How Hate Came to Permeate our Societies, And Why It’s Destroying Them From Within
Nov 22, 2022
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When I think about what shape our civilization is — and our countries are — in, I often talk about Five Existential Threats. Climate change, mass extinction, underinvestment, inequality, and authoritarianism slash fascism. To those, though, I think we may need to add another: hate.
Take the massacre in Colorado. A gunman killed five people and injured twenty five more at a gay club.Hate.
The gunman did not want such people to exist. As in, tolive. And he did what the far right, essentially,told him to:to annihilate such people, because they’re impure, weak, parasites, subhumans, who are causing the “genocide” of the master race. Hence…a massacre.
But the massacre in Colorado, too must be placed in a larger context. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum.And nor is that context just the rise of an openly violent right wing in America. That context isglobal. Hate is becoming a Big Worldwide Problem — to a degree that it’s destabilizing our civilization. You might think that’s an overstatement, so let’s talk about it.
A massacre at a gay club in Colorado. It didn’t happen out of nowhere. Think about the world for a moment. Italy’s now run by a political party thatpretends not to worship…Mussolini. It rose to power through hate. By demonizing refugees and immigrants for Italy’s woes, which have little to do with either of those groups, but are about decades of political chaos, and a lack of vision for the future. Sweden elected a party which is described as “formerly fascist”…oh, cool, onlyformerly? I guess that’s totally OK then! One of that party’s first moves in power was todissolve the Environment Ministry. LOL — good luck fighting climate change…or helping the rest of the world fight it, either.
Maybe you’re beginning to see my point. Hate is beginning to destabilize our civilization. One country at a time. Massacres like the one in Colorado are the most visible manifestation of hatred, but we should see them, too, as asign. Of what?
Our institutions are not doing a good job — not nearly a good enough — of teaching peoplenot to hate. That hate iswrong.Morally, economically, socially, practically. That hate isevil. We need to actually speak about hatein these stark and real-world terms, or else we will continue to lose the battle against it. Why is that? What do I mean?
Let’s look at poor, idiotic Britain. It used to be the envy of the world, and now it’s a laughingstock, pariah, in the process of an epic, thunderous self-destruction. Brits arepreparing for blackouts, theycan’t pay the bills, and meanwhile, nobody has a plan for the future.Except hate. Things got this bad because Brits believed the Big Lies of a series of fanatics — Cameron, May, Johnson, the ill-fated Liz Truss, who lasted just 45 days in power — and each of themextended the circle of hate.
Take a look at it with me, because Britain is by far the most instructive example of how hate is wrecking our societies.British living standards began to fall after the last financial crisis, as banks’ bad debts were absorbed by the Treasury. Brits fell for a foolish Big Lie — the conservatives said that meant the nation was broke, and only austerity would solve it.It didn’t. And so Conservatives, who’d rode that Big Lie to power, now had to find areason. They blamed…Europeans. LOL…what? Europeans were baffled. And still are. But Brits believedthatBig Lie, too — and so Brexit happened.
Today, five years later, amajority of Brits regret Brexit. For a very good reason — because Brexit has led to utter ruin for Britain. Among other things, it’s now theworst performing economy in the rich world, by a long way. But the problem is that the vortex that caused Brexit — hate — isstill whirling away. What do I mean?
Well, it didn’t work to scapegoat Europeans for the foolish choices Brits had made — governments whose only idea was vicious austerity. And so the circle of hate had to be expanded again. Who is it today? It’s…immigrants.Allof them. And now it’s not just the conservatives, either. It’s theopposition, too. It’s head, Keir Starmer, is busy playing mini-demagogue, and herecently saidthatBritain has to wean itself off immigration. Because, presumably, that’s the answer to Britain’s woes.
Is it? Britain hastremendous labour shortages, to the degree that Brits can’tget ambulances. That’s because Britain won’t take people in to do things like drive them, or trucks, or be doctors, and so forth. And there are both parties,blaming immigrants.
That’s xenophobia, and it’s absolutely wrecked Britain.If you don’t get my point, then consider the polar opposite.
America, meanwhile, has emerged as a bright spot. In tough times, its economy is doing relatively well,andpeople just rejected the far right. Why is that? Well, can you imagine Joe Biden turning and doing what Keir Starmer just did? The Labour Party in Britain is supposed to be well to the left of the Democrats — but can you picture Joe Biden turning around and angrily saying “America needs to get rid of immigrants?” LOL.
Are youkiddingme? Biden’s doing remarkable things likebuilding chip factoriesand planning to make America anexporter of clean energyand manufacturing. And all those things are going to revitalize the working class, sure — but they’re also going to requireimmigrants. Plenty of them. America’s going to have to import expertise in chip manufacturing from global leaders like Singapore and Taiwan, probably, and in clean energy, perhaps from Norway and France. These two things go hand in hand — revitalizing a working class, and immigration. Because we don’t live in the 1890s anymore. We have civilizational scale problems, and it’s foolish to imagine that any nation is going to single-handedly solve them — oravoidthem.
And yet Britain’s immigration policy is so extreme, so xenophobic that you know who appluaded Keir Starmer — the head of the Labour Party — for his “Britain needs to be weaned off immigration” comments?Nigel Farage. LOL — are you seeing how twisted and idiotic this is? That’s like Donald Trump applauding Joe Biden for telling Americans that immigrants are the real problem, for scapegoating themjust like him.
Now. How is all that linked to a massacre in Colorado? Well, pretty simply. Obviously Keir Starmer’s not out there demonizing gay people. But heisscapegoating “others.” And when do you that, well, it’s a slippery slope.Because nowyou’retelling a Big Lie, too. The fact is that Britain needs immigrants — a ton of them — if it ever wants working healthcare or ambulance or public transport or anything, really, again. To say the opposite, well, it’s a Big Lie of a particularly cynical kind, which is why a figure like, LOL, Nigel Farage applauds it. But when you tell that Big Lie, what are you doing?You are letting hate flourish.
Because now the average person out there thinks that people “not like us” are to blame forhiswoes. But the precise opposite is true. That guy can’t get an ambulance or a bus or cheap food or public services anymore because now there’s not enough labour in the economy tosupplythose things. And yet when the average person is led to think that “people like them are the cause of our problems!!!”…it’s a pretty small leap to demonizing gays, women, minorities, others in general.
You might dispute that, so again, let’s think about it. Why would a young guy shoot up a gay club? Igrew up at gay clubs. They were the only places where kids like me — sensitive, creative, bullied even by teachers, who’d egg on the daily beatings — weresafe. Even though I wasn’t gay, the gay community protected me fiercely. They knew a wounded, hunted kid when they saw one. And I supported them right back, going on “Silence Equals Death” marches. But you know what?Nobody was shooting up gay clubs in those days.
They didn’t have to. Back then, the hate was institutionalized. Just getting basicrightswas a challenge. But having won them, now — well, hate is something that’s not just in the open, it’s far,farworse than that.
Today, hate is right out there,permeating everything. Just open up the internet.What’s really weird and strange and gross about it? Well, the fact that literally any man — and it’s almost always a man — can build a huge audience through…hate. Some can preach misogyny, and teach lonely guys who can’t dates that women are to be hated, despised, put in their place…and some of those guysgo out and massacre women every once in a while. Some teach that the “master race” is under threat…and maybe they’re even smart enough not to say the clear implication out loud, which is that everyone else is “inferior,” and women’s role is just to breed, and the job of a kid is to be a little soldier in race war. Some call for the end of democracy. Some preach that science is out to get you. Some say that liberals are pedophiles who drink kids’ blood.
On and on and on it goes. What’s genuinely shocking and weird about the place our civilization’s in is how much hate there is, and how right out in the open it is.So much so that we just shrug, mostly, and accept it, as a feature of the modern world. It’s just a…risk. You never know. You open up YouTube or Facebook or the Cheesy Billionaire’s new Twitter, and, whoops, there’s some vicious hate. Someone’s saying that this kind of person isn’t really human, that those people don’t belong, that these kinds of people — women — don’t deserve rights. It might not even be aimed at you. It’s justthere.
We live in an atmosphere, now, of perma-hate. And it’s becoming a Big Problem.
Because, most of all, weshouldn’t. Do you think it’s remotely normal to exist in such a milieu?To just open up your phone and have to constantly navigate through hate?That’s not normal. At least not for a civilization that wants tostaycivilized.
Sohow did we get here? To this place where perma-hate is a feature of modern life, where hate permeates everything, so much so, that it’s like the air we breathe is a little bit poisoned, sometimes a lot, and we just shrug, and accept it?
Our institutions are failing at preventing and protecting us from hate.I’ve already discussed one key mechanism of that happening: political leaders, even those who should be against it, telling Big Lies, which go on to push societies down a slippery slope of hate, legitimizing hate towards all kinds of groups. Kier Starmer should know better, and when Nigel Farage is applauding, well, that’s a little bit like Jeffrey Dahmer saying you did a great job in your college essay.Something’s very wrong,and that something is Starmer islegitimizing hate.
But the story only begins there, really. The American media, recently, has done a better job. After the shock of Jan 6th, really, it began to finally call Big Lies…Big Lies…to try to debunk them better…to try to establish the link between hate and real-world violence. And that had an effect. There’s little doubt it helped sway Americans away from the far right. The American media still has a lot of work to do — just today I read a description of the Colorado gunman as “troubled” and “mentally ill,” and I think we all know that there are a lot of troubled and mentally ill people in the world,who aren’t massacring gay people at nightclubs.
And yet the American media these days is abright spot.That’s how low the bar is. In the British media, almost nobody points out that the head of opposition playing mini-demagogue is, well, a terrible place for a society to be, because that means nobody in power is offering people a hate-free politics, and what can happen then, but for hate tobreed? In Europe, too, media is doing a particularly poor job of really chartingthe continent’s descent, all over again, into hate, and helping people understand that it’s a Big Problem, not least because, well, hello, does anyone remember what happened last time?
When media fails at this basic job — of reminding people that hate is wrong — of course it’s that much easier for it tobreed.
I’ve used that word twice now, so let me clarify why. It’s what hate does, if nobody checks it. It breeds. Especially in troubled times, like these.People are looking foranswers.Hey, why is the world falling apart? Why can’t I seem to make it? I just want a stable life — that’s not asking too much, is it — so why can’t I ever seem togetone? Hate, in times like these, is a temptress, whose siren song can become almost irresistible. And once you hear it, you kind of go mad, and infect the next person.
Let me make that clearer.Hate is a social disease. It’s a set of beliefs that spread from person to person thatthosepeople are less than us.They’re to blame for our problems, our challenges, our woes, becausethey’re not like us. They’re inferior, and yet, we’re the ones who are facing all these issues — it must be because they made it happen. Theydidsomething to us. In ancient times, they’d said to have brought a curse on us, or be witches, or what have you. In modern times, they’re blamed for economic decline or social instability or downward mobility. The moral of the story remains the same: annihilate the hated ones, and the moral universe will only then be justified and righteous again, only then will you hav achieved salvation — through purification.
Let me say it again, because I don’t think we understand this well, even if we know it, we have yet to really grasp it, feel it, chew on it, taste how bitter it is.Hate is a social disease. And we are letting our societies get infected with it to the point that they are going into sepsis.They are hitting organ failure, like Britain, where nothing works, not the NHS, not the BBC, not the economy — and yet people arestillconvulsing in hate. Maybe you see how deadly the disease is, then.
We are failing to inoculate our societies against hate. Biden is emerging as a figure that can be admired and respected around the world because he’s one of the very, very few who actually goes up against hate and points out how foolish, how wrong, how downright un-Americanit is. But how many leaders do that now? In Britain…nobody. In Europe, the number shrinks by the day. Our media’s failing at the job, too — even if it’s doing better in America, it still fails in critical ways, which let people think that hate, just that tiny bit of it, well, that’s OK. No harm done, right?
The final set of institutions which is failing are our educational ones.Amazingly enough, when young people don’t want to hate, our institutions try to forcethemto. They’ll hire all kinds of speakers under the guise of “freedom of speech,” and plenty of kids will say, hey, I don’t want to listen to this misogynist, this bigot, hate is a social disease, andthe kids get blamed. But nobody’s taking away the “freedom of speech” of the bigots and misogynists and lunatics — are you kidding? Last I checked, they have millions upon millions of followers — it’s a joke to say that they’re like Soviet dissidents, locked away in Siberia. LOL — they’re earning huge amounts of money from hate,Solzhenitsyn and Brechtthey ain’t.
Meanwhile, because they buy into the foolish notion that hate-is-freedom-of-speech, educational institutions hardly prepare kids to live in a less hateful world, which is exactly why kids feel theyhaveto do things like protest.As a simple example, you can study Econ to this very day, and not be taught the fact that “comparative advantage”was made by….slaves…or Amartya Sen’s famous criticism that you can give a servant or slave a straw bed, instead of a stone floor, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still one…andhe won a Nobel Prize for that.
Our institutions are failing to inoculate our societies against hate well enough, hard enough, fast enough.And that’s before we get to grim facts likeBillionaires Buying Twitter to Give the Far Right a $44 Billion Christmas Present. Think of how rare it is for a leader to speak out against hate the way Biden does.But shouldn’t that be the norm?Think, too, of how infinitely depressing it is that a figure like Kier Starmer comes out on the side of hate, and how foolish and weak that looks next to a Biden. Think of all the Democrats taking a page from Biden, and speaking forcefully now, against hate, violence, brutality, Big Lies — how America’schanging.
We are going to have to do better, my friends. When I ask myself whether we should consider hate as a Sixth Existential Threat our civilization faces, sadly, my answer these days is: look again atthe state of the world, and tell me weshouldn’t.
UmairNovember 2022
