Modern Romanticism

The term “hatred” is one I’m seeing nowadays get loosely tossed around, like it’s replacing the term called “fear”. What, did Taylor Swift start this spread of the term “hate” or “hater” becoming as loose as it is?

They’re almost like opposites, hatred and fear. While the former is concentrated and based on the bitterness that resulted from a negative personal experience with another person, the latter is broad, can impact anyone or everyone, and is often a way for a person to refuse contact with someone else to initiate personal experience.

In fact, I believe that if these “influencers”, political figures, or whomever else were to term it correctly, to say that a “hate crime” is a “fear crime”, because the person who committed the crime acted out on thinking whoever they are prejudiced against is a threat, it might be more unifying when you consider that anyone is capable of this. If someone has prejudice towards a certain group of human beings, they’ll defend this prejudice by bringing up how this group of people are a threat. They’ll commit crimes because they want to eliminate that threat. Did Hitler hate or fear the Jews? He feared them, which is why he sought their extermination. This is the same for anyone who might have developed a phobia, as it is no different with someone who is scared of all dogs because of one experience of being attacked by one dog.

Fear could be a unifying factor, though when you have politicians thinking instead about hatred, they want to be viewed as problem solvers. As in, they might want their supporters to believe that prejudice has a specific origin. Through telling their supporters that prejudice has an origin, they have something to target. The truth is, anyone can be that origin, but just like how a product won’t generate many sales without a targeted audience in mind, a politician needs their supporters to think about who could be responsible for a problem. If a problem like prejudice is ever said that anyone can be accused of stirring up, it doesn’t work in a political or a business setting because that’s the same as saying that there are no groups to target and no audience to attract. “Anyone” isn’t a market and isn’t a demographic. A politician nor a businessman cannot simply say that anyone or everyone’s the problem, because a politician needs enemies and a businessman wants to outclass their competition. In other words, they want to appear powerful and capable. They want to appear dominant and able to conquer an issue through doing something that quells their supporter’s fear. But who’s to say that this isn’t also an act of prejudice? By thinking that prejudice has an origin or that it comes from somewhere specific, they’ll begin calling out groups that are viewed to be most responsible. It doesn’t matter if that’s more fuel for the fire, as long as the political leader appears to be doing something.

Perhaps the real reason why the term “fear” is being replaced with “hate” is because whoever is enforcing this spread of the wrong word doesn’t want to give a person a reason to not be ignorant. To think that hatred has a source appears to cause more division than if fears were to be overcome and people were to come together over what they begin to understand. In that sense, the first thing to understand would be that yourself and even the person who is physically closest to you is at fault or maybe just faulted or flawed. To that, one should simply say, “There is no legitimate excuse for this,” and then proceed to extend their own comfort zone to allow in what is now viewed more as a human than a monster or a problem.