Today I want to talk about hate and how we deal with it. It’s very easy to feel that the world is full of hate. Social media and the media is full of it. In the last few years, I have had a lot of it myself: COVID deniers, academics, people who have bad things to say about Jewish people and Israelis. Some attacks are personal, and some are general. Even within Israel, there’s lots of hate between the right versus the left and the secular versus the religious.
I was thinking about all of this and wondering if I could find a positive angle to view this hate. Could I think about this in a more general way? Then I thought about a normal distribution. A normal distribution, let’s say, starts with hate here, then normal, and then love on this side. I started wondering whether the intensity of hate also says something about the intensity of love. Imagine you have a normal distribution that is very small. It starts with very little hate, a normal level, and then very little love. For example, when we were kids, nobody really knew anything about us, we didn’t have haters, but we didn’t have a lot of people who loved us outside of our parents. As we grow older, we have a choice of how broad we want to make this distribution. I started to wonder that maybe if we want love, we also need to accept that there will be some negative reactions. That if we step out in the world and do things and get involved and we get people to care and we care, we can experience things on a positive side, but we also have the chance of experiencing things on the negative side. I think if we want to be anonymous and stay closed, or have a narrow distribution, we will not get a lot of love and will not get a lot of hate. And I think it’s naive to think that we can go out into the world and create things, write a book or a poem, or create a start-up, or whatever and think that everything we get out of it will be just love.
I think we need to understand that with everything we do in the world, if we create love and appreciation in some people, we’ll create anger, frustration, and hate among some other people. They’re kind of connected. Sometimes we think we can just create positive outcomes, but every time we create something positive, there will be some unintended negative outcomes.
Now here’s the big question. How do we want to live? Do we want to live anonymously with not much love and not much hate? Or do we want to live broadly and boldly and get much more love, but also much more hate? Hopefully we’ll get more love than hate, but there’ll be some hate. The thing is that if we just focus on the hate, it’s terrible. But if we understand that the hate we’re getting is the cost of also getting love, then it’s quite a decision. Would I have preferred to write a book that nobody would care about? That nobody would love and nobody would hate?Something somewhere in the middle that only a few people would look at it? Or do I prefer to do something that some people will really love and some people will really hate? Assuming that we can’t just create something that people would only love because these things go together. That, for me, was the insight: that when you create high emotions, they’ll come from both sides. Again, hopefully more the love than hate, but they’ll be on both sides. You can’t just create high intensity on one side because creating high intensity means getting a response from the other direction as well.
What would I prefer? I prefer to create both, and I prefer to stop paying so much attention to the hate and start paying more attention to the love. So, here’s to creating intense emotional experiences for us and for others. Being blessed that some people will react positively to it, regretting that some people would react negatively to that, but not spending too much time on the negative.
