Getting Rid of Hate with Empathy

“You can’t hate someone whose story you know.” Margaret J. Wheatley

This quote left a deep impression in me ever since I first heard it. Instinctively, I know it to be true. But what about murderers and child abusers? People with shitty personalities? How can we not hate them?

Hate is a nasty feeling that burns and festers. I would love to be rid of hatred.

Ultimately, I think Margaret J. Wheatley is right. To understand that, we need to consider several things.

Are we in control of our actions?

We often think that we are in control of our actions and fate.

But research has shown that the brain forms a decision 11 seconds before we become conscious of it. Though this doesn’t mean that we’re not in control of our action, it tells us that we’re not wholly conscious in our decision-making process.

I found out I wasn’t fully in control of my actions when I gave up a job with good career progression and would’ve opened doors to big firms. I was working at a good market research firm. The client was a huge Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) company selling toxic drinks and junk food.

Three months in, I left. I was already breaking down. I like market research, but I couldn’t handle the extremely social environment, and I didn’t want to help improve marketing of junk food.

It would’ve been good if I stayed at the job, but I couldn’t. Everything that had happened to me up till that point of time had decided my course of action for me.

I had unresolved social anxiety and an innate idealism I can’t outgrow. Together, they prevented me from sticking to a well-trodden path towards financial stability.

In truth, we’re more like products of life’s circumstances. Between genes and the environment we grew up in, namely nature and nurture, most of our actions and fate have been “guided” by what our ancestors went through, and what we’ve experience thus far.

How “nature” can affect us

Consider an epigenetic study, researchers created an association between a scent and a pain sensation in male mice, then let these mice mate with female mice that weren’t exposed to the scent-and-pain association.
They found that the same scent triggered fear reactions from the offspring of the mice.

Similar findings have been derived from human epigenetic studies.

This means that how we react to things could depend on what our parents and grandparents went through, even if we didn’t go through those experience.

We already know that genetic traits can be passed to us by our parents, but did you know that up to 50% of a person’s tendency toward addiction can be attributed to their genes too? Some people are genetically predisposed to addiction. I think we should treat addiction as a disease.

And then there is psychopathy. Some serial killers are born with psychopathy, which impairs their ability to feel remorse; the same way some of us are born with a widow’s peak or dimples.

Genes are the cards we’re dealt with at conception. We can’t choose what we’re born with!

How “nurture” shapes us

Similarly, we can’t choose our life experience – and that often determines how we turn out as adults.

I’m going to use an extreme example: Ed Gein, the infamous murderer who turned human skin stolen from graves into lampshades and belts.

When his mother was alive, she terrorized him, isolated him from the world, and fed him ultra-religious stories that often involved death and punishment. She was the only authority he knew, and she ingrained in him that everyone in the world is inherently immoral, except for her. He doesn’t have access to wholesome support or role model on their isolated farm. Don’t forget that half his genes came from his mom too.

After her death, Ed began to visit graveyards at night to steal female corpses who he felt resembled his mother. He would carve body parts off of them and make things out of them. Eventually, it escalated to murder. His intention was to make a body suit so he can “become” his mother.

It’s easy to say that if we were in his shoes, we would break out of his mother’s influence and not indulge in his twisted obsessions, but that’s because we’re born into different situations from him, with different sets of genes.

His actions were a culmination of nature and nurture. Put yourself in his situation – it’s unstable, isolated and full of fear. Would your mental/moral development still be how it is?

We’ll never know what we’ll do if we’re in his shoes.

One may be tempted to hate his mother, but who knows what happened to her?

Nature + Nurture = Us

For the most part, we can’t help doing the things we do.

It’s so easy to judge someone based on their actions, but if we look at the reasons that caused that person to act that way – their story, we’d see there’s always more than meets the eye.

We wouldn’t always love someone whose story we know, but the way we perceive them would change.

Humans are so multi-faceted. If everything that shaped us are represented with strings, we’ll be walking webs of intricacies. The same experience, when applied on two different persons, could trigger very different responses.

There’s no reason to hate anyone

Don’t jump right into hating someone whose story you don’t know. Instead, keep in mind that we’ll never know someone’s full story, especially knowing that genes has a big part to play in our development. Who knows what kind of trauma one’s ancestors have been through!

A healthy dose of empathy can make the world a kinder and more inclusive place. Perhaps there would be less damaged people…

I’m not advocating that we make up excuses for people who commit crimes, or exploit others for power and wealth. But a healthy dose of empathy can put us out of the discomfort of hating someone, and into a warmer spot of compassion through understanding.

Besides, we don’t have to “hate” or “love” someone when we can choose understanding and remain “neutral”.

By the same vein, why do we dislike ourselves when we don’t do certain things, and love ourselves when things are going well? If we really understood how we got to where we are, maybe we would have more compassion for ourselves.

Use empathy to your advantage. If we could choose, we’d all be good and perfect. Like it or not, we’re puppets strung by chance and circumstances to different extents. But we do have a choice.

We can choose to get rid of hate.
We can choose understanding and wisdom, and hence love.