What is it like
to be a Hater?

A couple years back a friend told me his new years resolution was to "be more of a hater". He was probably thinking about this mainly because of that verse in that Kendrick Lamar song but he did genuinely mean it. He wanted to become more mean and critical and hating.

And this sort of baffled me. I don't like hating. It's a lot of effort and it's not very fun. Neither do I like being mean, or getting angry.

But I am also a very suggestible person, so I wonder, what if he's right? Aren't there good reasons to be mean? That's why I'm writing this. I want to figure out how to think about this.

Tongue-Biter Behaviour

I like to think I'm a nice person, but that's mainly just out of habit, really. Like, if someone is taking too long in line, you'll start to get frustrated at them. You can wait out that anger, or you can voice it, and this is gonna depend on which is more habitually comfortable. I, as a habitual people pleaser, find voicing my anger uncomfortable; my mouth doesn't like moving in that way.

Of course, when the discomfort of keeping my mouth shut is so strong, I will be mean. But different people have different habitual dispositions. Agreeable people find it easier to wait out frustration, such that they barely experience the discomfort at all. Assertive people find it easier to voice their feelings, such that they don't have trouble dealing with them. And so sometimes people might think I'm a "tongue-biter" but I think I'm so used to not speaking up that I just genuinely don't care enough.

Go read Aristotle or something. Anyways some obvious clarifications:

1) There's reasons for me to be mean besides impatience. If I have an aesthetic aversion to you---I find you ugly or annoying or whatever---there is a similar emotional reaction which must be vented or subsided. I might also have a moral aversion to you, and feel the same kind of physiological disgust. And if you get in my way, just generally, I'll probably have a personal aversion to you.

2) There's a social aspect to meanness: It's a lot easier going along with whatever your ingroup is doing. In this way it's not context neutral; if my group hates on a particular kind of people---say, rich pedophiles---that doesn't translate to hating people in general.

3) Being mean is kinda fun? And its not just the kind of pleasure you get from teasing or ragebaiting people, the kind of things you do without malice. The malice itself is fun, in this "Freudian death drive" sort of way. It's cathartic.

So that's what it is to be mean, to be more of a hater than a tongue-biter. So...

What should we do?

Suppose I am a bit of a tongue-biter---I don't know this for sure, I'm probably more average than I think, but anyhow---should I be more of a hater? Or consider my friend, who seeks to be more mean. Should I encourage him otherwise?

If I should be more mean, that should go for everyone else too, and if I should be more nice, then the same applies. Essentially I can't just say I should be more mean to get my own way, unless I also consent to other people responding in kind. So either my friend is right, and I should follow him, or he's wrong, and I need to bring him back to reason.

Hold on; that doesn't actually follow. It's not crazy to think "We need both tongue-biters and haters in the world." We need both leaders and followers, we need those who are easy and those who are assertive. Maybe it's fine for me to be a tongue-biter, while also thinking its fine for my friend to want to become more mean.

Put it another way; how can rules apply to everyone if everyone is so different? People grow up and live in such seperate worlds that saying we should "behave the same in the same contexts" is meaningless. It's never going to be the same for me to live genuine to myself than it is for you.

So really I'm not directly asking whether the world should be more or less mean. It's a much more person question; what kind of person should I be?

What should I do?

You should hate on people more to discourage their bad behaviour.

If true, I probably don't have enough hate in my heart for people like Trump and Netanyahu. Maybe I would justify this with something like "by hating these people, I normalise that feeling", but like we said before, hating is social and contextual.

So what about people I know personally? When I meet bullies and bigots, should I respond in kind? Of course. I'm a people-pleaser, I have no need to please these people. What about my friends or relatives? When they do something that doesn't sit right with me, how should I respond?

I'd like to think in these cases there's ways to be assertive without, well, rocking the boat. These are people I want continued relationships with, and so even if just for selfish reasons I won't want to be mean. But maybe I underestimate how much my friends can handle?

If someone can handle it, it's fine to be mean to them.

I have had people tell me that they are mean to people only when they think they can handle it. I think this is a little silly to be honest. Why do you get to decide what people can handle? It's a very austere, "tough love" mentality.

In my experience, the world is already mean enough and I'd rather more kindness in my life. Sure, I could handle more adversity, but I don't want to. And unless I get more or less explicit permission from other people, I'm not gonna assume other people are struggling any less.

But...

Maybe you're wrong. Maybe you do need more meanness in your life, because it's what motivates you to be better.

Woah, so we're just calling me a pussy now? I say, "I want my life to be kinder,"" but that's actually just making myself into more of a weak, docile pathetic thing than I already am? Very Nietzchean take.

I kind of really want to oppose this. Is it meanness that makes people better? Really? Meanness feels too untargeted. People are mean for all sorts of unnecessary reasons. All my life I've been mean to myself for unnecessary reasons.

Like, why should I be mean to someone for how they dress? Or what shows they like? Why should I tolerate people being mean to me on the same grounds? Is that something that really matters that much?

Really I should only tolerate people being mean to me, or be mean to others myself, when its justified.

Conclusion

Maybe towards the end there I got back to the "everyone is the same" rhetoric I tried to avoid but oh well. I don't know what I really learnt here I just wanted to get my thoughts out. I've been thinking a lot about virtue ethics recently, and about what kind of person I am and want to be.

I guess because of that "everyone is different" thing I don't know if any of the things I talked about actually apply to anyone else. Maybe they do, but it's your decision to let them apply. I guess I really write this because I want to respond to people criticising me for being a pushover---yeah, it all circles back to people-pleasing. I need to please the people who think I please people too much. The brain is a prison, but life is an adventure :)

Amendments

Ok so to no one's surprise some people went and hated on my piece about hating so here's some amendments:

1) One person says "everyone's entitled to an opinion... but obviously the expression of any given opinion is what you can be judged for." They then went on talking about cases when hating produces positive social gain (eg. against Trump) or is neutral (eg. against coffee), and also when its expressing an opinion more people should hold (eg. "hasan is evil").

The former two are about, like, social reputation. I want to fit in, I want to support my in group, so I express opinions my in-group shares. Or in the coffee example, I want to stand out, I want to build my identity, so I express opinions unique to me. Hating is an effective way to establish the identity of yourself or of your group.

Regarding Trump or Hassan... I think you're just entirely correct? The social effect of me hating on trump is to promote a culture that gets him out of office. It is a positive. The social effect of trump hating on queerfolk like me, is well. Death. It's the action; how the hate is expressed; that matters more than the hate itself. I can 100% be more of a hater without becoming a more violent, hurtful person.

Regarding Coffee... I don't know if I want to establish my identity by things I hate... I don't think I like that aesthetically. In other people I find it obnoxious. If I'm drinking my monster, and someone comes up to me says "yeah, I hate monster" I'm gonna be like ???. Bitch what is your problem. I aint no bitch. In that personal sense, I aint a hater.

2) Another person points out that fucking with your friends is actually rather affectionate, and shows intimacy. Compare it to dogs wrestling. I kinda glossed over this? In earlier drafts I had a whole paragraph about ragebaiting but I think the reason I don't call that "hating" is because there's no malice behind it. It is playful, but its interesting to think how "playful bullying" plays a role in personal change, somewhere between measured criticism and full-on bullying---it's got a bit of comedy, a bit of plausible deniability to it. It's a "positive politeness" thing (if you know your sociolinguistics). I don't do it myself much. I associate playful bullying with masculinity, but I do have friends and relationships which are quite masculine, and I hope I'm not so much of a pushover I can't contribute to these.

In this way this is also a reflection on how much meanness I can handle. I don't have a good track record with this. People have called me "fragile" and I definitely haven't internalised that or nothing. Is there a way to reduce my neuroticism though? My focus on such details of what people say to me? I dunno. I ain't a social psychologist yet.

3) A THIRD person pointed out just how little I really talk about politics and broader social trends... I'm not too familiar with the history so don't take my word on it, maybe it's always been like this, but it feels like "hate" is in fashion now. Like back then, if you were conservative, you had to have justification. You couldn't just deny the ideal of a democratic and fair society, built on equality. Yet now, people like Nick Fuentes exist. People like Trump and Musk exist, people who don't run on a platform of being responsible, good people, but on a platform of truth-speaking, being disruptive, edgy, hateful. The trope of sexism, say, is no longer the womaniser, but the incel---an identity built on hate.

This is fascism. The aesthetics of hate as political platform.

But I almost see this fashionable hate happen in my group, in left-leaning university students. When I talk to people my age about their philosophical beliefs, there sure is a lot of nihilism. People want to reject morality, the structures of society. It's why I was prompted to write this essay. Because there is a lot fucked up about the structures of society, and not in a conservative "cultural marxism" way. And it seems that the disruptive attitude, conservative or progressive, is associated with being a hater. Moderate people aren't haters. And by avoiding being a hater, am I thereby positioning myself in a way that maintains a systemically harmful social order?