Hatred makes you feel bad

22 February 2022

In recent years more than ever (for Covid?) newspapers and other media mentioned this feeling.

The context in which it is presented seems to give it a reproach and exhortation connotation towards those who are referred to as the “hater”, as if he were responsible for having this unpleasant feeling within himself, underlining how harmful it can be to good common social life.

In effect, hatred is unpleasant, it is an emotion that hurts: the hater more than the hated, many philosophers have said; while harmfulness -except for isolated gestures of despair of the individual - affects the community to the extent that it ignites. hatred in the soul of many, without ever wanting it (why on earth would anyone want a feeling that makes you suffer?), and unfolds in a set of disorganized conduct in the community itself.

But what can the man who feeds such a feeling do?

It is said precisely: "feeds" as if the individual was responsible for feeling this "feeling". This is one of the many prejudices of our philosophical-religious tradition from the Middle Ages, when they instilled in humanity the belief –actually an illusion- of being able to be the arbiter of their own affects.

This is the extension of the so-called free will not so much to actions, but to thought itself: for this reason it was believed that one could renounce a faith or convictions matured in a person's mind.

Feelings and affects are born in our soul without our willing and without us noticing them, in the incessant work that our brain does without our knowledge: if we realize it, we can hide them, but not eliminate them; we can perhaps, more or less consciously, lie to ourselves.

This is what psychological sciences and neurosciences tell us today.

However prejudice is tenacious and underground, and this is used politically to remove responsibilities that are essentially expressed on the political level with the purpose of placing the blame on individuals. Are we asking them for an abjuration? Or is it known that this is not true and prejudice is exploited?

What can be done? It would be necessary to prevent the reasons for generating those affects that make us all, in primis those who hate, suffer.

But it is difficult to act in the social environment of a civilization that seems to have taken an inevitable course, precisely by excluding or limiting the actions of the "best" individuals.

Hatred makes you feel bad

But what can the man who feeds such a feeling do?

Further Readings