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> Nope, we seem to be hardwired from the monkey inheritance to fear the "other" or "stranger". again, hate is different from fear. It's similar, I know. bu

by lsc 11y ago

> Nope, we seem to be hardwired from the monkey inheritance to fear the "other" or "stranger". again, hate is different from fear. It's similar, I know. but it's not the same emotion. I think we're wired to hate the other, not to fear them. Fear is the emotion I feel when I'm bicycling on a busy street. I'm afraid that one of the giant trucks six inches from my left shoulder will make an error and leave me as a thin, red, road-paste, or as a head with no functional arms. Fear, it has to do with danger. Hate, well, I think I kind of understand the in group out group hate, but my out group is a little different. I hate salespeople. I know they pose zero physical threat to me, and they only pose a monetary threat when I talk with them, but I still feel hatred and anger that they are in my industry, that I need to see them every day. If you want to analyze it, it probably has to do with growing up as a nerd when that was something you really didn't want to be. Generally speaking, I have a mild negative reaction to anyone who seems too smooth, too socially skilled, anyone who seems to fit in too well. Hate, hate is an irrational emotion you feel when you see someone you don't like. Now, I could write a paper about how salespeople have negatively impacted my life, and how they are destroying everything good, rational and beautiful about Capitalism, but it would all be a post-hoc rationalization; Hate of the other is a fundamentally irrational emotion, and while it's usually not hard to graft on some post-hoc weak-sounding fear, it's still post-hoc rationalization. If I actually want to understand my feelings on the matter, I think that they are shaped more by my idea of who "my people" are, by who I felt was oppressing and/or threatening me during my childhood. Now, I also think that having an irrational feeling and recognizing that the feeling is irrational is way better than having an irrational feeling and coming up with a rationalization for that feeling, and I think most people disagree with me there; most people would much rather come up with a rationalization for the feeling they are having, and that's probably where this confusion of hate and fear comes from. (to be clear, I recognize my feelings here are irrational, and I try pretty hard to look past it. Any remaining effects that get past my filter, I'm sure, are smallish. I'm just giving it as an example, because I believe it's very similar to the way racist people feel. Hell, I even have that one salesperson friend who is a really good guy even though he is in sales.)

placebo 11y ago
In my earlier response, note that I didn't say that hate doesn't exist or that it isn't real. Neither did I say that it was the same as fear. I said it is an emotion that is derived from fear. Usually the connection is easy to see. Other times it is more subtle and concealed - but I argue it's always there. I don't believe in irrational behaviours. People behave the way they do for a reason. When you hate someone, it's always because they represent something that you can't remain at peace with. Usually because of something that you are threatened by in one way or another (either physically or psychologically). Of course, I might be wrong, but I think that in the same way there's no smoke without a fire, there's no hate without fear. This is a theory though, and one counterexample is all it takes to bring it down.
- lsc 11y ago
  >I don't believe in irrational behaviours. People behave the way they do for a reason. I'm assuming you are speaking of evolutionary psychology; personally, I think that most evolutionary psychology explanations are post-hoc rationalizations; it's usually difficult to actually test. That doesn't mean that it's valueless or uninteresting, just that evolutionary psychology should be treated more the way we treat history and less the way we treat experimental psychology or neurology or what have you[1]. Yes, we can come up for reasons why the crusade happened, and we can come up with historical evidence for and against it, and that can be really interesting, but we're still building a narrative from the bits of history that remain, and have a bunch of obvious biases (in history, the biggest is that the surviving written evidence is usually, well, written by someone with their own narrow biases.) I thought I gave a pretty good example of hate without fear (or hate where the fear is pretty secondary to the hate) from my life, which you seemed to ignore? I'm not going to come up with another example, because I work pretty hard to remove my own irrational hates, and speculating about other people's irrational hate is, well, it's much less likely to produce reasonable results. [1] neurology and experimental psychology have their own, very different problems, of course, but it's a different sort of thing from history.

by lsc 11y ago

placebo 11y ago

In my earlier response, note that I didn't say that hate doesn't exist or that it isn't real. Neither did I say that it was the same as fear. I said it is an emotion that is derived from fear. Usually the connection is easy to see. Other times it is more subtle and concealed - but I argue it's always there. I don't believe in irrational behaviours. People behave the way they do for a reason. When you hate someone, it's always because they represent something that you can't remain at peace with. Usually because of something that you are threatened by in one way or another (either physically or psychologically). Of course, I might be wrong, but I think that in the same way there's no smoke without a fire, there's no hate without fear. This is a theory though, and one counterexample is all it takes to bring it down.

lsc 11y ago
>I don't believe in irrational behaviours. People behave the way they do for a reason. I'm assuming you are speaking of evolutionary psychology; personally, I think that most evolutionary psychology explanations are post-hoc rationalizations; it's usually difficult to actually test. That doesn't mean that it's valueless or uninteresting, just that evolutionary psychology should be treated more the way we treat history and less the way we treat experimental psychology or neurology or what have you[1]. Yes, we can come up for reasons why the crusade happened, and we can come up with historical evidence for and against it, and that can be really interesting, but we're still building a narrative from the bits of history that remain, and have a bunch of obvious biases (in history, the biggest is that the surviving written evidence is usually, well, written by someone with their own narrow biases.) I thought I gave a pretty good example of hate without fear (or hate where the fear is pretty secondary to the hate) from my life, which you seemed to ignore? I'm not going to come up with another example, because I work pretty hard to remove my own irrational hates, and speculating about other people's irrational hate is, well, it's much less likely to produce reasonable results. [1] neurology and experimental psychology have their own, very different problems, of course, but it's a different sort of thing from history.