Democrats hate Republicans. Republicans hate Democrats. The political hate the apolitical and vice versa. The religious hate atheists. Atheists hate the religious. Even among the religious, the opposing religions hate each other. Gang members hate members from others gangs. Businesses hate other businesses. The compassionate hate hate groups and the hate groups hate everybody. In short, in one way or another, everybody hates somebody, and there are biological and psychological reasons why (but my guess is you’ll hate those reasons).
We’re hard-wired to wonder what’s around the corner. Deep in our brains is a survival mechanism that alerts us to potential dangers, and we are unconsciously always on guard. It’s the reason we find suspenseful movies suspenseful: We want to know what happens next. 10,000 years ago, our ancestors needed to know what dangers lurked around the corner, and just a few years ago, scientists demonstrated that mice pass along acquired fears through generations. So consider this: What we know we fear less than what we don’t know, and what we don’t know might cause us harm, so we fear what we don’t know. And we don’t know why other people would ever choose to think differently than we do. So we fear them. And we hate them.
We hate the idea that others might have a viewpoint we don’t understand – maybe even a more advantageous viewpoint – so we hate them. We hate the different-minded. We all believe that we are deep and mysterious and that others are shallow and predictable, and since we all believe that, other people believe that about us, too. We’re all so baffled why others don’t believe what we believe and think the way we think, that we are willing to perpetuate the hatred we have for them rather than take the time to learn why they think, feel, believe, or behave differently. And even if we do “learn” why, it’s only through the lens of our fragile egos that are secretly scared to death to actually understand others’ perspectives.
The real reason why you hate people who think differently than you is because you are biologically terrified of losing the identity your ego created for you. Your ego is your sense of self: It’s who you tell yourself that you are – and it is forged in certainty. In a world of more than 7 billion people in a galaxy of more than 100 billion stars, in a universe of more than 2 trillion galaxies, your ego actually convinces you that you’re right about what you believe; that you can be certain about anything. You actually believe that your religious beliefs (or absence thereof), your political bent (or absence thereof), your life philosophy, thoughts, ideas, and knowledge is the correct bit to have – and to protect your certainty, you rely on hate.
You actually hate others who see this ineffably grand universe with a different lens than you. “Oh I don’t hate them,” you say; still, you will go on condescendingly berating, scoffing at, and belittling any perspective with which you don’t agree. So yes, you do hate them. Even though you might hate to admit it.
Let the hate go. You don’t need to be controlled by your ego because you don’t know anything. Of course, neither do I. And of course that means this whole article you just read could be wrong. Come to think of it, since I don’t know how this will be received: I hate what I just wrote! Wait! No I don’t! I’m not certain of anything now…. Then again, maybe it’s in being comfortable with not knowing that we can escape the ego’s grip and finally drop the hate.
Now, I’m open to hearing how others view this article, but ultimately, I actually like it a lot.