Do you hate being stuck in traffic? Do you hate when you get to a store to buy something and it’s all sold out? Do you hate your neighbor? Generally speaking, most of us will toss the word hate without giving it a lot of thought about things that are unpleasant to us. Experiences, people, situations that we don’t enjoy and don’t want to repeat. We hate those things. But aside from expressing the fact that we’re not big fans, what does it mean to hate something? Why do you hate a thing?
It’s fairly easy to figure out the purpose of most emotions. Anger can motivate you to get things done. Fear can keep you alive. Love can bring you joy and perhaps even help keep the species going if it’s romantic love. Even sadness can help you grieve and get past something traumatic. But why hate?
Have you ever felt you benefited from hating something? It doesn’t have any real positive connotations, so why is it a seemingly universally felt emotion? Why did nature saddle us with this experience? We’d hate to let this intro go on too long, so let’s dive into it.
Why Do We Have Emotions?
Before we delve into the emotion of hate, why not look at emotions in general? Hate isn’t the only emotion that people question, after all. How many of us have been in love before, had a broken heart, and wish that we could never feel that way again? We have a love-hate relationship with emotions, so to speak.
Darwin was one of the first to theorize that we have emotions as part of survival. Emotions keep us alive. We mentioned earlier that fear can keep you alive by helping you escape from a dangerous situation, that fight-or-flight response that can literally save your life when it’s threatened. If you feel disgusted by something that you’ve eaten, you may spit it out and save your life if it’s toxic. If you feel love and attraction, you can become a couple, or at least reproduce, and that keeps the species alive as well.
For Darwin, not all emotions were universal, but some were. These emotions manifested even in isolated groups that could not have learned or emulated behavior but were expressed very similarly, leading him to believe a deeper connection. By that he meant they were present in all people in all societies regardless of how different their habits and beliefs might be. Joy, anger, sadness, fear, disgust and surprise seem to be the generally accepted six basic emotions. Anything beyond those might be not present in all societies at all times. By the same token, there may be many other emotions, hate for instance, that do show up in some societies.
While it’s easy to consider emotions simply a mental process, it has been proposed that they are biological, psychological and social. Emotions elicit physical responses in us, they are born from social interactions, be it with other people or animals or other aspects of our environment, and they are psychological because mental processes are involved in developing, regulating, and reacting to them.
It’s easy enough to say an emotion is just a mental response to something, but how many of us can say we have never had a physical response to an emotion? Fear, again, is a great example of this. You can feel fear in your entire body. It can make you freeze, it can make you feel like you’re going to vomit. It can make you sweat, it can make you scream or cry. There is a whole host of measurable, biological reactions to this one emotion.
Other emotions can cause similar responses. If you have ever been in love, you probably felt that elation, a butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling, maybe a flushed feeling in your cheeks just from seeing the object of your desire. It happens.
Feelings vs Emotions
For what it’s worth, feelings and emotions, although the terms are used interchangeably by most people in the modern world, are not the same thing. An emotion is something that can cause a physical response in your body. Your feelings are your mental experience while having that emotion. It’s how you interpret and react to the emotion as you’re experiencing it.
While emotions can be universal to the species, your feelings are going to be subjective to you. That’s why some people who are experiencing grief may crack jokes, and others feel it’s totally inappropriate. Everyone’s experiencing the same emotion, but their feelings allow them to process it differently. This can be of great benefit to some people who are able to process and deal with negative emotions in a more positive way than others. Not only can it be of benefit to your mental health but even your physical well being if your feelings around these so-called negative emotions are handled in a healthier way.
Do We Need Negative Emotions?
So, if your emotions are about survival, why do we need negative ones? What are hate and anger doing for us that couldn’t be done with something that makes you feel better overall? Negative emotions can have a profound impact on our physical health. They can raise your blood pressure, lead to anxiety, heart disease, and exacerbate issues with addiction.
We saw that fear, for instance, has a biological function in terms of keeping us alive. Fear can motivate you to run away from a fire or a nice wielding Maniac. But it’s more than just the physical aspect of emotion that’s key for your survival. Dealing with negative emotions is integral for your mental health as well.
If you were to live a life devoid of negative emotions, you would suffer as a result. For most of us, you can’t simply turn these emotions off, so they’re going to be there whether you like it or not. But trying to ignore them, suppress them, or otherwise not deal with them will leave you worse off. In fact, it can make it harder for you to appreciate your positive emotions.
Every negative emotion has a root cause. If you ignore that, then you are not dealing with the cause and thus not fixing or addressing whatever caused it in the first place. It’s like turning up the volume on your car stereo to ignore a noise that the engine is making. The problem isn’t going to go away just because you’re ignoring it.
While we mentioned the effect of negative emotions on your health, there is research that shows it’s not actually the negative emotions that have an impact on your well-being. It’s how you react to those negative emotions. This goes back to what we said earlier about emotions versus feelings.
One thing, right off the bat, is that we refer to these as negative emotions. Bad feelings. You automatically have a negative association with hate, anger, nervousness, and fear. That sets you up to feel bad when you experience these emotions. You’re conditioning yourself to have a poor reaction. People who react this way tend to have more anxiety, more depression, and generally are less content in life.
Consider fear again. One person with a fear of heights standing on a ledge next to another person who does not have the negative connotation associated with fear. They experience it as an adrenaline rush. This is the kind of person who might jump out of a plane or go cliff diving for fun. The emotion can be the same, but the way they feel about it, the way they process it, is almost exactly opposite. For that person, this is thrilling, exciting, and desirable. But for the person who has a negative reaction, it’s terrifying and should be avoided at all costs.
What we consider a negative emotion is there for a reason. It could be to motivate us to do something. To eliminate something in our life, or in that specific situation, that is causing that for you. Something that’s threatening, something that’s hindering, or something that otherwise needs to be addressed.
Why Do We Need Hate?
So far, we’ve pinpointed at least one reason for most emotions that are considered negative. Anxiety can help you prepare for something that you need to overcome, like studying for a test or preparing to ask your boss for a raise. Anger can prompt you to accomplish a goal purely out of spite. But hate, it’s still a bit of a mystery.
We attribute a lot of terrible things in history to hate. You don’t need to look far across time or space to find a place where hate has done irreparable damage. It’s hard to conceive of there being any kind of purpose behind such an emotion.
Let’s start at what hate is and why Darwin and others have not considered it a universal emotion. Rage, fear, disgust and resentment can all form the basis of hate. It is intense and intensely negative. True hate does not have a lot of layers to it.
In terms of the function of hate, the action that hate is promoting, it is the elimination of the source. We want to get rid of the things we hate. Hate is often targeted at specific people and groups and, historically, this has been in a very brutal and tragic way. The things we hate are perceived as bad, wrong or threatening in some way.
But there are situations where hate directed at those that cause suffering could be considered transformative and even helpful. So hating people without good reason is bad, but perhaps hating those people who hate people for no reason could be considered good if it motivates you to change things for the better. It’s a very circular, silly thing, but that is how it works very often. For better or worse, hate also is a reassuring emotion for those who feel it. It reaffirms their beliefs in what is right and just in the world.
From the outside, people who perpetrate hate crimes, for instance, can be judged for the wrongness of their actions but, in the minds of those people, their hate is justified. Hate, therefore, has an aspect of enacting justice to it, even if it’s completely wrong.
Understanding hate, from a psychological point of view, is more difficult than you might think. How do you study hate in lab conditions? It would be unethical to put people in a situation where you expect them to hate one another and act on those emotions.
As a group experience, he has actually been linked to something that actually gives life meaning. That sounds counterintuitive, but you do need to consider what circumstances could be behind this. Take, for instance, a totalitarian Society. If you are a citizen living in that Society, fighting against oppression with other like-minded individuals, together you might all hate the oppressive regime you are under. That hatred motivates you, as a group, to make your world better. In essence, your hatred has given you purpose. You, and those with you.
This situation is not ideal, of course. It would be much better to have a purpose in life driven by passion, joy, love, and all the other more positive emotions. But it doesn’t negate that hatred can still provide that for someone. And, in doing so, allow for good things to happen. The problem is that so much hate is not directed in that way.