Hatred and War

You can't have war without hate. Hate is as essential to the initiation and carrying out of warfare as the weapons used to do the killing. Warfare, after all, is the natural outcome and culmination of hatred between people. The hatred and desire to destroy an enemy is the primary factor that drives a conflict. You don't win wars by being nice and friendly. 

      Hatred poisons minds. It possesses the thoughts and drives the intentions of people towards violence and hostility that would never be there had the hate not been sewed into their thoughts and their hearts. 

     If you eliminate hatred and neutralize its power, you can greatly reduce the scope and frequency of warfare. A daunting and difficult task, but one where if it is achieved the world would truly be a more pleasant place to operate in. 

      I truly believe hatred is a learned mindset. It is not innate. Not something that a human is born with. It is something that is conditioned, often at a young age, by the group or family a person is brought into. Unfortunately, once it is wired into someone it can be exceedingly difficult to get a person to unlearn their hate and break the binds that hate puts on a persons mind. 

Hate stems from fear quite frequently. The fear of the different, the fear of the foreign, the fear of the inunderstandable. Fear leads to a natural aversion to something, which can turn into hatred quite quickly. We hate what we fear because fear is an inhibiting emotion. An unpleasant one that no one likes feeling. So naturally we end up hating what makes us afraid. 

     Alongside fear, disgust is another cause of hatred. What disgusts us or provides us with an unpleasant mindset or a "gross-out" response often leads to feelings of hate towards the thing that disgusts us. 

Even though disgust and fear are natural human emotions and responses to things, I truly believe that hatred can be severed from these feelings. Hatred pertaining to other groups of people is very much a learned mental disposition. There is nothing natural about a hatred of a group of people because of traits like race or religion or national group.

That kind of hate is always taught and conditioned. The only way to break the cycle of perpetual violence between groups is to unlearn the hate. You can make warfare obsolete and an undesirable strategy of human interaction if you can neutralize the power that hatred has in our world. That's one way to break the cycle of war.

I've always liked FDR's quote of "the only thing you have to fear is fear itself." 

In its spirit, I'd like to think the only thing we have to hate is hate itself.