On Hatred

Yesterday I hated someone. A state. The state of Israel. They are killing children, bombing hospitals, annihilating a people in plain sight of the world – and there is nothing I can do about it. I hated. I made extravagant outbursts. I passed absolute judgments. Then night came, morning came, and today I looked at the hatred itself.

The moment you try to defend your hatred – if you have an analytical mind – the hatred collapses. You start lining up your reasons in logical order. Unless emotions intervene from the background, that sequence cannot hold together. You triggered hatred through a chain of reasoning that never formed. And you look at the object of your hatred: does this object actually fit the hatred? You cannot find that it does.

This piece was born from that moment of not finding.

When I say "I hate the state of Israel," what have I actually said? The state of Israel: millions of people, thousands of years of history, hundreds of distinct schools of thought, a state apparatus, an army, civilians, dissidents, anti-war voices, people protesting in the streets – all compressed into a single object. This generalization does not satisfy an analytical mind. Generalization is the mandatory precondition of hatred – but it is the fatal error of analysis.

Then the object shifts. What I actually hate is not the perpetrator but the act. I hate the killing of children in Gaza. When I look at that act, the hatred holds – because the act is concrete, definable, bounded. But the feeling of hatred does not stay with the act; it spreads to the perpetrator. This spread is automatic, reflexive, happening in milliseconds. The emotion's first move is the question "who did this?" The moment that question is asked, the act recedes and the perpetrator comes forward. A state, a nation, a religion – the generalization is complete.

Hatred generalizes; anger focuses. Perhaps yesterday's outburst was not hatred – it was anger. But the moment I called it "hatred," it spread from the act to the actor, became boundless, became uncontrollable.

Repetition of an act begins to define the perpetrator. Systematic, deliberate, repeated actions – yes, these reveal a structure. And that structure should be punished. But the purpose of punishment is not to vomit hatred.

The purpose of punishment is to rehabilitate the offender. To protect others. To maintain social order. You do not punish someone because you hate them – you punish them to protect others from them and to rehabilitate them. You cannot rehabilitate by destroying. You certainly cannot by hating. You bring them under control – nothing more.

And even in that act of bringing under control, the causal link you draw between offender and consequence is never a perfect cause-and-effect chain. You cannot establish a scientific link. As a lawyer I lived this for thirty years: adequate causation, suitability, intervening factors, conditions – all approximations. None of them certainty. You construct the closest possible link for that day's circumstances, and even that is good only for that day. Yesterday's justice is not tomorrow's justice.

If justice is a function of time – then hatred, an emotion that freezes time, ignores circumstances, claims absolutes – is incompatible with the structure of reality.

It is difficult to even discuss hatred in terms of meaning. Its definition is troubled. Whether hatred belongs to human beings, whether it is an extension of being alive or a structure contrary to life itself – these questions are as tangled as hatred itself.

An animal can feel fear – preservation of life, the fight-or-flight response triggered by the amygdala.2 An animal can feel rage – territorial defense, aggression. These are bodily, momentary, situational. When the threat passes, they fade. But an animal does not hate.

Hatred requires the following: object identification ("this thing"), persistence ("always"), generalization ("all of them"), memory ("they did this before"), and rumination. All of these are cognitive operations. But none of them are rational operations.

The paradox sits right here: hatred requires cognition but does not originate from reason. Fear comes from the body; the brain processes it. Anger comes from the body; the brain directs it. Hatred, however, takes the raw material arriving from the body – fear, pain, helplessness, perceived threat – and dresses it in structure. It locks it onto an object, extends it across time, generates justification. This structuring is automatic, reflexive – but it cannot run without cognitive infrastructure.

Hatred is neither pure emotion nor pure thought. It is a counterfeit compound of both.

You hate Israel because you expect humane behavior from a state. Your expectation is violated, and hatred is born. You assume a world order: states should not kill civilians, children should be protected, hospitals should be untouchable. When that expectation breaks, the judgment "this should not have been" forms – and that judgment is the fuel of hatred.

Against this, consider Anton Chigurh.1 A character who perfectly embodies the pure nature of evil. You cannot execute that man, you cannot destroy him – and you cannot even hate him.

You expect nothing from Chigurh because he shows you what he is from the first minute. Nothing hidden, nothing fake, no pretense of being something else. He flips a coin, calls it fate, and his internal logic is entirely consistent. No expectation, no disappointment; no disappointment, no hatred.

Hatred feeds on the perception of falseness. "You should not have been this way, yet you are" – that contradiction is hatred's fuel. In Chigurh there is no contradiction. He is what he is. Organic evil carries no pretense – and a human being cannot hate what carries no pretense.

For a long time I had stopped hating the people I believed had partly caused events that harmed me, people in whom I had seen evil. I had forgiven them inwardly. But this was not an emotional forgiveness – it was an analytical one.

Because I had told myself: your actions contributed, but they did not directly cause the outcome. I allowed you to do these things – directly or indirectly. Your actions alone were not sufficient to produce this result.

And here is the breaking point: if their actions had been directly sufficient – if they could have done it entirely on their own – that would mean I was useless, that my will could not have stopped anything. To hate them is, indirectly, to see myself as powerless.

This is hatred's most hidden face. When you hate someone, you are telling them: "You did this alone. I could do nothing." The acceptance of helplessness. The one who hates is impotent – because they are saying "they did it, I was ineffective."

My position is different: "I was there too, I did something or failed to do something – responsibility is shared." This is the price of possessing a will. But it is also the reward. Hatred erases both parties' share. Forgiveness – analytical forgiveness, accepting responsibility – acknowledges the existence of both.

Love is problematic too. Love, too, cannot be verified by reason. If you tried to line up your reasons for loving someone in logical order, the same collapse would occur. Verifiability may not be the only criterion. Both are pre-rational, both are problematic – but both produce something. Love can be an art; the harmless form of hatred might be one as well.

I sometimes love evil. Provided it is deeply organic, provided its nature is worth examining.

That sentence carries the core of my worldview. I reject falseness, not evil. Calculated manipulation, engineered cruelty, counterfeit goodness – these disgust me. But an evil that is true to its nature? That can be examined. Because its structure is visible, nothing is hidden.

This is the fundamental criterion: organic, or counterfeit? Counterfeit goodness is worth less than organic evil. Counterfeit love is emptier than organic hatred. Because there is nothing to examine in the counterfeit – in the organic there is structure, there is nature, there is something that can be taken apart.

Yesterday's hatred was locked onto an object, surrendered to emotion, its structure unquestioned. Today I took that same hatred apart, extracted its structure, tested its chain of reasoning, questioned its object, investigated its relationship to being alive. The hatred is the same hatred – but yesterday it owned me; today it is my material.

Hatred is trapped between two reductionisms.

The first is religious reductionism. The heaven-and-hell economy: "Hate, so you deserve paradise" or "Do not hate, so you escape hell." Both turn hatred into a trade instrument. Cults use hatred as a loyalty mechanism: hating a common enemy produces belonging to the group. Excommunication, takfir, expulsion – all institutional forms of hatred. Hatred here is a tool; the purpose is control.

The second is materialist reductionism. "Hatred is amygdala activation, cortisol elevation, serotonin depletion." This is not hatred either; it is hatred's shadow. Semir Zeki and John Romaya's 2008 fMRI study4 mapped the brain signature of hatred – putamen and insula activation, partial deactivation in the frontal cortex – but mapping the terrain is not understanding it. Measuring chemistry is not understanding emotion; scanning the brain is not reading the mind. You cannot see hatred on an MRI – you see its bodily trace. The trace and the thing are not the same thing.

This territory – the nature, structure, and function of hatred – must not be surrendered to religions and belief systems. They exploit this emotion through the heaven-and-hell economy, through cult-like structures. But examining it only through neurons and chemical processes is equally foolish. Both are escape: one into dogma, the other into data.

There is a third path: examining hatred as a human experience, with its own structure, its own logic, its own mode of collapse. Neither saying "hatred is a sin" nor saying "hatred is a neurochemical reaction." Hatred cannot be verified by reason, it does not fit the object, it requires a violation of expectation, it is the confession of surrendered will – these are neither a preacher's sentences nor a neuroscientist's. These are the sentences of a human being who has confronted hatred itself.

Fear is organic – it serves the preservation of life. Anger is organic – it serves the defense of boundaries. Love is organic – it serves the making of bonds. Hatred has no place in this sequence. The only pre-rational emotion that does not serve being alive – perhaps not even an emotion at all.

Perhaps a malfunction. The cognitive structuring of bodily and emotional responses – fear, pain, helplessness – but without a rational foundation. Raw feeling dressed in the costume of logic. A counterfeit rationalization.

But even as a malfunction, as long as it is organic, it is worth examining. Yesterday hatred owned me. Today it is my material. Tomorrow it may become a teardown tool in someone else's hands.

Here is the painful part: if you taught this in a criminology class, the majority of the room would go on hating. Only a few people who use their minds – people capable of placing a gap between feeling and judgment – would not. Legal education is precisely the place that should teach that gap. And even there, most fail.

But a few succeed. And this piece is for them.