THE NATURE OF HATE

Listen to the radio or television, or read the newspaper, and it is difficult to pass even one day without witnessing hate and its ugly consequences. As we write this preface, massacres believed to amount to genocide are occurring in West Darfur in the Sudan, and these massacres follow a long history of others that have occurred around the world in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, World War II Europe, and the earlier days of what is now the United States. Hate is not the only cause of these calamities, but it is certainly one of them. Moreover, the hate is often cynically instilled in citizens by the people who are entrusted to lead them, whether they are governmental leaders or even religious ones. To understand contemporary civilization, one must understand hate – its nature, causes, and consequences.

We have written this book in order to propose and elaborate upon our own views of hate. The original impetus for this book was a journal article, “A Duplex Theory of Hate and Its Development and Its Application to Terrorism, Massacres, and Genocide” (Sternberg, 2003). Since that article was published, we have had many more ideas about the nature of hate, and the junior author of this book, Karin Sternberg, has done a dissertation on the topic of hate (Weis, 2006). In this book, we present the views we have developed.

The book is intended for a general audience. It requires no special background knowledge in order to be understood.