Over the years in these articles, we’ve explored the erosion of truth in modern society from several different angles: belief perseverance, belief substitution, partisanship, elitism, language, religion, false equivalence. Obviously, there is no single, all-encompassing explanation for everything that ails the modern information economy. But there is a persistent thread we haven’t explored yet: hate.
Throughout human history, thinkers from different traditions have converged on the same conclusion that hate is both a personal failing and a social poison. In the Old Testament, hatred is repeatedly condemned as not only immoral but destabilizing. The Qur’an echoes this concern, cautioning that hatred of others can warp moral judgment itself—“Let not the hatred of a people cause you to swerve from justice” (Qur’an 5:8). Centuries later, Mahatma Gandhi framed hatred as self-destruction, arguing that it degrades both the hater and the moral fabric of society. How is hate operating today, and why is understanding this dynamic so important?
The view from science
Psychologically, hate is a basic human response to uncertainty—an attempt by our brains to make sense of the world around us, especially when that world feels threatening or unstable. Humans can also respond with curiosity, adaptation, cooperation, or support-seeking, but these are learned reactions; generally, fear of the unknown is a reflex that, left unchecked, can lead to defensive and often irrational anger designed to restore a sense of security. Someone—the targets of our distrust are also learned through social conditioning, culture, and personal experience—is to blame when things don’t go our way.
Hate can be seductive for this reason, because it offers an easy path to clarity and redemption. But sociologically, hate is also highly contagious. This is why hate has always been portrayed as a force with agency—a deceiver, possessor, contagion, and corrupter of judgment. Medieval societies imagined hatred as plague; religious traditions warned of possession; modern thinkers, most notably Hannah Arendt, observed how evil becomes banal through bureaucratic obedience and routine once institutions stop thinking. The metaphors differ, but the diagnosis is consistent. Hate is understood not as a personal failing but as something that spreads—consuming moral restraint, disabling reason, turning truth into an enemy, and destroying the norms and institutions that make collective life possible.
This spread happens not just through personal interaction—made easier than ever in today’s society, where online lies (and the hate they carry) are shared faster than truth—but also by hate enlisting social structures to do its bidding. This infection requires willing (or at least vulnerable) hosts that receive power in return: institutions, belief systems, communities, and power structures that lend hate legitimacy, scale, and durability. It is through this symbiosis of hate, infected hosts, and power that the parasite inflicts widespread damage on society. Once laws are written to privilege one moral worldview, suppress inquiry, entrench hierarchy, and punish deviation, the system becomes self-protecting.
The view from history
History is replete with examples of this dynamic—from ancient conflicts between peoples fueled by ignorance and lies, to wars over religion and politics; racial hatreds that sanctioned slavery and genocide; and misogyny that has been endemic across much of human history. In every case, the information-exchange mechanisms we’ve explored elsewhere played essential roles. But hate has been the mechanism that multiplies fear, uncertainty, and disagreement into existential threat.
Antisemitism is only one historical example among many. Medieval European societies before the Scientific Revolution searched desperately for explanations to crises such as crop failures and disease. Lacking reliable knowledge frameworks, communities turned to myth, superstition, and panic. Fearmongers found convenient scapegoats in Jews and other marginalized groups who lived outside accepted societal boundaries. Over time, this hostility infected segments of the Church, and with the authority and power structures available to church institutions in many regions, hate metastasized into officially sanctioned persecution. Christianity itself was not the instigator, but the parasite of hate fundamentally altered the Church for centuries, hollowing out its moral core while using its authority to enforce suspicion and fear.
A different but related pattern appeared during the French Revolution. Inspired in part by the American Revolution and outraged by centuries of corrupt rule, revolutionary leaders in France resolved in 1793 to dismantle existing institutions—not only the monarchy, but also church and state authorities associated with the ancien régime. Animating this destruction was a growing hatred of all who were deemed insufficiently loyal to the revolutionary cause. Under the Jacobins and Robespierre, accusations of insufficient patriotism were often fatal. This period of chaos and violence persisted until Napoleon’s rise in 1799, when exhaustion with hate-driven governance produced authoritarian order instead—a return to centralized power by different means.
In the 1930s, Germany’s struggle to rise from the ashes of grievance resulted in an even more catastrophic outcome. The German state had been blamed for the start of World War I and burdened with reparations far beyond the capacity of its economy. The German people were disoriented and humiliated. Hitler offered a resurrection narrative: refuse blame, reject shame, and reassign responsibility for Germany’s failure to Jews, intellectuals, and other imagined enemies. Hate was not incidental to Hitler’s plan—it was foundational.
Maoist China illustrates another variation of the same dynamic. Emerging from civil war, Japanese invasion, and prolonged humiliation by Western imperial powers, Mao Zedong launched successive campaigns to purge China of “bourgeois” and counter-revolutionary enemies. Beginning with the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) and intensifying during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), expertise was displaced by ideological loyalty, denunciation became civic duty, and alternative sources of authority—science, history, professional judgment—were dismantled. Professors were sent to re-education camps, children informed on their parents, and the state ensured that only a single sanctioned perspective survived. Here, hate functioned not as spontaneous rage, but as a governing tool used to enforce conformity and suppress reality.
These episodes differ in ideology and context, but they share a common structure. In each case, hatred did not merely accompany upheaval—it became a means of organizing power, disciplining dissent, and simplifying uncertainty. Once embedded in institutions, it proved far more durable than the grievances that initially gave rise to it.
The case of modern America
What we are seeing unfold in America today shares much in common with these lessons from the past. Today, hate has become deeply embedded in influential segments of America’s evangelical movement and the contemporary Republican Party. The end result of this infection is churches that profess love while encouraging intolerance and oppression, and governments that violate laws while invoking patriotism. Hate has become embedded, normalized, and institutionalized in these hosts. Understanding how we arrived at this point is key to understanding how hate changes perceptions in society.
The root of America’s is vulnerability may be that ours is a country born of contradictions—founded by religious people but enshrining the principle that religion and state must be separate; founded by slave owners yet professing belief in equal rights and justice; vowing to work together in a federal system and yet retaining strong state rights. These contradictions finally came to a head following the Civil War. Rather than accept the outcome of the war and the political and social implications of emancipation, white supremacist movements such as the Ku Klux Klan emerged to terrorize Black Americans back into submission. When the KKK was temporarily subdued by federal authorities, state and local Jim Crow laws were established instead—government-sanctioned systems designed to entrench racial hierarchy through law, intimidation, and violence. Similar logics were applied to women and other marginalized groups as they became more visible in public life and demands for equal treatment under the law intensified.
By the mid-20th century, pushback against these oppressions began to emerge: voting rights for women, an integrated US military and professional baseball league, the end of “separate but equal” in education after Brown v. Board of Education, and the rise of the Civil Rights movement. These changes were experienced by many as overdue corrections, but by others as existential threats to identity, status, and moral order. The aggrieved parties sought new vehicles for their bigotry—new institutional hosts to carry their worldview forward.
The Republican Party and the evangelical wing of the Church became prime targets for this infection because of philosophical overlaps at the margins—shared agendas and constituencies on some causes but not all. At the time and until only a half-generation ago, conservatism represented an inclination to move deliberately and ensure that change was not reckless or destabilizing. The philosophy reflected a belief that social institutions are complex, that unintended consequences are real, and that traditions often encode hard-won knowledge. A functioning conservative party is an essential part of society. But a conservative party is also susceptible to subtly shifting its goals from preservation to domination. The same is true for a faith system that values strength and patriarchy, as the evangelical movement in America increasingly did during the 20th century. Transforming this philosophy at the margins from patriarchy to misogyny was only a small step.
Conservatism was not solely a Republican domain in the 1960s, though—for much of the early 20th century, conservative Southern Democrats had been the party of Jim Crow. But as the liberal Democratic Kennedy and Johnson administrations stood firmly behind civil rights in the 1960s, Southern voters abandoned the party in droves and supported Republicans instead. At the same time, voices of intolerance found common cause with ministers like Billy Graham, Republican leaders like Barry Goldwater, and ultraconservative organizations like the John Birch Society, who collectively promoted from influential pulpits a vision of America defined in large part by rigid social order and traditional gender roles. (Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights legislation was framed in constitutional terms, but its political effects aligned with segregationist resistance.) This was not a Christian or conservative worldview being promoted so much as a bigoted worldview—one that both the Church and the Republican Party found useful in mobilizing their bases.
Gradually, these perspectives fused, with religious concerns about abortion melding into the same platform as resistance to desegregation and school busing. During the 1970s and 1980s, more churches, donors, and elected officials were drawn into the vortex as grievance became monetized, outrage broadcast, and loyalty rewarded with access and power. The evolution of church and state during this period was driven as much by reactionary activists like RJ Rushdoony, Bill Gothard, James Dobson, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, and Tim LaHaye as it was by the politicians and cultural actors they strategically co-opted—John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich, and countless others—who recognized the transactional value of an energized voting bloc. These activists were not representative of a changing America, nor were they exemplars of moral virtue; and the politicians they recruited were not true believers so much as opportunists. Working separately, they were feckless; together, however, this symbiosis of hate consumed both of its hosts, reshaping the Church and the political party enlisted to enact its agenda.
By the late 1980s, racial resentment had been laundered through “family values,” patriarchy reframed as “moral order,” segregation recoded as “states’ rights,” diversity cast as decadence, prejudice and intolerance sanitized as “culture war,” and willful ignorance and distortion of truth portrayed as simple differences of expert opinion—particularly on critical science-related issues like vaccines and climate change. Science, equality, women’s rights, and faith in the modern world are entirely compatible; science, equality, women’s rights, and partisan dogma disguised as faith are not.
This evolution continued through the 1990s and into the present, with the parasite constantly adapting and identifying new targets: gays, feminists, immigrants, globalists. Aided by the burgeoning network of conservative media forces—from Rush Limbaugh to the Roger Ailes-led Fox News—anything liberals supported was vociferously opposed, even if doing so meant ignoring facts, violating laws, endangering health, and perverting both religion and governance. The organism’s priority is survival, not fealty to its hosts.
This saga of how hate consumed America will take a generation to understand more clearly—history takes time for the dust to settle. For now, the question Americans need to address isn’t so much how did we get here, but how will we find our way back?
What next?
Will our country revert to normal after Donald Trump leaves office or when Democrats retake Congress? The uncomfortable truth is that the hate parasite will probably not disappear overnight. It has already built a comfortable home: truth and disinformation on social media are often indistinguishable; conservative media networks profit enormously from grievance and provide nonstop disinformation to willing converts; politicians who owe their careers to outrage are embedded in office; legal institutions have been weaponized; and universities and businesses are increasingly pressured to treat reality as negotiable in order to survive.
If reforms are undertaken deliberately—before further collapse occurs—the path back to normal may take decades. Following World War II, Germany and Japan’s governments lost moral legitimacy and experienced epistemic collapse. The state had lied, expertise was subordinated to ideology, and institutions meant to protect truth had served propaganda instead. These societies were rebuilt not by enforcing allegiance or purging citizens, but by restoring procedural legitimacy: reestablishing independent courts and professional civil service, creating standards to ensure truth in news reporting, and building education systems that taught how propaganda works rather than what to believe.
If we do not undertake reforms like these in America, history suggests that hate-based systems eventually collapse under their own weight. They can terrorize and silence, but they cannot govern complex societies indefinitely. They hollow out institutions, drive away talent, radicalize themselves, and fracture internally. These governments collapse not because they are exposed as immoral, but because they become nonfunctional. As with the French Revolution, reality does not persuade so much as exhaust.
A third path forward may be to drive the hate parasite out of the two bodies most responsible for this crisis. Church leaders must decide whether they will remain captive to a non-native ideology antithetical to their purpose, while Republican voters must decide whether the movement that has replaced the Republican Party truly represents their vision of America. As we have written before, the Republican Party has taken on the structure and behavior of a cult and bears little resemblance to the party of even a decade ago, let alone that of the Reagan era.
Nothing is forever. Change has happened repeatedly throughout the history of these institutions. Now would be a good time to begin working together to create a better version of the future. We cannot eliminate hate from the repertoire of human behavior, but we can do a more responsible job of limiting the damage it inflicts on society when left unrecognized and unchecked.
Additional reading:
