“You’ve
got to be taught
To
hate and fear,
You’ve
got to be taught
From
year to year,
It’s
got to be drummed
In
your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught...
FROM HATRED TO EMPATHY: AN ESSAY ON FREE WILL
Karen Cronick
INTRODUCTION
In this
essay we will consider the nature of two human experiences, empathy and hatred,
and compare their psychological, social and physiological characteristics. We
will review the factors that cause them, and consider how they contribute to
our sense of self, both individually and collectively. We will consider how
they have been manipulated by different classes of leaders, and their effects.
Finally, we will analyze how the pernicious aspects of hatred can be converted
into empathetic relationships.
People’s
Sociability and freedom
We humans are
uniquely social. We learn almost everything by watching and listening to others.
From birth we look at the faces and hear the voices around us -interpreting their
emotional charges-, and we imitate them. We begin to smile after seeing our
parents do it, and then we imitate the sounds they make. With time, our
learning becomes more complex, and then we walk the way they do, and learn to
love and hate what -and whom- they do.
We imitate, but we have to ask, does this limit our
free will? The problem of human freedom includes our ability to choose, and our
moral and legal responsibilities for our acts. Free will can be considered at
both individual and group levels. It implies that that our decisions and our actions
are not completely determined by external constraints, and that we could have behaved
differently in any given situation.
This problem is, in turn, related to the question of
what it is that determines what we really want to do. It is clear that our
desires are determined and influenced in many ways, by our physiology, by past
experiences, and by social constraints. We are taught to be monogamous, for example,
and to appreciate certain culturally created foods, ways of dressing ourselves,
and artistic expressions. But even these custom-influenced practices and habits
change over the years, partly due to “influencers” dissidents, or in
Moscovici’s term, “active minorities” (1996). Both custom and the influencers
affect us, but in the end, we as individuals choose. We just need the right
conditions to do so. We may take charge of ourselves and become active
minorities, although most of us may need the example set by these nonconformists.We
can judge their actions, and sometimes accept them as appropriate.
Zygmunt Bauman (2024) questioned whether “we the
people” are inherently free. He observes that although politically, in a
democratic state, the individual is responsible for his or her acts, and considered
capable of choice, nevertheless he or she “appears as a historical creation, as
does the society to which they belongs” (p. 22). Bauman creates an analogy using,
on one hand, the ideal of total social control incorporated in Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon”,
and he situates this model in a structured capitalist society in which an “individual’s
access to ‘liberty’ is determined by their social status. In this way he
suggests that “moral education, cultural integration, consensus, group values, the
‘principal coordination’, legitimation, […] and the assimilation of our
affective environment influences our own attachments and preferences” (p. 53).
Bauman’s appreciation of the limits imposed by culture
are perhaps extreme, but as he also points out, human action does not happen by
chance. There have always been strong social determinants over belief and
action. But, as we will consider in the last part of this essay, there are
large spaces for individual doubt and possible social change. There have been
important historical moments of intentional change to promote human betterment,
such as the invention of written language and libraries, the establishment of
democracy in ancient Athens, the beginnings of a religion of brotherhood and
love in the 1st century,
the ideals of non-theological solutions to human knowledge, the possibility of inherent and legally established human rights
in the 18th and 19th century, the legal abolition of
slavery in the 19th century, and the establishment of an
international organization dedicated to the achievement of world peace (The
United Nations), among others. These are intentional accomplishments that arose
from a combination of individual thinkers and historical moments of cultural
change.
The relation between hatred and empathy
Hatred and empathy create opposing predictions with
respect to free will. As we will discuss below, hatred is almost always an
induced condition, either at an individual level or as a collective phenomenon.
Empathy, on the other hand, is an individual experience, and allows emotional
communication that surpasses cultural experiences.
There is evidence for a basic continuum between hate
and empathy in which past experiences and culture mold individuals’ emotional
reactions to others. But these two “ways of feeling” are very different both in
both their etiology and functioning. On the one hand they both are involved in
people’s reactions to each other. But empathy is an inborn ability while hate
is a learned response.
Empathy has innate, cerebral components which makes it
almost instinctual at an individual level. Some people tend to feel it more
than others. Hate, however, is not a unique reaction, it is a learned behavior
arising from a history of fear, sadness, or even love,
that has some of the attributes of an emotion. Sam Goldstein (2025) observes
that “It is shaped by fear, anger, stress, and social conditioning, developing
over time rather than emerging naturally”. Also, a sense of powerlessness is an
important component of hatred.
Thus, hatred is not the opposite of empathy, nor is it
an emotional alternative to it, although empathy may help alleviate it. These
two emotional states have different origins which will be considered below, although
both have some important components of learned social behavior. One learns to
hate, as the song from Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical comedy “South Pacific”
makes clear (the lyrics of the first verse are cited in the pull-quote above).
Hate can be unlearned, but first, it must be
understood in its manifestations in language and actions. In the following
pages this possibility will be explored. Similarly, one can learn from past
experiences with empathy to be more sensitive to its manifestations, and to feel
a generalized positive identification with others. Once established, both begin
to function like emotions and have motivating properties. But hate does not
arise “naturally” from simple imitation response the way empathy does.
EMPATHY
History
Cronick (in evaluation) has considered the concept of
empathy from a variety of viewpoints. She points out how it has been
characterized ever since the eighteenth century as an ability that allows one to
perceive others’ emotions as “mirrored” in their own feelings, that is, the
condition in which the emotions of an individual begin to be reflected in those
of another person. This experience is often related to compassion in the
perceiver. Below, I refer to some of the research nuances regarding the
subject.
Stueber (2019) reminds us that the modern concept of
empathy is of relatively recent intellectual heritage. It reflects varied
research that comes from different disciplines, both philosophical and
scientific. Since the Enlightenment, philosophers have speculated about our
ability to recognize “other minds”. The author points out that since the
eighteenth century, particularly due to the influence of the writings of David
Hume and Adam Smith, the ability to feel the emotional processes of our fellow
human beings has been central to much academic research, especially with
respect to the psychological bases of our social and moral nature. It is clear
that it must be considered as a basic component of human agency.
Relation to tolerance
There is a significant, if distant, conceptual
relationship between empathy and tolerance. Tolerance does not imply that
people are emotionally involved with each other. Tolerance presupposes the abstract
awareness of a shared humanity, and this includes a sense of identification,
one of the components of empathy. With the Enlightenment, thinkers such as
Immanuel Kant and Voltaire began to reflect on the theme of tolerance,
especially in the sense of religious tolerance. In the context of Enlightenment
philosophy, the ideal developed of a possible coexistence between people and
groups whose opinions and beliefs are different. This ideal does not imply
acceptance or adoption of these opinions, but it does imply a sense of
compassionate rapport.
Characteristics and definition of empathy
According to Riess (2017), empathy is an emotional
capacity that is expressed when a person can participate in the affective
experiences of another person, that is, take someone else’s perspective (a
cognitive process) and feel compassion for them (a motivational process). The
author indicates that there are three parallel aspects to this: sharing other
people’s emotions, perceiving the circumstances of another, and feeling
compassion for them.
Depow, Francis, and Inzlicht (2021) say that most
research on empathy has focused on painful emotions, for example, shared,
empathetic sadness. However, in everyday life, empathy most often appears in
response to positive and joyful emotions, not just disturbing ones. They say
that positive emotions, such as excitement, are experienced about three times
more frequently than negative emotions, such as disgust, anger, and fear.
Causes of empathy and its and relation to brain
anatomy
Marco Iacoboni (2009) says that there is evidence from
studies in social psychology, and also from the neurosciences to consider mimicry
and empathy as basic learning tools. People learn associative sequences from
watching others. Imitation and mimicry are pervasive and automatic. Children’s
constant imitations of their parents and others can be comic, but it is the
basis for most early learning experiences, from walking, to talking, to using
cutlery at the table. Dancers, musicians and athletes imitate the great-grand masters
in their fields. People in the street will all look up if someone in their
midst does so: there may be a flowerpot falling off a high window!
But empathy is more than simple imitation, it involves
actually interpreting and feeling another person’s emotions. Neuroscience
investigations have focused on the physiology of “mirroring” at single-cell and
neural-system levels. These approaches give new perspectives to the
understanding of intersubjectivity and social behavior.
Riess (2017) refers to the neurobiological origins of
empathy. People have an innate capacity that makes them responsive to others’
emotional processes, although some people may be more empathic than others.
Riess says that magnetic resonance studies show that there is a cerebral mechanism
that permits people to imitate others on an unconscious level in their
postures, mannerisms and facial expressions, and to actually feel their joy and
pain. This biological “mirror” capacity also is expressed in muscular fibers,
for example, if one sees someone else reacting to a pinprick, he or she may
retract their own hand.
Empathy and a sense of self
Jennifer Pfeifer, Marco Iacoboni, John Mazziotta and
Mirella Dapretto (2008) say that the mirror neuron system plays an important
role in social cognition. These findings suggest that simulation mechanisms may
be important in everyday social functioning during human development.
For their part, Uddin, Lucina, Iacoboni, Lang and
Keenan. (2007) describe the anatomical and physiological aspects of the
development of a sense of “self” and relate it to empathetical experiences.
They observe that studies on self-face recognition indicate that the right
frontoparietal brain areas that are associated with self-recognition overlap
with areas that contain mirror neurons. They observe that these neurons may
provide a link between self and other, enabling personal subjectivity and intersubjectivity
through an intentional synchrony that supersedes the more unreflective and
automatic simulation processes. Thus, they say, “the frontoparietal
mirror-neuron areas of the human brain can effectively function as bridges
between self and other, by co-opting a system for recognizing the actions of
others to support self-representation functions” (p. 154).
This suggests that for humans, and probably other
social animals, the self is created in terms of its relationships to others.
The self is so identified with its social environment that it constantly needs
to differentiate itself from others. The same authors propose that the function
of certain anatomical brain areas called midline structures, are the origins of
the “social or psychological aspects of the self, such as self-referential
judgments […], self-appraisal […] and judgments of personality traits […]”.
They add that “It is likely that one function of this so-called ‘default
network’ is to act as a constant monitor of the self and its social
relationships; thus, we see increases in activity in this network where the
social self is invoked, as well as when processing information about the mental
states of others (p 155).
In this anatomical reading of the difference between
the self and others we see a constant interrelationship. It is clearly related
with the idea of culture. But empathy is a profoundly positive and personal means
of emotional communication, and the basis for people’s capacity to relate. It
has important socialization functions because it not only involves one’s capacity
to “feel” what others feel and react compassionately to others’ emotions and
needs, but also forms the platform for one’s own sense of self. Thus, children
take on their parents’ culture, and learn how to survive in a social world. And
yet, because the experience of empathy is immediate, and bypasses cultural
structures, it provides the possibility of forming new ways of evaluating one’s
self and other people.
Empathy, esthetics, and sports
With respect to the aesthetic
experience of empathy, Seifert and Kim (2006) describe “Einfühlung” (empathy)
as an immediate, implicit, and non-rational knowledge that deals with the
imaginative projection of oneself towards the objects of artistic
contemplation. It is a psychic experience that one “feels entering” (eingefühlt)
into what is perceived. Implicit in this process is that the observer (or
listener) participates in a process of imitation by interpreting what he
perceives in the others, or in this case, an artistic object he or she listens
to or sees.
Artistic appreciation is an experience of sociability
and empathy, whose scenario is usually collective. It is highly socializing and
collaborative. Musicians, actors, painters and dancers act together to achieve
a specific product that is related to a musical experience, a theatrical performance,
a dance experience, a painting or some other production and may have other
people witnessing the event. Both performances, and private artistic experiences
usually haves a limited duration, although nowadays, with recordings and videos,
the possibility of enjoying it can last longer.
There are, of course, two sides to these productions,
the artists’ experiences and those of the audience. Both involve empathy, and
both are intimately related to shared experiences. Both have connections with
shared, cultural resources such as different musical or artistic genre which
particular groups appreciate as part of their own ethnicity and background.
Aesthetics and sports have been used in social
projects to reduce violent community and group confrontations. With regard to
sports, perhaps the first time they were used to achieve peace was in Greece,
in the first Olympics. In revising the idea of the use of sports for social
change below, we will review some of the psychosocial aspects of sports
competitions that make this possible.
HATRED
Definitions
The word hatred is nuanced. A person may say they hate
the taste of cauliflower, or a particular song, or algebra or traffic jams.
These aversions are personal and are related to particular tastes or bitter experiences.
On the other hand, when someone says they hate a specific person, or a group of
people, the word implies a learned, intensely hostile and acquired animosity.
Agneta Fischer, Eran Halperin,
Daphna Canetti, Alba Jasini et al offer the following definitions
for hate: an emotional attitude, a syndrome, a form of generalized anger, a
generalized evaluation, a normative judgment, a motive to devalue others, or
simply an emotion. Hate, as the authors recognize, is socially unseemly, and
difficult to acknowledge personally.
They observe that, it is different from anger. While
anger is temporary, and usually aimed at someone else’s immediate behavior,
hate “implies appraisals of the other’s general malevolent nature and malicious
intent”. The former is temporary while the latter tends to be longstanding. They
also observe that: “the concept of hate includes low levels of control, high
levels of obstacles, and intense unpleasantness”. Summarizing, they say that personal hate is
characterized by “the attribution of stable and malicious intentions to the
target, accompanied by appraisals of danger and feelings of powerlessness”.
Stephen Richer (in Kasparov and Applebaum, 2025) said:
“It’s a little bit like the Eye of Sauron. With that—when it’s turned on you,
you feel it. You get a lot of ugliness directed your way.”
Characteristics
Hate is a learned, emotional response. Its objects are
not arbitrary As Navarro, Marchena and Menacho (2013) have pointed out:
“Prejudice,
group hostility and hatred are everyday experiences. They are expressed in
words and in deeds. US white supremacists attack blacks; Jews kill
Palestinians, and the latter blow themselves up in a Jerusalem restaurant full
of Jewish diners; pro-abortion gynecologists have been murdered by
anti-abortion fanatics; the genocides of Rwanda and Bosnia….” (p. 10).
Hate can be a personal or group project. It can surge
up in the face of perceived wrongdoing on the part of other people or groups.
As a generic, shared emotion, hatred is a strong, negative feeling against
another person or group. The hater sees the object of their hatred as bad,
immoral, dangerous, or all of this together (Staub, 2003).
Hatred can be experienced emotionally, but can have
cognitive implications and also become a kind of behavior. In a cognitive,
attitudinal sense, it refers to negative opinions regarding its object. A
violent act is also an act of hatred, when it is based on an intense,
persistent and negative perception of the other, whom we desire to hurt,
destroy, or make suffer.
Causes
It can arise from aversive experiences, such as
domestic or social mistreatment, or the effects of war or other forms of
violence. In these cases, hatred can be a direct behavioral reaction to pain as
described in classical conditioning, as in Pavlov’s experiments, where dogs
learned to associate a bell with food and would salivate upon hearing it,
leading to a conditioned response. In simple terms, two stimuli are linked together to
produce a new learned response in a person or animal. In a negative sense, the
dog would learn to associate the sound of a bell, or any other stimulus with the
pain of an electric shock, and cringe or express fear when it hears it. It is a
behavioral response at a basic cerebral level. In people, the mental evocation
of those responsible for past torments, or anyone associated with them, can
elicit rage and hatred. In these examples hatred is not a chosen response,
although it is learned.
Another kind of almost automatic learned behavior that
has been amply studied is “operant conditioning”. The term originated with the
work of psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner. Research on operant conditioning
has produced a very detailed technology that is used in teaching, medicine,
psychology, and other disciplines, called "behavior modification."
Operant conditioning is a body of techniques for
manipulating the environmental consequences of behavior. The reinforcement of a
given behavior tends to increase its frequency and punishing it tends to reduce
it. A subject is more likely to repeat behaviors that are associated with
positive consequences, and less likely to repeat those that produce negative
results. In general, it is an associative learning; Behavioral contingencies
can come "naturally" from the environment, as, for example, people
wait for the green light to cross the street. The theory of conditioning comes
from studies that manipulate environmental contingencies to cause certain
consequences artificially.
When these two different forms of conditioning (Pavlov’s
and Skinner’s) are involved in the generation of hate responses, people can
resist. But they need to know, not only what is happening, but how to avoid
being affected. They need to intentionally oppose being manipulated, and this
means that they must have both the means and reasons to do so. People need
preparation, knowledge, and viable motivational alternatives that come from
reflection and problematization. The possibility of resisting conditioning will
be reviewed in the next sections.
Hatred as a mechanism of political control
Hatred can be created to enhance power and control. As
a collective social response, it is fairly recent historically. In history it
has not always been necessary to create sociological hate structures. For many
centuries the disagreeable aspects of war and slavery were considered normal
power issues, and it was not necessary to justify them. Inequality was also
accepted as a social given. It was not necessary for Cesar to defend his mistreatment
of the Gallic and Germanic tribes to the Romans when he arrived in Rome as a
successful general with slaves and plunder. He was received with enthusiasm.
Conquest and its booty of treasure and slaves was expected of the emperors’
generals. Even in the European religious wars in the 17th century,
the divisions of the time were not considered on an individual level, except in
a given person’s religious conversion from one religion to another. The
relationships between Catholics and Protestants were considered to have mostly dynastic
and territorial importance. Possibly the traditional European rejection of the
Jews may be considered xenophobic. However, the term “xenophobia” came into use
only in the 19th century.
It was with the Enlightenment, and the new awareness of
human rights, that mass mistreatment was recognized as problematic. And it was
also the first time that dynastic and imperial leaders had to convince their
populations to support their ambitions. Before that there were armies with
soldiers that followed their generals’ orders in a sort of professional ethic
of obedience, although history is full of tales of armies changing allegiances.
The relationship between hatred and intentionality
Agneta Fischer, Eran Halperin, Eran Canetti & Alba
Jasini et al observe that hatred is tied to intentional action, in that it
implies the desire to hurt, eliminate or destroy the hated person or group, even
to the point of physically killing or torturing them.
Hatred can be a chosen response, as we will describe
below. It can be socially useful in creating an hostile cohesion in which a
group´s members are united by their shared aversions. This is generally described
in terms of identity politics. In this case it is an expedient for increasing
in-group solidarity and for reducing the anxiety that comes from a sense of individual
powerlessness. That is, hatred for an outgroup can strengthen ingroup structure
and unity.
On the other hand, anger and hate can cause damage
both within the individual harboring these emotions, and to the people around
them. They create a toxic cycle, that diminishes personal well-being, destroys
relationships, and prolongs a legacy of hurt.
It can also be cultivated. People can remember and
create a litany of their grievances. Some of these grievances can be imagined,
as when one perceives an inexistent affront or aggression. Each new offense,
imagined or real, then becomes part of an inner or cultural narrative,
entrenching one’s emotional response.
Hatred and identity
As José Navarro, Esperanza Marchena and Inmaculada
Menacho (2013) have pointed out, hatred is based on the perception of the
other, but it also has a strong relationship with one’s own self-perception and
personal -and cultural- history. Certain adversity in one’s own life can
trigger and intensify hatred: jealousy, failure, guilt and so on.
It can even arise from a cultural memory in which
one’s own group was responsible for the mistreatment of an out-group, such as
the memory of slavery among certain white extremist groups. It becomes a
collective guilty conscience. As Cronick (2025a) points out, in the Americas
the memory of: a) slavery and its abolition, and b) the brutality of the
near-extermination of the indigenous population, persists. She says:
All this
has left psychological, social and legal traces. It has left social remnants
that are still visible [in the Americas], and still influence the formation of
attitudes and ways in which today's citizens understand themselves and
others. [The 19th century]
was a century that abolished slavery, thus questioning -and changing- millennia
of involuntary servitude, and contradictorily, it was also responsible for one
of the largest massacres in history with respect to the original inhabitants of
these territories.
Individual and group hatred
In political relationships generalized hatred, or
xenophobia, is a common component. It is antithetical to the ideal of
democratic debate, and has often been used by unethical political, religious or
other leaders to sustain their power base. Finkel, Bail, Cikara, Ditto, et al (2020) talk about political
polarization based on emotional rather
than cognitive differences with relation to political party affiliations. They
say polarization focuses less on the triumph of ideas than on the personal
rejection of the supporters of opposing political parties. It leads to
hatred-based political stances. The dynamics of polarization imply that party
militants identify with one political group largely because of their hatred for
an opposing one, not because of thought-out reasons. They call this a kind of
“identity politics” where “holding opposing partisans in contempt on the basis
of their identity alone precludes innovative cross-party solutions and mutually
beneficial compromises” (p. 533).
This can be distinguished from for tribalism (which is
based on kinship). They say it establishes a kind of religion. It is not
directly related to racial identity, but rather is based on a “strong faith in
the moral correctness and superiority of one’s sect” (p. 533).
The authors observe that since the beginning of the 21st
millennium, this sectarian tendency is reinforced by Internet social media, and
even many newspapers and magazines. In their opinion, part of this phenomenon
is due to the increased economic dependency that political candidates and large
news media have developed on ideologically extreme donors.
Cultural identity and exclusion.
On the other hand, Navarro, Marchena and Menacho also reflect
on the fact that hatred can be theoretically related to the experience of love
and even empathy. As we have pointed out
before, humans are neurologically wired to “mirror” the emotions of others, a
process related to the experience of empathy and facilitated by the brain’s
“mirror neurons”. Hatred and cultural rejection can be a similar experience, in
that it can provoke an almost automatic emotional reaction in others,
stimulating similarly strong affective states. Once cultural rejection is
triggered in one person, behavior associated with it spreads to others. This
can create a collective emotional state, such as mob mentality.
However, this imitation of other people’s hatred is
not a direct “mirror-image” response as it is in empathy. Hatred must be
intentionally incorporated by the affected person. And, as mentioned, usually
other motives are involved, such as the need to belong to a given social group.
The Russian sociologist Vladimir Mukomel' (2015), in
an article about xenophobia in Russia, mentions the relationship between the
trust and distrust that may exist among the people of xenophobic groups. He says that the present century in in that
country is marked by popular distrust, both for immigrants and for the nation’s
authorities. He affirms that “xenophobia serves as a surrogate for
gratification” (p. 39). He adds that in today’s Russia, “An individual’s
interpersonal trust is limited to the circle of people closest to him—the
family, relatives, friends, and close acquaintances” (p. 42). These limited
circles in which trust exists are felt as fragile, and distrust for outsiders
is exacerbated by the government that discourages manifestations of “popular initiative
and solidarity from below that are based on generosity, a willingness to
provide assistance […]” (p 44).
Hatred as a distractive strategy
A diversionary tactic is something used for
distracting other people’s attention from one’s real intentions. In this case
we reflect on certain world leaders’ strategic use of cruelty.
In the end, we are witnessing a certain kind of power
struggle. Individuals with certain characteristics that allow them to ignore
the suffering of others, form social bonds that permit them to pull an
ideological screen between their real intentions, and something they present as
a valuable political struggle. Certain groups of people are pointed out as
enemies of the true nation. These “enemies” are presented as bad influences
that must be eliminated. For those of the general population that accept this
rhetoric, this manufactured hatred becomes a political endeavor. Meanwhile, the
leaders and their followers steal everyone´s else’s wealth and resources.
Once the patterns of social repudiation are
established, people feel an increased affinity -if not a certain affection- for
those who share their revulsion. This idea of a “surrogate for gratification”
is worth exploring in this context. Michelle Peterie and David Neil (2020) observe
that rejected groups are “people against which one’s own identity can be
defined, either explicitly or implicitly; and [. . .] against which one’s
social practices, conventions and customs, values and beliefs can be contrasted”
(p. 27). This is, of course a two-way street: it provides both the criteria for
rejecting outside groups, and a reaffirmation of certain clan-like characteristics
of in-group identity. In this way, “the social processes through which the
‘self’ and ‘Other’ are constituted remain in the foreground” (Ibid. p. 29). The
ties that exist within exclusive groups can be reassuring and comforting
evidence of in-group identity.
However, both of these identities are forged, in the
sense that the beliefs that they are founded on are useful creations rather
than coherent value schemes. Groups do not need conclusive proof to accept
their beliefs, but usually these attitudes have an underlying, historical and
cultural coherence. They come from a history of shared and deliberated
traditions. When they become “contaminated” by xenophobic content, it requires
more effort on the believers’ part to accept them. For example, the Internet
page by Baptists Together (n.d.) lists the beliefs of the Christian far right
in the United States and contrast them with less political and more traditional
Christian traditions:
1.
‘Cleaning up’ so-called ‘moral depravity’,
which refers to a constructed rejection of values such as alternative sexual
identities or the practice of medical procedures like abortion. Baptists
Together observe that “the idea of ‘cleaning up’ the morality of society is
appealing to many who mourn the national decline in [what they consider to be] ethical
standards.” These ethical standards traditionally referred to honesty, loyalty,
charity, and shared, faith-related activities.
2.
Protecting the ‘Christian nation’
from the threat posed by Muslims/ multiculturalism/ the liberal elite/ […] antisemitism
(or sometimes, conversely, rampant Zionism), white supremacy and ethnic or
religious nationalism, with hostility towards migrants. Baptists Together
comment: “The recovery of a ‘Christian’ past in the face of the ‘threat’ posed
by Muslim immigrants appeals to a fear of persecution [….] We may add that
there are many historical antecedents for religious tolerance in which the
acceptance of others was a cultural foundation stone on which a whole ethnicity
was constructed. We can mention, for example, a) the shared culture in Granada,
Spain, between the 13th to the late 15th century, b) the shared French and
English traditions in Canada, c) the founding of the European Union, and d) Switzerland’s
cultural diversity which is manifest in its four official languages—German,
French, Italian, and Romansh.
3.
Conspiracism around a variety of issues
including climate change denial, holocaust denial, and anti-islamic conspiracy
theories. We might add to this list beliefs about creationism, paternalism, and
a general anti-scientific posture. These are alarm-reactions on the part of
those who need to protect their beliefs at all cost, even at the price of
sacrificing the need for veracity, and even the core Christian adherence to a
culture of covenant love.
Other conservative religious factions make similar
claims. With regard to the radicalization of Muslim men in Europe, Tahir Abbas
(2017) connects masculinity as a traditional, dominant identity with the
effects that follow the experience of racial rejection felt by immigrants in
Europe “where differences in religion and culture regarding ‘the other’ are
problematized and subsequently politicized” (p. 57). He says that the
attraction of utopian and totalitarian political solutions “instils a sense of
purist identity politics (p. 58)”.
In the context of a nationalist Islamic state, the
Islamic National Defense Collete (n.d.) writes that the mixture of doctrine
with nationalism in Iran can be understood:
“[…] when one looks at the Safavid empire due
to the fact that Shia Islam was almost an act of defiance against the
infiltration of their culture and nation by the Ottomans. Arguably, Shiism is a
potent political weapon for Iran as a state, as much as a religious ideology
(on a personal level). Thus, within the context of Iranian national identity,
Shia Islam is not regarded as primarily a religion but as a historical movement
opposing the forces perceived as undermining Iran’s power.”
We could cite other combinations of doctrinal and
political identities. But in the context of these two cases (the mixture of
nationalism with either Christian or Muslim identities) we find that the
creation of exclusive ingroup dogmas brings both coherence and relief to its
members. These are reactions to aversive emotional environments, that can only
be changed if they are confronted in non-aggressive ways.
Accepting cruelty
Cronick (2025c) has observed that people and groups
that form political ties with leaders that use cruelty to establish their political
bases may engage in acts of considerable brutality as signs of their loyalty.
This leadership strategy is powerful, because the emotional commitment of those
who accept these practices becomes great. They need to overcome many personal
and cultural restraints to engage in ruthlessness, and their loyalty is thus
reinforced by “guilty consciences”. It is no coincidence that under President Donald
Trump’s immigration policy in the United States, the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE agents) wear masks to hide their identity. And at a world
level the forces that violently disrupt popular manifestations also tend to
cover their faces.
Powerful modern leaders like Donald Trump, Vladimir
Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Nayib Bukele, and Isaias Afwerki (Ethiopia) among
others create enemies just for the entertainment of their followers. Then they
allow these supporters to mistreat the foes they have generated. These acolytes
can engage in their own power rituals and domination, but they will do so
personally with prisons, torments, and firearms. The top bosses themselves do
not need to participate directly in this nastiness, because they have all the
dominion that they need just watching how their orders are obeyed.
Cronick (2025c) observes that this cruelty is not even
a real political issue for the top leaders. It is simply an instrument for ensuring
their followers’ loyalty, and thus achieving more and more power and more
illicit wealth, the way a spoon is used to stir a boiling soup. She says that
this behavior may involve social and personal pathologies in which leaders and
followers form mutual bonds of unconcern for others to obtain and maintain
prerogatives and entitlement. There are certain personality characteristics
that make this indifference possible.
Individual rewards for belonging to an ingroup
Social Identity theory, originally developed by Henri
Tajfel, describes the benefits that group membership has for the members of
these groups (Research Net, 2025). The theory posits that individuals may
identify themselves with values, basic social identities such as “male” or “German”,
and group-social identities related to group membership (a club or a political
party). These may be contrasting identities, and people must choose which are
appropriate in a given situation. This menu of possibilities increases the
individual’s confidence and reduces both anxiety and social isolation. These
group identities can lead, however, to individual depersonalization and notable
intergroup hostilities.
CHANGING HATE FOR EMPATHY
We can ask, how can people, who are physically capable
of empathy, tolerate hatred? It is, as
we have been saying, a learned reaction and also a behavior, and it is
intentional. The problem is that, although intentional, it often not
thought-through. To resist it, people need to be aware of how it develops, and
to make counter-intentions, and these processes must be carefully elaborated.
We have seen that intolerance, exclusion, and hate-related
reactions are often the result of fear, isolation, identity crises, and even
simple misinformation. That is, to repeat, they are often cognitively constructed
over learned experiences that have left undesirable consequences. These
experiences can be simple operant learning episodes, or they can be cultural
elaborations that may extend across large populations, and have long histories.
Operant conditioning
In the last section we discussed how the effects of
Skinner’s idea of classical conditioning are not irresistible. But without
knowledge of how it works, it can be very effective. Cronick (2025b) has
commented on an interesting story in Skinner's autobiography, "A Matter of
Consequences" (1983) in which the author recounts an encounter with the
humanist Erich Fromm. In 1958, the two attended a symposium. Fromm had
previously expressed doubts about Skinner's results, saying that conditioning
techniques did not take into account the decision-making and free will of human
beings, and told him, "People are not pigeons" in reference to the
Skinner’s work using this species. Skinner got miffed and developed a little
experiment right there in relation to Fromm himself:
On a piece
of paper I wrote 'look at Fromm's left hand. I'm going to mold a karate move'
and passed it under the table to Halleck Hoffman. Fromm was sitting directly
across from me at the table and talking mostly to me. I turned my chair
slightly so that I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He gesticulated a
lot when he spoke, and when his left hand went up, I looked directly at him. If
he lowered his hand, I would nod and smile. Five minutes later he was moving
his arm in the air so vigorously that the watch came off his wrist all the
time" (quote taken from Psyciencia, 2015).
In this story Fromm "obeyed" Skinner, but
without knowing it. It is a control mechanism, but if Fromm had understood what
Skinner was doing to him, he could have refused to participate. Conditioning
techniques work in two basic situations: a) when the subject is unaware of the
disposition of contingencies, and b) when they are aware of them and accept
them. In fact, in certain addiction treatments, patients voluntarily undergo
aversive conditioning programs to eliminate their unwanted habits.
Conscious choice
Focusing on positive emotions is usually a conscious
choice that comes after people or groups begin to question previous ideas and are
exposed to new ways of evaluating other people. It is a healing process, in
which emotional pain is evaluated under new conditions of encounter and
understanding. The haters not only heal themselves but also contribute to the
well-being of others.
The motivation for these emotions may come from
personal contacts with members of excluded groups.
In a now well-known and moving story, Daryl Davis
(1998), an Afro-American in the United States, wrote about his friendships with
certain members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Davis is a musician and author whose
book, Klan-destine relationships: a black man's odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan” describes
his positive encounters with men who belong to this highly racist organization.
He had a middle-class upbringing that included some encounters with racism, but
although he was largely protected from its effects, he was curious about the
phenomenon. After becoming a country-music professional, Davis began to explore
the possibility of contacting Klansmen to discuss their beliefs. One of his
first encounters was with Roger Kelly, the Grand Dragon of
the local branch of the KKK at that time. The two men begin to meet, and talked
about Kelly’s beliefs. He claimed not to be a white supremist, but rather a
separationist. That is, he believed the races should live separately. Davis and
Kelly found common ground in their opposition to drug use, and Kelly proposed a
collaboration to combat addiction. Later Kelly left the KKK.
Their discussion shows that that people can overcome,
and come to tolerate opposing views, and that there can be humanity amidst
division. Davis eventually went on to
make friends with many more KKK members, and even went to some Klan meetings.
Many other members eventually left the organization because of his influence.
Davis found that Klansmen have many cultural misconceptions about black people.
After forming a friendship with a black man, he says, it was more difficult to
maintain their prejudices.
These personal and tolerant contacts opened the door
for many Klansmen to both question their prior beliefs and to revise the
emotional appraisal of the members of an excluded group. The attitude changes
were personal and intentional.
As Cronick (n.d.) notes, “We may need to consider that
consciousness is a cultural phenomenon, not in the sense of a mental capacity,
but rather in terms of self-perception and awareness of others. The way people
perceive themselves makes a difference in what possibilities they see for
themselves and how they act. This changing self-perception has cultural roots
and has influenced humanity’s ways of relating to the world and to others, and
has had a profound political impact.
Also in the context of the United States, Garry
Kasparov and Anne Applebaum (2025) discuss what the idea of democracy means
today in both that country and the world. In this conversation, Kasparov talks
about the need to understand all the underlying currents that make the trend
from democracy to autocracy possible. He means that it is important to foment a
massive understanding of these dynamics. He refers mostly to the collapse of
the traditional political debates between the Left and the Right, and their
substitution for identity politics. We have referred already to these
identities (race, religion, ethnicity), but Kasparov mentions the traditional
issues that have divided the left and the right, such as “the size of the state
and whether taxes should be high or low, and whether we should have state
health care or private health care. They were the subjects of politics and the substance
of political debate”. The danger of tyranny increases when these policy issues are
superseded by:
“… existential issues, cultural ideas,
national identity, other kinds of identity. Issues where there’s much less area
for compromise, and where there’s much less that the different various parties
can do together. I mean, so if you have an argument about taxes, you can find a
compromise between the center left and the center right. If your argument is
Who are Americans? And should people of only one skin color get to be
Americans? And, if people come from another country, and they don’t come
through the border in the right way, they should be expelled, or not expelled?
I mean, those are much more existential issues, and there’s very little area of
compromise. You also have the rise of political movements that challenge the
system itself.”
For Kasparov and Applebaum the main, most important
issue is the need to raise massive awareness of how the political debate has
changed, that is for people in general to be aware that the issues being
discussed today are not related to policy and political decision making. Rather
they are being used to divide the political spectrum and make true debate
impossible.
Teaching empathy
Empathy is an innate ability, but it is subject to
socio-environmental and cultural influences. Even people who feel its lack in
their own lives can cultivate it (Abramson, 2021) In environments where this
capacity is nurtured, these experiences tend to be more frequent. Levett-Jones,
Cant, and Lapkin (2019) examined the effectiveness of teaching empathy among
nursing students. They found that it was most effective in immersive and
experiential interventions based on simulations that employed role-playing. In
other words, there was greater learning when conditions resembled normal
contexts of social interaction.
Riess (2017) also notes that research has shown that
this vital human ability is mutable and can be taught. Nowadays it is common to
find videos on the Internet about learning this skill. There is a television
series called "Convicts and Pitbulls" (Drachkovitch & Lucas,
2009) in which inmates in prison learn to care for and love violent dogs, and
in the process they themselves learn to feel empathetic emotions. In Abramson
(2021) there are self-help recommendations for those who want to develop this
capacity in themselves.
In situations where empathy is ignored or suppressed,
it tends to disappear. Bleiker and Hutchison (2021) examined empathy in
scenarios where there have been political conflicts and wars. They also explored
its role in post-conflict reconciliation processes. That is, the authors review
both the conditions that decrease the experiences of empathy and those that
increase them. Bleiker and Hutchison say that the
emotions triggered by conflict often perpetuate existing antagonisms.
The role of art, music, and sports in promoting
empathy in violent situations
Bleiker and Hutchison discuss how the active use of
empathy can promote alternative ways of reducing conflict. The authors review
the role of art, and theatre in particular, in peacebuilding in Sri Lanka. In
its usual sense the term "culture" is used with reference to works of
art, fiction and music. This meaning, too, has served as a precedent to
mobilize consciousness. And these manifestations are always active in social
change.
One example of how the arts can create empathy and
thus promote de reduction of prejudice and hatred is the work of the author Harriet
Beecher Stowe, who influenced how slavery was viewed in the United States
before the civil war. She wrote the novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (2021) that was
first published in 1851. She narrated the story of slaves and their owners in a
way that made their feelings accessible to people living in the northern
slavery-free states.
In
Venezuela there is a program whose original objective was to bring classical
music to impoverished neighborhoods where it was seldom heard. It originated in 1975 from an idea developed by José Antonio Abreu, and
they called it "The System of Orchestras". Its objective was (and is)
to promote the collective and individual instruction and practice of music
through symphony orchestras and choirs, as instruments of social organization
and humanistic development. "The system" ended up being an instrument
of peace in the neighborhoods, and many young people were able to avoid being
incorporated into violent gangs due to the influence of this organization.
Some years later
a spontaneous movement of street-corner groups appeared that sang rap, without
any score. The two musical genders saved many boys from delinquency and other
types of bullying.
Music is a
language, which goes beyond tonalities and becomes empathy, that is, an
expression of one's intimate being and one’s own culture. Especially in
improvised music, musicians who share playing a piece cannot hate each other.
Ancestral music, unlike classical music, contains specific cultural memories
that are incorporated in the particular harmonies and rhythms of the ethnic
group that has produced it.
Music is a
universal language. There is a video of the cellist Yo Yo Ma (n.d.) playing
along with a musician from a tribe of the Bushmen. It is a testimony to the plurality of this
language that goes beyond local tonalities and rhythms and becomes a powerful
instrument of empathy.
Andrés
Felipe García (2025) writes about the instrument (and the comparative style) of
"la guataca" in Venezuela. He says that playing this type of
music:
"It is not a special gift or anything like
that, but it is executed from traditions such as knowing, recognizing and using
musical-cultural conventions. It means being aware of the perceived sound
structure, of the recognition and use of those structures, of conventional
forms and those that are not. It implies knowing at what point in the sequence
we are located in the evolution of the rhythm, the melody, the harmony or in
the formality of the sound discourse" (García, 2025).
This
combination of discipline, knowledge, tradition, and innovation can have deep
effects on the participants. They become collaborators and co-reproducers of renovations
or extensions of their existing cultures.
These
effects are not limited to the arts. In many sporting events similar
“civilizing” effects are felt. Sports also have pre-established rules, along
with plenty of room to improvise. The traditional spirit of the Olympic Games
uses sporting events to strengthen peace as its participants interact in social
scenarios in which the rules, goals and actions are agreed upon.
The
Alcatraz Project in Venezuela, under the tutelage of the Santa Teresa
Foundation, began in 2003 with a group of young people that had been imprisoned
for participating in a robbery at the Santa Teresa Rum company. The owner of
the company, Alberto Vollmer, decided to offer the young people that were responsible
for the crime the possibility of working for the company, without being paid,
for three months, to reimburse what was stolen as an alternative for spending time in jail. Later they were taught to read
and write. Then Alberto Volmer came up with the idea of instilling interpersonal
values in them through the sport of rugby, and thus began the project, which
eventually had more than 200 young participants.
From these
beginnings, the formation of rugby groups began to be promoted as part of a
social re-education program for young people and adults with behavioral
problems. Young people, members of local bands, participate in the formation of
teams, the organization of competitions, and the learning of new rules of
interaction. Participants come from gangs, prisons and local high schools.
Since its inception, the program has managed to dismantle ten criminal gangs.
According
to Corral (2022) The next step in the program was to achieve a ceasefire
between existing rival gangs. Vollmer organized the formation of Rugby teams,
using members of the bands, and facing them off on the field. This time,
however, there were no weapons, and the players had been trained in the rules
of the game. It was a remarkably successful program, and evidently filled an
important emotional need for the participants.
Currently, they have a school rugby program and a community rugby
program, giving a total of two thousand young people sports training and the
opportunity to get away from crime.
Just like
music, sport has rules and space for innovation and interaction. The
participants who confront each other on the field are protected by "fair-play"
rules, together with legitimate and non-violent scenarios.
FINAL
THOUGHTS
In this
essay we have reviewed ideas about empathy and hatred and how the first can
help overcome the pernicious effects of the second. We have reviewed the social
and political environments that facilitate these reactions, and we have
considered social and psychological mechanisms that either enhance or limit
them. We have evaluated how they are related to culture, and how people can
intentionally choose empathetic responses. All this is related to a general
sense of a personal and collective self, and an ample awareness of social being
in both individuals and groups.
We have
considered how hatred can be substituted for empathy. The benefits are large,
both for individuals and groups. When people can choose to live in conditions
in which social isolation, ignorance, and violence are reduced, then their
possibilities for personal and group development are enhanced. They can make
choices based on valid information, and resist domination.
We have
reviewed the roles of classical and operant conditioning in limiting choice.
Ironically, operant conditioning, when the person is aware of the contingencies
and the options, can be an instrument of enlarging free-will. When people are
unaware of these conditions, they are vulnerable to manipulation. It is
knowledge that should be included in every high-school curriculum.
People need
to know that they can learn to be empathetic. Another area of great importance
is the need for public policies that foster interaction between different
identity groups. When isolated they may become hostile, but as in the case
related by Daryl Davis (1998), when an Afro-American could interact with
members of the KKK, the effects of hatred were weakened, and friendships were established.
The role of
the arts and literature cannot be overstated. When people get together to
create esthetic works, they must activate their empathetic capacities. When
they do so together, their interaction can produce rewarding experiences.
Sports activities have similar virtues: improvisation within the limits of
rule-bound activities is a fundamental source of tools for eliminating
hate-related reactions.
Understanding
the dynamics of group-related initiatives within communities (and nations) is
also very important. In an important area for social investigation, and should
be encouraged. In a research project that is still in progress, Raúl Rojas
(personal communication) is elaborating a classification of community
organizations in a Caracas neighborhood, and analyzing them in terms of their
contributions to the idea of “social capital”. He is organizing their
characteristics, origins, and roles in a given vicinity, and
analyzing how they influence values such as reciprocity, trust, and leadership
styles. This notable study will be an important contribution to our
understanding of communities’ ability to overcome hatred and to substitute it
for more positive ways of interacting.
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el bushman dueto - Search Videos. (n.d. f.). https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=%22yo+yo+ma%22+y+el+bushman+dueto&&mid=86A1C8BACC76508149F686A1C8BACC76508149F6&FORM=VAMGZC
