In a polarized world, where emotions prevail over rationality, hatred is a feeling that can spread like an uncontrollable tide. It should not be confused with anger, which is usually fleeting, while hatred endures the passage of time. Nobody is born hating, but to hate is something learned or transmitted. Let us recall the two minutes of hate that a crowd practices daily in George Orwell’s novel, 1984, when Emmanuel Goldstein, the regime’s official enemy, appears on a screen, and it erupts in all kinds of shouts and insults. But, unfortunately, today there are still people who embrace that terrible voluntary blindness of entering into hate at the cost of losing their own freedom. They are blinded by resentment, an emotion that is sometimes justified in the name of personal experience or a longing for justice. They do not realize that their own identity has been absorbed by a dominant passion from which they will not easily disentangle themselves.
“Without there necessarily being a populist leader behind it, social networks can foster hatred from anonymity”
There are two factors that have contributed to the consecration of hatred: social networks and populist movements. The combination of both is, therefore, explosive. Yet, even without a populist leader behind it, social networks can nurture hatred born of anonymity. Anonymity is perfect because it deflects responsibility. It makes it seem that actions have no consequences, and this fosters all manner of excesses. It is a feature of dehumanization, perfectly suited when one seeks a scapegoat to channel accumulated resentments toward. Additionally, it enshrines a binary opposition between good and evil, always from a subjective perspective, and ruthlessly rejects the possibility of forgiveness. Anonymity helps perpetuate that culture of cancellation in which any extremism feels at home. The experience of many people trying to introduce nuances in social media comments is far from positive. The response from the other side is usually insult or block, another synonym for cancellation.
In populist movements, hatred, not always direct and sometimes disguised as suspicion, is a fundamental ingredient. The authoritarian leader who presents himself as the savior —of a group or a country— relentlessly stirs negative passions. He is the one who compels the masses to choose, with no room for nuance whatsoever, between “them” and “us.” Thus, the law ceases to be justice and becomes an instrument of hatred.
This is what the philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) grasped in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she attributes to the mass man traits of isolation and a lack of social relations. Arendt characterizes totalitarian movements as mass organizations of atomized and isolated individuals: “Total domination can only be achieved over human beings who have been isolated from one another.” The destruction of the bond between people is, consequently, the path to systematic dehumanization.
The critique of the mass man is central in this work, where she shows that human beings are victims of their own emotions and subject to manipulation. The totalitarian leader knows how to manipulate the resentment of all those who feel marginalized. In the face of injustices, he transmits the slogan that responsibility belongs to the enemy, especially an internal enemy. Thus, the simple dichotomy of “friends and enemies” triumphs.
There comes a moment, according to Arendt, when the masses do not trust their eyes or ears, but their imaginations. She notes that the lie changed its nature in the twentieth century. Before, “the lie was a hole in the fabric of facts” and did not affect politics. But afterward appeared the lie of totalitarianism in which “the facts depend entirely on the power to fabricate them.” By the way, this line appears almost literally in the film The Wizard of the Kremlin (2025), by Olivier Assayas, based on the eponymous work by Giuliano da Empoli.
“Without the possibility of receiving forgiveness, we would always be victims of the consequences of our acts, for in many cases we have acted without knowing for sure what we were doing”
For Hannah Arendt, thinking is an antidote to hatred. She acknowledged in a television interview with the French writer Roger Errera in 1973 that thinking is a dangerous undertaking, even though not thinking is even more dangerous. She says the same about reflection, which consists of thinking critically. It is another dangerous task, but not doing it is even more so. It should be added that one ought to reflect on the fact that the hatred that leads to destruction is also self-destruction. Not to mention, Shakespeare expressed this in some of his immortal characters, such as the deformed Duke of Gloucester, who becomes Richard III, or the Jewish moneylender Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. It is no accident that the English playwright was one of Arendt’s favorite authors. One might wonder whether reading The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, in which forgiveness appears as a force of human and social recomposition, had any influence on the philosopher. In The Human Condition she regards forgiveness as the key to not letting oneself be dragged by the endless spiral of revenge and to undo the acts of the past. She grounds it, above all, in respect for the dignity of the human being, for she believes that each person is far more than what they do or think. She asserts that without the possibility of receiving forgiveness, we would always be victims of the consequences of our acts, for in many cases we have acted without knowing for sure what we were doing. The situation would resemble that depicted by Goethe, another writer highly admired by Arendt, in his ballad on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the trigger of powers beyond control.
In the face of the spiral of resentments, it would not hurt to pause and think of the famous scene of Mickey in Fantasia, by Walt Disney, which recreates the ballad. The little wizard believes in easy and simplistic solutions, and he is overwhelmed by the situation. Similarly, resentments, with their stereotypes about good and evil, can make us victims of their consequences.
