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Mind of a hater
While the current socio-political environment suggests otherwise, hateful people and groups are nothing new. Since the beginning of the European colonization of the Americas, haters have victimized many groups, most prominently Native Americans, African Americans and successive waves of immigrants (Irish, Chinese, Poles, Latinos, etc.). At various junctures in our history, these groups, and others, have endured genocide, enslavement, lynchings, violent mobs, discrimination and a host of other wounds, physical, psychological and economic.
Our current version of hate reflects some of these historical tendencies but set in a modern context. In 2023, there were over 12,000 hate crime incidents logged by the FBI. Over half were based on race or ethnicity, and over a quarter related to sexual orientation or gender identity, followed closely by religion (in particular, Jews and Muslims). Analysts point out that hate crimes are widely underreported and assert the overall prevalence is much higher and the trend is sharply up.
Also in 2023, the SPLC documented the presence of over 1,430 hate groups in America. And while haters have long organized into groups, like the KKK and the American Nazi Party, today they are more sophisticated and, thanks to technology, interconnected.
Disinformed and Interconnected
The growth in the number of haters and their organizations has accelerated in large part due to disinformation across a multitude of media outlets. What’s more, some political leaders give cultural license and encouragement for haters to wreak their havoc on groups they define as “other.”
So, what is the psychology behind hate, and how does it motivate someone to become an instrument of animus toward innocent persons and groups? As usual in my field, it’s complicated, but we are beginning to unravel what’s happening in the psyches of these individuals, and it isn’t pretty. Here is what we know:
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- Othering. Fear and enmity toward those unlike ourselves is a deep, primal impulse in our lineage. Throughout much of our history as a species, unknown tribes or individuals posed a survival risk, engendering a mental default mode of mistrust and paranoia. So, too often, it comes naturally.
- Hate-Love: Haters experience hostility toward feared out-groups while, simultaneously, feeling love toward their own in-group. As the adage goes, there is safety in numbers, so when threatened, whether in reality or imagination, people tend to circle the wagons and cling to those like themselves.
- Absence of Compassion: Haters exhibit a mindset devoid of empathy and caring for anyone outside their in-group, and even sometimes for those in it. While not all are narcissistic and sociopathic, many fit these labels. Some of them harbor disdain for another person and group but don’t act on it (so-called “silent haters”). However, with most, the absence of compassion provides moral permission to strike out.
- Belonging: Many members of hate groups go there to find a “home.” Much of their underlying fear of and animosity toward others creates a sense of isolation and loneliness, a belief that “I don’t belong.” Identifying with like-minded persons generates feelings of kinship and validation, which help assuage the underlying fear that inhabits their psyches.
- Fear of Self: Due to psychological blind spots, haters tend to project what they dislike or fear in themselves onto those they despise. Projection is the way they deny their negativity by assigning it to others. Rather than looking in the mirror and examining their own toxic motivations and intentions, which takes self-awareness and courage, they project onto those they fear and disdain.
Of all these tendencies, projection is often the most challenging to understand, so consider an example. Trump and Musk are poster children, in more ways than one, for narcissistic projection. Musk was in our country illegally, yet rails against illegal immigrants. Trump meets all the criteria for being a dictatorial autocrat, yet claims his political opponents are a danger to democracy.
Most of all, hate is an exercise in self-destruction, not other-destruction. While haters’ perceived enemies often suffer the most at their hands, in the end, we all pay the price collectively, including them. As the late, great Maya Angelou told us: “Hate. It has caused a lot of problems in the world but has not solved one yet.”
