Ideas - Why do people hate?

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

Even in the name of love, we can justify hatred, even murder, of the other. But why do we hate others? Scholars have identified a list of 10 reasons why one group may hate another group. They also have suggestions on how to break the cycle of hate. Guests in this episode are scholars from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR):Prerna Singh, professor of political science, Brown University, U.S.Victoria Esses, professor of psychology, Western University, London, Ontario Stephen Reicher, professor of social psychology, University of St. Andrews, Scotland

Ten years ago, I asked my partner Kelsey if she would marry me. I did that, despite the fact that every living member of my family who had ever been married had also gotten divorced. Forever is a Long Time is a five-part series in which I talk to those relatives about why they got divorced and why they got married. You can listen to it now on CBC's Personally. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Why do people hate others? Those not part of their group? Well, it's complicated. A lot of people would agree that hate, in terms of hateful attitudes, hateful behaviour,

is having an unprecedented moment. But where does it begin? It's a question being researched by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, or CFAR for short, a globally influential organization based in Canada that involves scholars from around the world. Several of them have worked out a list of 10 reasons to hate others. A list, if left unchecked, turns into a cycle of hate that only builds and strengthens. Here are three of the CFAR members studying hate. Stephen Reischer, I'm a social psychologist from the University of

St. Andrews in Scotland. I'm Vicky Esses, I'm also a psychologist and I'm from University of Western Ontario. I'm Prerna Singh, I'm a political scientist and I come to you from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, just down the coast in the USA. They were on stage at Neptune Theater in Halifax, Nova Scotia before a packed audience, joined by Ideas producer Mary Link, who moderated the conversation. We're calling this program 10 Reasons to Hate Others and What to Do About It. hate others and what to do about it. Let's start with the definition of hate in the context of your collective work. And it's not hate is a raw emotion, is it Stephen?

Well definitions matter because they matter in terms of when we do or don't recognize things. So if you conflate hateful actions, harming people out of a sense of animosity, with hate as a raw, powerful emotion, then you don't spot the hate which comes without the emotion. And as Hannah Arendt famously recognized when she talked about the banality of evil, people can do the most appalling things, the most terrible things, out of the most banal of motives, or even, from their own perspective, out of positive motives, out of love. We hate you because you challenge the things we value and we love and we think are good. And therefore, for us, it's really important to say we're dealing with action. We're dealing with the way in which people are treated, the ways in which they are harmed

by others, of which the emotion might be part, but it's not the whole story. So as you said, hate and love are almost partners in this. In many ways, you could argue that hate and love, rather than being opposites, are two sides of exactly the same coin. If you go to a Trump rally, which from the outside many people might see as talking about hate, hatred for immigrants, hatred for people of different sexuality, ethnicity, and so on, Trump talks about those rallies as an occasion of love. And if you listen to those who are there, they too talk about the love for each other their patriotism

their love from America that particular and toxic definition of We and their love for the we entails a hatred and their desire to destroy all that which they see it at odds With and as threatening the we so yes love and hate are often integrally tied together. They're not two opposites Vicky when I was a young girl my father my darling father Stan would tell me and my brothers that Hate wasn't a word if I said I hated something he said Mary is not in the dictionary which I believed for a long time He said it's not real hate is not real but in some ways, you know, maybe he's right and that maybe it is made up. Is it, is Stan right? Is it largely manmade, the whole idea of

hate or is it an innate emotion? You as a psychologist can tell me. So I would say it sure doesn't have to be an innate emotion and it doesn't have to be expressed emotionally. Hate is human-made. It's made by us. It's motivated by us. It's amplified by us and it propagates by us. So your father is sort of right. Is hate then, Stephen, ever justified? I mean, if someone does a horrendous act to your child, is hate justified? Hmm. Well, I'm not a moral philosopher. I'm a psychologist. I seek to understand how these things come about. And I seek to understand the conditions which are necessary,

the levers which you can pull to increase hate and the levers you can pull to decrease hate. I will leave it to the moral philosophers to talk about whether particular forms of action are acceptable or not acceptable. But I would say this. There's a debate about human behavior and human nature, which I think is really important.

Because on the whole, we think of nature as limiting. We think of human nature as meaning boys will be boys and therefore masculinity is inherently different from femininity For me the whole point about being human is that we are not limited by our environments We make our own environments human nature is about possibility It's about the fact that we can create and we can live in different worlds So every notion of human nature which says this is bound to be misunderstands what it is to be human. The fact that we have a capacity, but at the same time

it means we are never fixed in the present. We are always looking to the future. But I do think that also has a moral implication. Because if you think that being human is about agency, is about creating our own worlds, then action which restricts us, which harms us, which takes away voice from us, which takes away agency from us, makes us less human. And in that sense, hateful action, which takes away agency, which takes away

voice, diminishes us as human beings. And if that's a basis for morality, then I would say it's inherently immoral. And as a social psychologist, Vicki, we're inclined, aren't we, to create groups. That's part of who we are. And in order to create groups, you had to distinguish yourself from the other. So is hate almost inevitable when we are so inclined to create groups? I would say hate isn't inevitable in terms of loving our own group. You can love your own group. I think Canadians, for example, very strong in patriotism.

But that doesn't mean that other groups are necessarily bad. So I would say the in-group love and out-group hate are distinguishable. Yeah, it's probably shouldn't use the word inevitable But I wonder if it's somehow it can it can sow the seeds Stephen Well, there are two ways in which it isn't inevitable The first is yes as human beings we may create groups But how groups are inherently variable and there is no inevitability to any particular groups we create. If you go to apartheid South Africa, which from 1948 till about 1994 was a system which sought to create a society on the basis of race, you would have thought that they would

be able to define what race was. They had 40 years of all their best minds attempting ideologically to make clear that these things were natural entities. So what did they come up with? Well, to be white was to be somebody who was generally agreed to be white. To be black was somebody who was generally agreed to be black. And to be colored was to be somebody who was generally agreed to be neither and to be colored was to be somebody who was generally agreed to be neither white nor black. I mean, pathetic definitions, because the way we draw boundaries between people is inherently arbitrary.

It's humanly made. So yes, we might create us and them, but there is nothing inevitable about which us and which them you create. There's nothing inevitable about racism. There's nothing inevitable about which us and which them you create. There's nothing inevitable about racism. Nothing inevitable about homophobia. Nothing inevitable about any of the forms of hate we see. The second point is this.

Even if we create us and them, it is not inevitable that we see them as a problem, as something to hate, as something to be rejected. I am not a medical doctor. My parents actually wanted to meet. When I turned down a place as a medical doctor, as a student, they wept and thought I was ruining my life and theirs. I'm not a doctor. I don't hate doctors. I'm not a nurse. I don't hate nurses. We don't have to constitute the other as something which is problematic. Vicky says it's absolutely critical. Hate is human made and therefore we're accountable for it.

We can't just say that's human nature. We can't excuse sexism by saying boys will be boys. We can't excuse any form of hatred by saying that's bread in the bone. We made it. So it's up to us to un-make it. So Prerna, I interviewed Zaid Rad Al-Hussein a few years back and he's a former UN Chief of Human Rights and before that he was president of the UN Security Council and president of the International Court. And he said to me, the world is besieged by a re-tribalization of identity. So my question to you is, Prerna, is hatred on the rise?

It's a great question and certainly you could say that quite easily. I think just to pick up on what has been said, hate is neither intrinsic nor is it inevitable. And for me as a political scientist and as perhaps for all social scientists, it is constructed, it is mobilized. And the cycle of hate that we describe really begins by talking about how does that begin? So to answer your question about how do we get to this point now, when I think certainly a lot of people would agree that hate in terms of hateful attitudes, hateful behavior is having an unprecedented moment, not just in

the United States, but in India where I'm from and also in many other parts of the world, but where does it begin? Okay. So we're going to be doing 10 reasons to hate others. We're also going to look at ways to solve that. So nine scholars at at CFAR have come up with this and we have three of our scholars on here tonight. So there's ten reasons to hate and we're going to break it up into four

categories. We're going to walk you through it. So we're going to start with our first category and I'm just going to let people know as we sort of walk through. So the first category is history and deeds, personal and group. So history is so complex in itself. So how would you define history in this context? So I think the first thing that we'd say is that there is no one history out there, as we know that history is written by the victorious, by the powerful. And even within families, there is no one singular history.

The history that your grandaunt tells you could be quite different from the one that your mother remembers because of course memory is constructed as well. And so for us, the way that we think about history is that the same set of events can be narrated in very different ways. And the ways in which those events are narrated, both in your family and at schools. These are key institutions of socialization. They inform the imagination of the very young and the very impressionable, have very important consequences downstream for the way that we think about the world and our place in it.

So, for us, history is, again, who are we? Where did we come from? These are powerful animating questions that all of us feel an almost existential need to answer. But to get to the point about hate is not inevitable, there can be very different answers to that question. And so just to give you an example, my mother's father's family, my maternal grandfather's family came from that part of India that was partitioned to become Pakistan at the time of the British partition of India in 1947.

This was a time of unprecedented violence, about two million killed, 20 million displaced, and my grandfather's family was one of them. And yet the narrative, the same set of events that I heard, was a narrative of loss, of grief, of nostalgia, and of the generosity of neighbors. Even though obviously there had been horrific violence, the narrative was one of despair that at the moment of their departure, the British had basically severed this one country that was living peacefully together, which is again a narrative. It's a history. And for me personally, that history was reinforced when I went to

school when the textbooks at the time told us that even though Pakistan was envisioned as a homeland for the Muslims, India was not a homeland only for Hindus. It was a multi-religious, secular, multicultural country, in many ways quite analogous to the way that you might think of an inclusive definition of Canada. And so that family history, which I never heard anyone in my family ever say anything negative about Muslims, combined with the fact that we were learning this very inclusive history of what it meant to be Indian, we sang patriotic songs. I still like, you know, time the boiling of an egg to the singing

of this one song, which is about Hindu-Muslim unity. That is a very, very different history that I was socialized into in my family and at my school than the one that is being taught in India today, where under a very different regime, the textbooks have been changed, and so this narrative of India being primarily a homeland for Hindus, for religious minorities, Sikhs, Christians, and especially Muslims occupying a distinctly second place has been institutionalized in schools.

And so if you have a family history in which when someone says, I was driven out of my homeland, that was never my family's narrative to me. It was a narrative of like, we all left, this was tragic, this should never have happened. And so when it comes to the current context in which hate is being mobilized, at the point when I was growing up, it's not that there were not attempts to mobilize along Hindu and Muslim lines, it was that the land hadn't yet been,

I want to say, tilled to be ready for hate. So those seeds of hate were not landing in the fertile soil that they're landing in the current context today. And in the petition itself, in the history books and and monuments, what do you see in India about that? India only had its first memorial and museum to the partition, which was perhaps one of its most destructive events in its entire history very recently. So in some ways it's kind of collective amnesia, PTSD, which also you could argue that the lack of constructing a history around it in the popular domain meant that today you can come and say, well, that was a homeland for the Muslims. So what are the Muslims doing in India? Negating the fact that more Muslims chose to stay in India and come to India,

which had for the longest time the largest Muslim minority, more Muslims lived in India than anywhere else in the world. And so that is also a history that is not being taught today in which it's like, well, that's their homeland. So they should go back to it when they've always been Indian. We're about to move on to the next category that contains the reasons for 10 reasons we hate. But Stephen, tell me about the impact in terms of how history is used and perceived and how this cycle that we're talking

about can just strengthen itself as it repeats itself. Tell me about the Balkan Ghosts. It's a book that the former president Bill Clinton read and that he was influenced by. Yeah. Okay. So let me first make a comment because I think it helps understand the context for talking about Clinton's book. I mean it certainly is true that when you look at the amount of hateful conflict in the world it has increased. Over the last three decades the number of conflicts is about 30% up. Over the last 30 years the number of people dying in wars is up by a factor of 10. I mean it's hugely up. At the same time it's not monolithic. There are conflicts which were very acute which seem to be changing. So over the last

year or so, you know, Syria, the civil war, seems to have come to an end, might change. In Turkey, the PKK has ended its conflict and things may be changing. And there's a really important quote, I love this quote, it's from Ernest Renan, who was a French theorist, who was a 19th century intellectual, his book on nationalism, one of the most important books on nationalism. He makes the point that any new groups,

any new categories, especially those of a nation, depend upon forgetting old categories. He said, you can't think of yourself as French unless you forget the old divisions between a Burgundian, a Normand, an Alsacian, and so on and so forth. There is a lot of forgetting that goes on, and history is both about what we remember and what we forget, what we don't see, the hatreds which are no longer around. And I think that's important because again, we need to be realistic about the mess we're in.

You only have to look at the news to know the mess we're in, but we don't need to be too pessimistic, not inevitable. The danger is, and this is the importance of the Clinton story, that to believe that conflict is inevitable is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So this was in the middle of the Balkan Wars, the early 90s if you remember, and there was a big question about should the US intervene? Should they go in and try and stop some of the conflicts that were going on. And Clinton had read this book, Balkan Ghosts, which says, well, look, it's inevitable.

Historically, these people have always been at each other's throats. This is simply what went before reproducing itself. And he came to the conclusion there was no point doing anything. We've just got to let them fight on for a bit. So discourses of inevitability, the notion that hatreds and specific hatreds are inevitable aren't just wrong, they're not just a misperception of reality, they help create and perpetuate these toxic realities. So that's why it's so important to challenge the notion that these are inevitable. They are not a function of history. They are a function of the stories we tell about history.

They're a function of the narratives of history, the hatreds we topicalize and the hatreds we forget. The second grouping here in the 10 Reasons to Hate Others is current context. And in that we have number three, which is identity and norms, number four, which is competition and loss, number five, which is threat, and six, which is lack of control and uncertainty. And Vicki, I'm going to start with you. And one of the areas you specialize as a social psychologist is immigration. So right now we're seeing as we speak in Northern Ireland, in a small town, things are blowing

up against immigrants. Two young Romanian boys were accused of sexual abuse. And even their families are saying of the girl, don't do this. But they're just, it's just going wild right now. And we have, of course, in the States right states right now the army coming in being fueled by these raids that are happening all over the states but particularly in California. Why are immigrants such as touchstone for hate or used so much as a touchstone for hate? I think that's a good question. I think immigrants are used as a touchstone for hate

because they're always the other. They're the perpetual other. They're outside of our boundaries. They come in. They may change in terms of what group is coming in, but we identify them as outside of our boundary. And so immigrants really touch on all the things that we've you've talked about in terms of current context. You know, we touch on all the things that we've talked about in terms of current context. You know, we may be complacent in Canada, but attitudes toward immigrants are getting a little less positive. And you look at the current context based on how we're interpreting it, at least, we're now seeing immigrants as competing with us, competing for housing, for jobs. So the housing crisis is now being blamed on immigrants.

During COVID, when there was a lot of uncertainty about what to do and what was happening and what the future held, immigrants, so they were blamed and they were othered and they were considered to be a threat to us. And of course, threats from immigrants can take a lot of different forms. So we can see immigrants as threatening us in terms of economics, right? In Canada, we bring in immigrants with a lot of skills and then we say they're taking our

jobs. Well, we're giving them the opportunity to come to Canada and fill positions, but then it can be seen as a threat. So there's the economic threat, but there's also a cultural threat. Immigrants come in with different cultures and we can see them as threatening the vitality of our own culture. So if their culture gets stronger or if they maintain their culture, it can be seen as a threat to us and as competing with whatever Canadian culture is.

Also control, right? So I don't know if you've looked at the newspapers recently, but there's a lot of talk about out of control immigration. And that perception that we don't have control over our borders, our boundaries, leads to negative attitudes toward immigrants. And so all these things together really feed each other and they lead to dislike or at least less favorable views of immigrants. So, you know, you talk about Northern Ireland and you talk about the US, but it's we're seeing some hints of that in Canada too. So, for example, recent surveys have shown the Canadians are a little less favorable towards immigrants.

So it's OK for people to say maybe we should bring in fewer immigrants. That's the number. But it's already bleeding into people saying immigrants cause crime, that immigrants don't have our values, that refugees aren't real refugees, and even that maybe we should bring in fewer racialized immigrants. And when it creeps into the attitudes towards the people rather than the process, that's when these things become problematic. I think Vicky makes an important point, which is we know from a lot of social psychological research that this perception of the loss of control,

a kind of feeling of threat is something that can be a very powerful antecedent for hate. And I think in some ways that the kind of framing of facts such that it creates a sense of threat can be a very powerful motor for the beginnings of the attitudes of hate. And so for instance, in India, quite analogous to this idea of a racial eclipse in America, which is that the black population is going or the population of Latinos and immigrants is kind of threatening white Americans. And at some point there might be this kind of demographic eclipse of the white population to that of the non-white.

That again is in some ways not a peculiarly American trope. This idea that there's a deluge of immigrants that they're going to come. If you go back to the very first census, so the census is something I've done a fair amount of research on along with CIFAR fellow Evan Lieberman and we find that counting on the census, so we put together research on every census in the world and whether or not it counts ethnic categories. And we found that counting on the census actually crystallizes identities that could otherwise have been quite fluid. So again to get back to that question of how we think of Hindus and Muslims as entirely distinct and potentially antagonistic groups today in India, but at some point in time

in the late 19th century people would regularly describe themselves as both Hindu and Muslim. They would have trouble distinguishing exactly which religion they belonged to because they would define their religious identity in the terms of a very specific sect or set of religious beliefs, which then the colonial census came and overlaid with the language of, oh, you're Hindu and oh, you're Muslim. And this kind of set the stage. And so to get to this point about the racial apocalypse, one of the things that happens in India

is that as soon as you begin to count Muslims as a distinct community and Hindus as one, there is in that context, this kind of call to arms and this mobilization saying, oh, look at the Muslim population, they're breeding, they're going to overrun us, their fertility rates are higher. And in India today, even though Muslim fertility rates have been consistently declining, again and again, you hear this threat being mobilized that the Muslims are breeding.

They are breeding like, fill in your pejorative noun. And this is kind of putting Hindus at threat. You see that in the US. These Latinos are coming in. The black population, soon whites, the idea of being reduced to a minority in your homeland, this perception, this deliberate attempt to insight a sense of a loss of control, a threat,

whether that's demographic or it's economic, they're taking our jobs, they're taking our houses, or it is political, they're marching on the streets, or it's existential, they're raping our women. But this kind of idea of the construction of a sense of threat in the current context that is mobilized through a call to arms is all part of this cycle.

It begins by telling ourselves, in our families, in our schools, they're not like us. This is who we are, this is who they are. Should sentences be changed in the way we approach doing sentences? That's a great question. Every time we do a Canadian census, they try and revamp the questions, and they retest the questions, and they still get it wrong. I think every state institution has multiple purposes.

In some ways, I certainly have a lot of suspicion about the motives of the colonial census, but India today just a few weeks ago announced a caste census. It'll be the first time. A caste census? Yeah, so the last time that data on the caste was officially released was 1931 and India made a very explicit decision not to count caste in the post-colonial census, except for castes that are historically depressed or the former untouchable caste. So just to kind of back up and say it's not as if I want to kind of come across as saying

that the census is evil or even the counting of categories is inherently problematic. It's just that I think we have to be very careful because it's also that the counting of the categories could potentially be a tool for social justice or the redressal of historic grievances and injustices. And that's certainly the kind of logic of the cost census that has been announced today. So I think it depends a lot on the context and the way in which it's framed and the way in which those numbers are used. You're listening to 10 Re to hate others and what to do about it on CBC ideas. I'm Nala Ayad.

Hey, I'm Gavin Crawford hosted because news where comedians answer questions about the headlines for meaningless points. And one of our regular panelists is here. It's Alice Moran. Sup Alice. Hi, Gavin. We always like having you on the show, partly because you're always up on the news, but mostly because of your vast And one of our regular panelists is here. It's Alice Moran. Sup, Alice? Hi, Gavin. We always like having you on the show, partly because you're always up on the news, but mostly because of your vast knowledge of Pokemon and baseball.

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invitation. If you've ever been touched by an episode of Ideas in a way that changed the way you look at the world or that affected your life in some deep way, we'd love to know about it. To get in touch, email us at ideas at cbc.ca with a brief outline of your story. That's ideas at cbc.ca. Let's return now to Ideas producer Mary Lenk on stage in Halifax with three international scholars, social psychologist Steven Reichschur and Vicky Essis and political scientist Prerna Singh. They were discussing 10 reasons to hate others and what to do about it. So the next category is called the arms.

And within this category, we have number seven, which is leadership and number eight, which is media. And so Stephen, I'll let you start off on this one. I think if we go back to the question about immigrants, the interesting thing about immigrants is that in a world of nation states, in a post-enlightenment world, they are not only outside the nation, they are outside the system of nationhood,

because nationhood is an identity based on place. You live, you come from ethnic definitions, your ancestors come from a particular place. Immigrants are defined by movement. They are defined by being quintessentially other. Now, in British politics, there was a brief moment when things changed. I don't know if it was the same in Canada. A few years ago, a young boy drowned on one of the boats coming over. And there was a very famous photograph of the father

looking at his son, Alan Cordy, lying on the beach dead. And for a short time, the narrative changed. But the interesting thing there was we didn't change our view of immigrants. For a short time, we didn't think of them as immigrants. We thought of a father mourning his son. And anybody who was a father or anybody who had a son, much wider than that, of course, could not help but be pained by it.

The categories for a while, a short while, were changed. Then we went back. So the question is, the critical question is, why do we see things in terms of particular categories? Why do we see them in terms of immigrants as opposed to families coming and looking for a better life? Any family would do that. Now we've already seen that part of it is the media. The media played a really powerful role there. That image recategorized the world for a short time. But it's not just the media. So let me tell you the story about one of the most famous social psychology experiments

ever done, which I think raises this point. And it's a set of studies by a Turkish psychologist called Mutsufa Sharif. They're known as the Boy's Camp studies because what he did is he took that great American institution of the the boys come where you send your kids away over the summer and he used it To look at what happens if you can take if you like a completely immersive world and change the social relations between people So the first thing he did is he put everybody together and he measured who liked whom. And then he divided them into two groups

where you were in a group with people you didn't like. The other group was full of people you did like. So did that mean that you liked the out group, not the in group? No, what happened very quickly was people started liking people in the in group and disliking their erstwhile friends in the out group. Itiking their erstwhile friends in the out group. It showed the power of the group

to transform personal relations. And then he put them in competition. And these boys suddenly turned on each other. They suddenly started attacking each other. They suddenly turned physically violent towards each other. Instead of eating their food, they used it for food fights. And there's a famous quotation where Sharif says, if an outside observer had entered the situation

at this point, he would have concluded that these boys who were the cream of the crop in their own community were vicious, disturbed bunches of youngsters. He showed the power of competition. But what's really interesting is, every single psychology student will know of these studies. They are in every single psychology textbooks, but in none of the textbooks is one of the studies he did which failed. He did three studies in fact, 1949, 1953,

and 1954. In 1953, the boys didn't turn against each other What they did is they began to think actually? Is the other group the problem I've got or is it the experimenters the problem that I've got are they playing a game? Right are they turning us against each other which of course is exactly the same analog which prena talked about your life is difficult The cost of living is going up. You can't get jobs. Is it a problem of immigrants? Is it a problem of class or whatever?

What are the categories through which you should understand things? And what Sharif's study shows us is they're not inevitable. And in fact, I came across the notes of one of the people involved in that 53 study, a man called Kelman, very famous international relations theorist, and he showed the importance of leadership. The leaders in these groups were beginning to say,

hey, wait a moment, should we see it this way or should we see it in that way? But psychology has ignored that. The psychology is dominated by the notion that we see things in terms of race. We see things. We don't see things. We have a set of experience which we try to make sense of. What's the basis of this?

As a political scientist, I think that when I, I mean leadership is such a critical component of this. And I think that the call to arms and the justification of the mistreatment often comes from a political leader. Because it resonates and now of course in the kind of social media environment that we are in, those kinds of messages are then fueled by the tyranny of the algorithm.

And so as a political leader, as a political machine, and we are seeing this again all over the world, and that's where the cycle kicks in, it's almost like a juggernaut. And so you have a leader saying and justifying, I mean, once you have constructed that history and that narrative about how, for instance, group X is all of these terrible things, they're coming for our jobs, they're coming for our houses, they're coming for our women, then in that environment, because it is a cycle that is mutually enforcing, a leader then comes and says, they are the problem.

You can, again, substitute in the name of authoritarian leader in your chosen part of the world, but the narrative remains shockingly similar. But I think all of those things need to have happened. This is my problem with social psychologists, is that, you know, that history needs to have been written, that those textbooks need to have been read, that family history needs to have been internalized.

For you to get to that point when that call to arms by a leader, however forcefully made, resonates with you. And that's precisely the point of the cycle. That's why we put the cycle together. Yes, of course you've got to have these material realities. You've got to have the fact that people have got difficult lives, they've got problems, they need to be made sense of, they need to be explained. If everything was fine, it absolutely wouldn't work, but neither is it a fact that the nature of the world is self-evident to us. I agree. And to me, the problem with psychology, and I speak as a psychologist, is that we psychologize. We see that we perceive the world in particular ways.

I know, Vicky, do you agree? No, I don't agree. Go ahead, Vicky, do you agree? No, I don't agree. Go ahead, Vicky. Well, I think psychologists are more sophisticated than you're giving them credit for. Vicky,

but though in terms of leadership, you've written a lot about the children overboard affair, which was in Australia, and this was based on public allegations by Australia's Howard government, their ministers, leading up to the 2001 federal election. And I think that's a very good example government, the government of Australia was based on public allegations by Australia's Howard government,

their ministers leading up to the 2001 federal election. Tell me about that and how the leaders use that. So this is an interesting case study, but you can find these case studies lots of places.

And this government in Australia was seeing themselves and presenting themselves as very tough on immigration and keeping asylum seekers out of And this government in Australia was seeing themselves and presenting themselves as very tough on immigration and keeping asylum seekers out. And the claim was that a boat coming from Indonesia had parents who were throwing their kids into the water in order to get saved.

It wasn't true. The photos they had, the photos that Howard government had, were photos taken when the Coast Guards tried to tow the boat and the boat sunk, and then the kids were in the water. But this idea that people would throw their kids into the water, it's a way of dehumanizing them, right? Because they're not us, right? We would never do that to our kids.

We would never hurt our kids in any way. And so they're a little less human. They're more animalistic in a way. And when you start thinking of people in that way, you can mistreat them and you can feel okay about doing that because they don't have the same sensibilities as we do. sensibilities as we do. And that takes us then to the last category before the cycle repeats itself. And this is justification of mistreatment.

And in this category, we have number nine, which is moralization, and number 10, which is dehumanization. So Prerna, I'll let you take the lead on this one. I think, you know, Vicky is absolutely right in that the dehumanization is what sets the stage in a way for hate to feel okay. You see this again and again in terms of the description of immigrants. They're themselves described as kind of parasites, as vermin, as cockroaches. And they're described in terms that would be disgusting for us.

And so, you know, disgust is a kind of core human emotion, this idea that immigrants eat cats and dogs. There are many, many, many ways. In India, it takes the form of, oh, Muslims are killing our holy cows. And so, you know, cow slaughter becomes a political issue, but it's closely related to this idea of dehumanization. But again, it's constructed because what, you know, does eating beef make you less human? I mean, there's plenty of evidence that actually

beef was ritual food in the Vedic times in India. But again, it's that going back to that cycle, it's the construction of the narrative. Who we are, are a country that protects cows. Who they are, are people who eat cows. Eating cows is disgusting. They are less than human. They breed like rabbits. And that forms the justification for the mistreatment that doesn't feel so wrong anymore.

Steven, there was a famous speech in 1943, an infamous speech by Himmler, and he was rallying SS officers and which he said, quote, most of you men know what it's like to see a hundred corpses lie side by side or 500 or a thousand to have stood fast through all of this and at the same time to have remained a decent person. So this is going along with this Nazi conscience it's often called. Tell me about that. So in a sense, this takes Pridner's argument a stage further. It's not just that we justify it, we glorify it. We see ourselves as doing good, acting for a greater

good. So Claudia Kunz, who is a historian, has written a book called The Nazi Conscience. She starts off from the premise that even to use a phrase like the Nazi conscience is jarring because we don't think that the Nazis had a conscience, and certainly from our view of a morality, of course they didn't. But if you want to understand from the inside why it was so powerful, you have to take that on board. And she makes the point that for a long time, the Nazis emphasized the glory of Germanism, the decency, the purity, the superiority, the fact that it was about the good. Now, of course, it's not that virtue and morality in itself is a bad thing.

It's a little bit like if you create a bomb out of different materials, both of which are fine on their own, put them together and they're truly toxic. So if you put together this notion that we are the sum of all good, we are virtue, and they are an existential threat to us, they don't just threaten to undermine us, they threaten to destroy us, which is precisely what these narratives like the Great Replacement Theory do, they're gonna destroy us.

Then you'd need to destroy the other in order to maintain the good. And in many cases, the most extreme forms of genocide are based on precisely that sort of argument, that we are about doing a greater good. And that's what precisely Himmler was saying in that obscene speech to Auschwitz guards. And he said to them in another place, he says to them, he says, he says look he said it's a bit like being in a town Which has got the plague It's got rats in the sewers and only the most noble people are prepared to go in

To the sewers and kill the rats. It's a nasty. It's a dirty job But it's got to be done and that sort of logic. That's a truly toxic logic. It doesn't just rationalize, it doesn't just justify, it glorifies. And I think you look around the world today and you see the ways in which obscene forms of action are being justified as maintaining the greater good because the in-group represents the good. Vicky, did you want to say something? the greater good because the in group represents the good. Vicki, did you want to say something? Well, some of these examples from other places

are talking about Nazi Germany, makes it seem like it's not us, but it is us, because we do this too, right? We dehumanize groups, we talk about people in other places or refugees, asylum seekers, as savages, as not quite the same as us, and that we're being moral by keeping us together and pure. We do this when we talk about gay marriage. When some people talk about gay marriage, when some people talk about gay marriage,

we see this now with trans rights. It's not just the other, it's not just happening in other places, it happens here too. So I just don't want to make that point that it's easy to say it's sort of out there somewhere, this isn't us, but it is us too. Of course.

What can we do about it? We don't want to end this evening and be, you know, totally depressed. Once hate is entrenched, how difficult is it to dismantle? When the ball of yarn is woven and woven in this cycle, how difficult is it to unroll? I think one yarn at a time. The ball took a while to come together into what it is today. And so I think it begins at different points. I certainly take Steve's point about power, the powerful write the textbooks, the powerful set the institutions, they make the rules. And so it could happen in many different ways. It could be a change in regime. That's one way. That's in a way the highest echelon at which we could imagine some of this unraveling.

Another yarn is at the micro level. To be able to, first of all, identify when you see someone. We've been trying to work on an infographic for the cycle of hate, almost as a way to kind of diagnose this as a kind of primer to say, you know, maybe a family member has been radicalized by the algorithm or is beginning to say things that are beginning to sound a little bit in our definition of hateful. And so I think it can also be at a very individual level, which is you see someone kind of, you know, telling a family history that doesn't reflect the way that you think of your family history or that of your nation. I mean, getting to the point about how do events in America affect Canada,

as someone who's been a very loyal and, you know, a big fan of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research, I'm always struck by how Canadians think of the American as the other. And so perhaps there is also an opportunity at this kind of precipice of being like, you know, colonized by the US to kind of say, this is not us. And so I also kind of do want to mention that, you know, to Vicky's point, that in-group love and out-group hate are entirely distinct. And in-group love can happen with out-group distinction and perhaps out-group disdain without it coming to hate. And so you know I think someone

like Will Kimlicka who's one of the co-leaders of our group has kind of spoken about a very inclusive multicultural idea of Canadian nationalism which I find extremely appealing and so another way to kind of think about you know unraveling some of those yarn another way to kind of think about unraveling some of those yarns is to kind of have this alternative idea of what does it mean to be Canadian. And perhaps that's the one that's reflected in a textbook. Perhaps there's a social media campaign around it. One of my favorite designers, my sister is a photographer and my mom's a textile designer and I'm the kind of renegade academic, is this incredible fashion

designer who ended his show, he's called Ashish, with these sweatshirts that said immigrant, kind of reminding people. And now if you, one of the kind of most poignant photos for me from the protests in LA are all of these undocumented people on the streets saying, we build your houses, we clean your streets, we grow your food, we make America great. And so I think, you know, the kind of change in that narrative and the unraveling of that can happen from a change in political power to a kind of, you know, changing that narrative in a kind of micro everyday, micro but mighty.

Actually in the UK, attitudes towards immigration are relatively liberal compared to the rest of Europe and getting more positive. That more people think that immigrants are a good thing than a bad thing. But what is really telling is that most people think that most other people are anti-immigrant. In other words, it's our perceptions of other perceptions which often are the problem, our meta perceptions. And the role of the media and what the media does really powerfully is it doesn't change our own views. Actually, it's quite rare that people change their views because they read the media. What it does is it changes our views of what others think. Moreover, we've done some work which shows that when you show people the true statistics

on what people think about immigrants in the UK, they become more pro-immigrant and more willing to act on it. I think Alison and Will in the CIFAR group have a very similar point to that, right? And Alison's here, so Alison, correct me if I'm wrong, is that Canadians think that immigrants are a lot less nationalist and patriotic than they really are. And so there's this kind of penalty because they think that they are less nationalist. And so I think you're absolutely right. Just to kind of give a Canadian example is that that perception of what you think others think versus actually turns out.

One of the things that's bizarre in psychology is we have millions of opinion polls. They happen all the time There'll be a hundred you'll see a hundred in the media every day We have very few meta opinion polls what we think that others think and as I say often It's what we think that all this think is really powerful But I do think that has practical implications right one of them is to talk to each other Another is if you hear people coming out with particular views to say I don't agree or we don't agree with that Round here. It's coming together in communities offline as well as online to actually realize That actually things aren't quite as dire as we think they are at the level of what people actually believe and when people

Come together in those various ways rather than feeling atomized and helpless in the level of what people actually believe. And when people come together in those various ways, rather than feeling atomized and helpless in the face of power, that's when you're going to get those forms of resistance. So preventing hate in the first place, there's an inoculation. Well, we're hoping that the cycle and publicizing the cycle

and really getting it out to the public will allow people to see that if they have particular thoughts, if they're starting to think things, if certain things are starting to happen, it's time to stop. And that you can break the cycle early on, it's easier to break the cycle than once it gets going. And so the idea is really to inoculate people and to also develop some sort of early warning sign. Okay. So we're just going to do final words about hate. Stephen? So I'd go back to what we were saying at the beginning.

It's not inevitable. And if we consider it to be inevitable, and I do think that in part academia has played a baleful role in the sense of reifying racism and making it inevitable. It's not inevitable. I think in terms of challenging it, I think we can do two things. As academics, we can do what we're trying to do, which is to provide a clear way of understanding so that we can see the different levels at which you can intervene. Each of those four levels are ways of intervening. Each of them point to things that we can do.

But I think as citizens also to realize, number one, that if you are against these things, you're not in the minority, and you're not alone, and to say no, and to say no with others. And so I think there is real possibility. I think it is possible to build from the ground up, given what is coming from the top down in so many parts of the world. Vicki, do you have final thoughts? I think we have more power than we think we do, and that it really is, as Steve said,

up to us to intervene. It's up to all of us to intervene and to think about how sometimes our lack of action is just as bad as our action. Not intervening when you see something happening or when you hear about something. So I would say remember that we all do have some power to stop hate.

PURN A PURN A that we all do have some power to stop hate. Perna? You know, I think of hope as not necessarily a feeling, but as a moral impetus. Like, it's really important to keep hoping. And I think our hope for the cycle is to be able to kind of illustrate something that we hope will be useful to all of us

as we kind we navigate what are really troubling times. Just being careful what narrative is being told around the dining table about Uncle X or where you came from, who's the them, what histories are we telling, what is the current context that we are living in? You know, that idea that when the old fish asks the young fish, how's the water, and the young fish is like, what water? So to be aware of the water that we are swimming in, to know that even as there are these call to arms

to do all these horrific things, I mean, in Providence, Rhode Island, where there've been a huge number of ice arrests, what is interesting is to see the alternative call to arms. So there's a civil society force called AMOR and AMOR, and they have like put their cell phone numbers everywhere. And so as soon as you kind of see ICE, and when I was taking the train to the airport, someone called and said, there's a kind of ICE report.

We didn't actually see ICE, but we saw all of these people who were there with loudspeakers saying you don't have to answer any questions. Do they have a warrant? Ice out of our communities. And so that's counter mobilization. That's a kind of call to arms from a different perspective. And that then as Vicky was saying, being involved in initiatives that kind of ask you

to kind of make you see the humanity in people such that that justification of mistreatment actually feels like mistreatment and not as just. Thank you so much for your wisdom tonight. Thank you for coming everybody. Thank you. You were listening to 10 reasons to hate others and what to do about it. An onstage conversation held at Neptune Theatre in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Onstage were three Seafar scholars, social psychologist Stephen Reischor, Vicky Essis, and political scientist

Prerna Singh. They were in conversation with Ideas producer Mary Lenk. An illustrated graphic of the 10 reasons to hate others will be on our website at cbc.ca slash ideas. Special thanks to Kate Geddy, Olga Sein, Linda Mayan, Jordan Palmer, Alexa Kirsta, Ryan Rayfuse, Chantal Barnard, and Greg Guy. Technical production, Pat Martin and Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayd.