Is it easier to hate someone you don’t know?

How about a whole group of people you don’t know? We know it has been happening for millennia with great consequence. It leads to discrimination, persecution and war. If not stopped, hate can even lead to pain and suffering on a massive scale. So how and why does this happen? More importantly, how can you and I, understand and do something about it? Do we even have that power?

Arthur of The Arthur Brooks Show, describes an event in his life that illustrates this phenomenon of “group hate” in a very personal way. It was during the 2016 presidential campaign when he was the lone non-political guest speaker at a conservative political event. As he describes it, the other speakers were good at firing up the audience, “saying the other side was really bad, making ‘em angry, hootin and hollerin” and he wondered, being right of center himself like most everyone else there, what he could do to make it better. So he went out and gave his speech to the conservative activists but stopped in the middle and said, “look my friends, we agree on a lot of things here but I want you to remember, the people who are not with us today because they don’t agree with us, those are political progressives. And what I want you to remember is that they’re not stupid and they’re not evil, they’re just Americans who disagree with us.” After his speech a lady came up to him and told him,

“It’s okay to say that people on the other side are stupid and evil because they are.”

Even though he knew the lady didn’t mean to personally offend him, Arthur admits that he took it personal because the people she was talking about were his own family. He grew up in Seattle, Washington, in a very progressive family.  “I thought that day, this is going to be a new day for me because almost everybody loves somebody with whom they disagree politically and I think the way that we can bring the country back together is by remembering the people with whom we disagree but that we love, and defending them to people on our own side.”

Before you form an opinion about that thought, allow a little nuance…

Arthur introduces his guest Adam Waytz, a social scientist who wrote an article about

Motive Attribution Asymmetry: the belief by one group of people that they are motivated by love, love of their own, but that another opposing group is motivated, not by love of their own, but by hate for them.

When taken at face value it seems to not make sense, but hate does not make sense. As Arthur puts it, “both sides can’t be right. The scholar behind this research is… Adam Waytz, a psychologist who does a lot of work on politics and has found that in point of fact things are pretty grim in American politics today because of motive attribution asymmetry.”

Adam is also a professor of organizational management at Northwestern University and has a book coming out called, The Power of Human, How Our Shared Humanity Can Help Us Create a Better World.

The idea that one group thinks they are motivated by love but that another group is motivated not by love of their own, but by hate for them, also called political motive asymmetry, is the finding of quite a lot of research.

Arthur notes, “It’s a super interesting hypothesis and the findings are really compelling too but here’s the mind blowing part: you find equal levels of political motive asymmetry today in the way that democrats and republicans see each other in America, right?”

A Downward Spiral

Arthur sites Adams’ 2014 paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with what he sees to be a self-reinforcing mechanism which results in a downward spiral. We see it over and over again Arthur says, “where there’s a misrepresentation of the other sides motives, that person is defined as an enemy, the enemy must hate us, since they hate us they are our enemy, and it gets worse and worse until there’s less overlap, there’s less interactions, there’s less communication and things get worse and worse… We’re just in kind of a downward spiral in American politics today because political motive asymmetry builds on itself.”

Adam agrees, “That’s exactly right and that was the motivation behind doing this work, to understand intractable conflict, to understand these conflict spirals and to phrase it another way, if you believe the other side hates you rather than simply loves their own, then it makes no sense to use diplomacy, it makes no sense to rely on some common ground, hey we’re both looking out for our tribes, what makes sense is to crush them and if you act in that aggressive way then you simply appear more hateful to the other side, they’re going to respond in kind and you get this sort of reciprocal interaction that spirals downward.”

A Solution?

Arthur sites the huge influence Adam’s work has had on him which led him to write a book about it called, Love Your Enemies. With an ever increasing political climate perhaps a radical approach is called for, “to do exactly the opposite of what your heart is telling you to do and that is to love your enemies.” But he also seems to think that political motive asymmetry contains an inherent flaw. Based on his experience at that 2016 event, he began doing some research of his own. He began asking his audiences a question. After approximately 100 speeches among widely varied audiences ranging from very conservative to very liberal “and everything in between,” he asked them, “How many of you love somebody with whom you disagree politically?” The response, “100% of hands go up every single time.”

“So when I talk to people individually who have participated in that little convenient experiment that I do at public events then, I say, so therefore, are you of the opinion that everybody that you know and love who disagrees with you politically loves you, but everybody YOU DON’T KNOW who disagrees with you politically, hates you? And they realize it actually doesn’t make sense…

…So political motive asymmetry in this case actually appears to me to not be based in reality, right?”

Adam agrees but, with the caveat of what can or cannot be technically called “an error” in social science, he says perhaps that would be the next logical step, “what happens when you make people realize?”

The Secret to Loving Our Enemies

Arthur gets excited because maybe a big part of the problem and the secret to loving our enemies is realizing they don’t hate us.

Adam agrees and illustrates the point by recounting an experience of teaching executives, one of which was a former Green Beret who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. This guy told him that he was trained to see everyone there as the enemy. When Arthur asks him why they train them that way, “does it make them better Marines or what?”

Adam said he researched and found “that a lot of training involves making people comfortable with doing harm because, it also turns out to be the case that humans are tremendously harm averse, even averse to harming our own enemies. Essentially what my student described it as is ‘professionalizing killing’ which sounds, you know, fairly awful to me, but I guess the idea is that if you professionalize these acts, you start treating them as part of your job you become more comfortable with these things morally…”

Love is Natural, Hate is Not

What the ex Green Beret told him though, was that when they got over there and had ‘sit downs’ with the mullahs and they talked about their families and their grievances, love crept into the relationships. He said that they actually “got much more out of those interactions psychologically but also strategically and did a lot of wonders for them over there.”

So at some point this marine just “snapped out of that line of thinking and realized there’s another way. So that was a really, kind of inspiring affirmation of a lot of things that I believed in my research as well.”

Arthur then says that the “worst possible way” to be informed, no matter your religious or political beliefs, is to silo your news feed to only that which supports your own point of view “because you will be manipulated by leaders that want to fire you up and you will not actually be hearing from people who turns out don’t hate you, right?”

“Exactly”, Adam agrees and raises the question of where does motive attribution asymmetry actually originate? Is it inherent in people or does it come from the those who seek to influence people, interjecting the ideas into them and then fanning the flames with one-sided media.

Lack of direct one-on-one interaction with those of a differing view is one of the reasons why it persists. “…when do we actually come into contact with our ostensible enemies or foes or ideological opponents?…part of political polarization is literally we spend less time with people on the other side of the aisle. So where do we see them? We see them filtered through media sources portraying them in the worst imaginable light. So when would we ever see instances of them loving their family, or attending a funeral of a loved one… we can see very easily the worst of the other side, images of them hating us.”

Who is the “real” enemy?

Then Adam raises another concern about enemies, “There’s something psychologically comfortable about having an enemy. When people are confronted with existential anxieties, there’s a certain certainty to knowing that there’s an enemy there, AND it also serves as a convenient scape goat as well that can make us feel better. So I guess what we need to do then is to shift who that enemy is from the person across the aisle from me to someone perhaps, above me not acting in my best interest.”

Arthur concurs citing that as the world gets safer, better and more prosperous, people need to invent new enemies. Though it’s relative, that’s the human condition he says. If you “look at the existential threats that were going on in the 16th century where the chances were approximately one in a hundred I was going to be killed in military conflict and now it’s one in hundreds of thousands that anything would befall me like that.”

Adam makes the point that invented enemies are also a convenient scape goat. “…we have some work in progress showing that when you expose people to the idea that automation is taking jobs people become more anti-immigrant, as though they’ve transferred what should be animosity toward technology… to a human scapegoat.”

Reality, what a concept!

Arthur thinks that we are “wired” this way but that this information lends itself to the answer of how to love our enemies: “…stop having clouded judgment, to perceive reality as reality exists; that these people actually aren’t your enemies so therefore you have no reason to consider them as such, you have no reason not to love them and so we need a reality-based movement, right?”

Adam says yes, let’s all just get a grip on reality, right? “The problem is, and we call this phenomenon ‘naïve realism’, everyone believes that their version of reality is the accurate version of reality and then what that implies is that if you don’t see the world as I see it then you must be blind to reality and then again you get into these conflict and misperception cycles.  So then the question becomes okay, how do we undo naïve realism? It’s one of the hardest things to do”.

Adam then returns to Arthurs exercise of questioning his audiences. What if you could think of ONE THING that everyone could agree on, “…this sort of small dosing, of getting some shared reality might be the way…” Adam says.

Kids and Dogs!

Arthur confirms that the best way to create some harmony is to have people of different views come face to face for a conversation, but to start with something they share in common, “… the best way I’ve ever seen is to ask them to tell each other about their children because everybody loves their children.”

“That’s fantastic!” Adam says. “…this has been my big revelation …one of the gateways to ideological agreement aside from children could be dog ownership. Now positive sentiment toward animals is something that is becoming increasingly bipartisan and I think you know, the dog is the gateway issue,” Adam says jokingly, “…they’re totally non-human, they’re kind of… a neutral third party, and I think you know, love of animals could be a starting point.”

“I love it, are you kidding. My dog Chew Chew is a huge leftist…” Arthur kids and sums up the conversation with, “The secret to loving your enemies is actually LOVE.”

The Power of Love

And what is Love, anyway? The ancient Hawaiians in ‘The Huna Way’ actually defined Love as ‘A Doing Thing’, Love is doing what is in the highest and best for EVERYONE involved.

This definition of Love is based on a logical assumption. The assumption is that we ALL come from the same Source, go back to that Source, cannot be truly separated from that Source because the Source is All That Is.

Love then, is the natural Connective Element of all parts of the Whole. This is why Love is the most natural thing for us to do.

I know. I can hear you saying, “That’s just nonsense! Love is not ‘natural’ except under certain circumstances, your family, your pets, maybe even your inlaws, but nobody ‘loves’ people they don’t even know, especially ‘those people’.”

The World of Pretend

And this in fact, is quite true. In the World of Form, we play pretend. We pretend we are not Divine Beings who originated from The One Divine Source, but we can no more stop being what we are than the earth can stop being the earth.

In the material realm, the drama of love and hate go on. But from the Greater Perspective of the Spiritual Realm, Love is as Natural as air. We can experience this Greater Perspective any time we choose to.

Just consider.

If there are people out there for whom you hate, or you think hate you, what if you were to stop and consider the Greater Perspective? What if “those people” are not only like you, but ARE you? They are you in the sense that we are all Drops from the same Ocean, Connected by the Connective Tissue of All That Is, which is LOVE.

Some already know what I am talking about but if this sounds like hogwash to you, I offer this as a consideration. Just consider.

In the final analysis, what is REAL can be Recognized, no belief is required. If you give it a chance, LOVE WILL reveal Itself to you and it’s Power can undo any illusion of hate.

As Arthur Brooks puts it, “…we don’t just need public policies that do this, we don’t just need political candidates that do this, we need ordinary citizens of goodwill if we’re going to do this. We need a social movement to do it together. That’s why I wrote Love Your Enemies, How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt.”

Check it out!

Aloha!

Kahuna Karie