience and insight, hatred can teach us a lot about our priorities, proclivities, and
sensitivities.
Hatred has a bad rap.
But admit this: Hating something or someone doesn’t always feel bad. Sometimes it feels
shockingly good. Sometimes it feels righteous, invigorating, inspiring, or even fun.
Society, religion and other putative arbiters of human conduct declare hatred evil,
antisocial, destructive and cruel. They say it’s born of ignorance, that only stupid brutes
can hate.
Why then can hating someone who has harmed us, or hating prejudice or war, or even
movie villains fuel our sense of justice and resolve to fight for what—or at least what we
think—is right? Aren’t those positive qualities?
Yes, our first sparks of hatred are typically harsh. Its tight, bright tension makes us want to
lash out, bash, smash, slam. Enacting those impulses in real life can destroy others and
ourselves. But finding ways to manage them while staying keenly conscious of them—
without going blank inside or blaming ourselves for our feelings—is a precious life skill.
Knowing what or whom we hate, and why, helps us understand whom we are, and why.
Pretending that we are incapable of hatred, or hating ourselves for hating, is corrosive.
Instead, we can treasure hatred as a scanner revealing our sensitivities, proclivities,
priorities, traumas and paralytic memories.
Gaining such self-awareness while practicing self-restraint can make us stronger, less
perplexed by our own triggers and reactions, and less afraid of unleashing impulsive
violence that we will surely regret.
But if we never hated anything, if we skipped la-la-la through life adoring everything, we’d
miss these crucial in-the-moment opportunities to wisely fathom—and pilot—ourselves
and our positions in a crowded, complex world.
In its inherent violence and brutality, hatred teaches restraint.
Some might say: Hatred harms, so it’s unhealthy. Even if that harm is never physically
enacted, even if we never throw a punch or post a vicious tweet, hatred remains a souldeep realm of pain and frustration and blazing rage.
But so, we might reply, does love.
For all its pleasures, love hurts too. Love hurts when it goes unreturned. Love hurts when
whomever or whatever we love mocks, rejects, or deceives us—or is suffering or lost. Love
hurts when whomever or whatever we love is snatched from us or changes beyond
recognition right before our eyes. Love ignites violence just as hatred does. Love hurts like
utter hell sometimes. In twenty thousand ways, love dies.
So, standing opposite each other on the circle of human emotions, love and hatred are
equally capable of causing happiness and harm, so we can’t bluntly call hatred sicker than
love.
Hatred can fuel strength and courage, even heroism, when we steel ourselves to face or
change or vanquish something objectively evil which we hate. Yes: This is, and has always
been, treacherous territory, given how little in the world is definitively absolute. Perceiving
such complexities, wondering why others love what we loathe, need not quell our own
heartfelt hatreds but might amplify our tolerance and curiosity. And that’s another healthy
skill.
Would human life be better if none of us, down the ages, had ever felt hatred, if the world
was so amazing that we’d never had to detest anyone or anything we knew or heard about
or feared? Of course it would, but that’s a fantasy. Real life gives us almost no option but to
hate—something, someone, sometime, somewhere
Given the unavoidability of hatred—studies show that it’s built neurobiologically into our
brains—can we then make the most of it, perversely surveying its gifts? Can we not hate
our hatred just for being hatred? Can we not hate ourselves for sometimes simply feeling
it?
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