Deleted forum posts on hate

I'm not sure why, but a recent forum was deleted and I don't see it in the boiler room, but I had saved my posts from it, so I decided to post them here as a journal entry. Here is what I had posted there.

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Well, until recently, I thought I had hate all figured out, and then there was a report on 60 minutes a couple of weeks ago where they did a study with children at different ages to find out when people started hating and why. As it turns out, hate is not a learned trait, we are born haters. This flies in the face of everything I have learned and believed over the past 44 years since I first became aware that humans hated each other and would even kill each other because of it.

I have spent considerable time contemplating hate and watching people's behavior, wondering why we hate. I have written several poems about it, and there importance to me can be noted by the fact that they are what chapter one of my book "Seeds and Weeds" is all about.
1: Pride Is One Seed: - 04/04/1997  
2: Seeds & Weeds (prose): - 06/21/2003
3: 3 Seeds: - 05/12/2003  
4: 4th Independence: - 07/04/2003
5: Matthew 5:5 : - 01/27/2002
6: Segregation: - 12/30/1988  
7: Separation: - 12/31/1988
8: Where Will You Aim Your Hate?: - 09/29/2005
&
111: the hidden foe - 09/17/2011
112: Someone There Is - 06/20/2011  
Fear (The 1st Seed)

And as anyone who has read my diatribes here in the forums knows, I never miss a chance to speak out against hate, even when I may not be right about my assumptions. I happen to think it is a good idea to confront hate whenever it rears its ugly head so it doesn’t have a chance to get out of hand and grow into something meaner than it already is.

But after seeing the study on 60 Minutes, I have had to re-evaluate everything I have come to understand. This actually started a couple of months ago when a friend of mine responded to a challenge I made to disprove my poem 3 Seeds and explain how hatred can be anything other than learned behavior, as the old song in South Pacific said, "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught" exclaims. Well, he gave me this vague reference to another study about some one-celled creatures that attack other things that are not exactly like them. Even similar creatures would be attacked if there was the slightest thing about them that was different. I wasn't convinced by that because one celled creatures have no brains and I thought, no way to form hatred of something else without some sort of thought process. I just figured it was some sort of survival instinct that told it that these other creatures were natural enemies that would consume them if they didn't kill them first. Well, it would have ended there for me if not for this study with children on 60 minutes.

Very young toddlers showed the ability to hate before they ever had a chance to be taught such behavior. And it was consistently true in about 85% of children. They did other tests at other ages and the percentage was always about 85% who displayed hatred until the kids reached the age of about 8 to 9 years old.

Then a funny thing happens. The tables flip and all of the sudden 85% of the children stop hating and actually start to offer others equal amounts or even more of whatever they had to give. I'm leaving out some things, but basically, humans are born greedy and take as much for themselves as they can, even at the expense of others. This explains a lot to me that I never realized. As a liberal Democrat, I have always wondered why I am such a bleeding heart progressive and how Republicans can be so uncaring and greedy. Well, there is that 15% that never makes the change when they are 9 years old. Funny how close that is to the percentage of wealthy people in America...

So it just goes to show that even an old dog can learn new tricks and admit I was wrong. But I still believe that I was not completely off base. If I can learn something new, so can haters. It can go either way, some people may not be natural born haters, as the 15% of toddlers showed, not 100% of them hated right out of the womb. I must be one of those because I started seeing hatred and finding it disgusting when I was only 5 years old. No one had ever taught me to hate and I ventured out on my own at a very young age to make friends who were poor and others who were black or in some way different from me. I have found that working with learning disabled children and physically disabled adults to be the most rewarding work of my life, though the lowest paying.

But for some, they never lose their drum major instinct. I still have hope for them, that with the right kind of teaching, they can overcome natures built in survival instinct and realize that people who are different are not the enemy. Thoughts and feelings may be the enemy when they are very different and lead people to kill each other or make wars, but things like that are learned, as in religion and politics.

So for me, 3 Seeds is still true, but there are exceptions to every rule. It's just that the exceptions are different than I had believed. We don't have to be carefully taught how to hate, we have to be carefully taught how to love. And that certainly does seem to be the one thing missing from the world today. Maybe John Lennon was right after all, All You Need Is Love...

JJ
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I thought so too, and that is why I thought the one-celled creatures could not possibly be capable of hate. But the problem there is in understanding what hate is. As an adult who has been looking at it a certain way for so many years, I was not ready to accept that these little no-brained things could understand the concept of hate and therefore not be able to experience it. But that is why it is so hard for us to accept it, we think as people who have learned and rationalized, not justified, our own hatred of things over a long period of time. That's what is so interesting about the 60 Minutes piece, they got to the kids very early and found there behavior to be the same, just in a simpler and more understandable form. Because the toddlers haven't yet formed all their prejudices, they acted out in the most natural ways. I will see if I can find a link to the story, it must be posted on the 60 Minutes webpage or maybe even in YouTube by now. It really is fascinating, at least to me.

JJ
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I suppose it depends on how you define hate. Is it an emotional response to outside stimulus or the manifestation of what is already there waiting to be released by some rationalized trigger.
The babies seem to understand the moral implications of what they were watching and even wanted to punish the puppets who behaved in the way they thought was bad.
I think it is an instinct, but humans have abilities to attach that instinct to their emotions, as animals do not retain the memories of the events of their lives, but they still are able to learn who their enemies are in the wild and never forget that part of it. It seems to me the easier thing to recall is the enemy factor.

Humans have to unlearn that. We are born with it, but it takes years for us to be taught not to want everything for ourselves. But some children grow up in homes where that concept is reinforced because their parents have wealth and position and get everything they want. They teach their children to expect the same, either by example or deliberately being fed the ideals of their parents, or both. That is why I say that I still believe that "3 Seeds" is valid. But The percentage leads me to believe that we are progressing away from the natural instincts and in time, we may eliminate hatred, if we survive that long. I can foresee a class war coming, and that concerns me. People with wealth already own most of the guns. Criminals have guns, but that percentage is lower and if there is a war at some point, the wealthy will win just out of the sheer numbers of guns they own. And their hatred will drive them harder to eliminate those they don't like. This kind of thing happens all over the world, all the time. It is happening in Africa and in the Middle East right now. But really, it is everywhere, including the USA. With the politics of recent years here, the defining lines are clearer than ever as the top 1% have so much more than everyone else. Even the people who are mere millionaires can't compete with the billionaires. If we don't get a handle on it, I can see it leading to such a war. If not for our continuing history of having wars rather than peaceful conversations, I might believe we could find diplomatic resolutions to all of our conflicts. And now with our technological advances, we have become even better warriors than diplomats. As the doctor in the 60 Minutes story said, when we are faced with conflicts we revert to our childhood and react with those instincts. Considering how many wars there have been in just the past 100 years, we clearly have not advanced beyond our basic instincts. With the disparity in classes here in America, I think it is not so much a matter of if we have a war, but when.

JJ