Hostility and Hate

Hatred is often misrepresented as an emotion. Hatred is another complex of cognition, behavior, emotions and feelings. Hatred is based on casemaking and story telling and thrives on misinformation. Hate can be defined as persistent, recurrent story telling that treats outsiders as aliens who are to be feared and despised. The emotions associated with hatred are fear, disgust, anger and rage.

Hostility is a broad term that refers the mix of cognitive structures associated with hatred, the frequent expression of anger, threatening displays and the dysphoric feelings that are prolonged and/or recurrent. A hostile human usually has a well-developed case against the targets of his or her hostility. The case is prejudicial and unyielding. Hostility is a feature of discrimination that is practiced systematically and may become a permanent feature of an individual human's life.

Hate is mostly a cognitive process that is constructed slowly but surely; the emotional components may erupt only occasionally. Angry hate is destructive and leads to acts of aggression that, from time to time, disrupt efforts to establish peaceful co-existence in many areas of the world. The beliefs that support hate tend to be enduring and resist modification by new learning.

Strong beliefs associated with religious fundamentalism almost always have a hate component and underlie enduring or recurring conflicts. Religions involve groups with strict boundaries, inclusion-exclusion rules and belief in the superiority of group leaders, icons and gods. All groups, large and small, define and defend their boundaries with hate stories. The benefit of hate is to enhance the readiness of a group to defend itself or to motivate an attack to weaken by killing members of and stealing scarce resources from a neighboring or rival group. An alien is any creature, real or imaginary, who is not a member of the group. The dynamics of hate involve repeated telling of a hate stories to arouse fear and anger.

Hate groups, preparing for an attack, will meet and use story telling, dancing, chanting, music, drama and ritual to arouse the emotions of the group to energize an attack. Mobs, hostility and hate go together. The reptilian part of the human brain clings to old routines even when circumstances change and the old routines are no longer effective. Painful past events tend to be recalled more often by selftalk and are repeated and embellished as casemaking. The hostile case argues that someone or some group has wronged you in the past and/or will harm you in the future; the wrongs are detailed; revenge and retribution is sought. Grudges and revenge motivation, as hate, can be maintained for generations.

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Emotions and Feelings

A Psychology & Philosophy series of books was developed by Persona Digital. The books are copyright and all rights to reproduction by any means are reserved. We encourage readers to quote and paraphrase topics from Emotions and Feelings 2011, published online, and expect proper citations to accompany all derivative writings. The author is Stephen Gislason and the publisher is Persona Digital Books, Sechelt, B.C. Canada.