Why Do People Hate? And Is There a Way to Counteract It?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/activism/why-do-people-hate-and-there-way-counteract-it



Who hates and why? Trying to answer that question, New York Times writer Seth Stephens-Davidowitz recently used big data methods to exhaustively analyze traffic on a prominent hate web site. His conclusion, “Why do some people feel this way? And what is to be done about it? I have pored over data of an unprecedented breadth and depth, thanks to our new digital era. And I can honestly offer the following answer: I have no idea.”

Not everyone agrees. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson has authored a remarkable book about the root causes of human conflict ( Beasts: What Animals Can Teach Us About the Origins of Good and Evil, Bloomsbury, USA). The book provocatively links human-on-human violence to human-on-animal violence.

Based on the work of Masson and others, I am convinced that sooner than we might think, breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology, cultural anthropology and other fields will give us dramatic new ways to understand where hate comes from and how to address it.

And fortunately there is one organization that has very good ideas about “what is to be done about it.” For twenty years now Not In Our Town (NIOT) has been communicating and developing community based programs to fight hate.

[shenmue]

1. Some folk create a defense mechanism

They've been fed a lot of fears. Hate helps them to push away the idea that they need to do anything different to make their lives better. It's pushed off onto some 'other.'