Hate is a very poorly misunderstood sentiment.

There is all this talk about hate speech, haters, hate as the cause of war, religious hate, hating your kind, hate mail, hate comments. Talk, talk, talk.

Here is the thing: the object of hate can only be the love you have for something. The love! Not the thing you love. The love itself. If you feel hate towards something it necessarily and automatically means you feel love towards that thing.

Hate is very complex. It is a rule set that we build as we grow up. Childhood, and not in a psychological sense, in a practical one, is when we start to create our hate response because we are hard wired to love our parents. We love our parents because of many factors, but one of the factors is signaling our attachment and dependence on them and love is very good at achieving this kind of social communication.

But love is not unconditional by default, it is unconditional only if it is reciprocal, and there is a point when parents inflict pain on children: all kinds of pain. Don’t confuse this with abuse. I am talking about the normal pain of education, as no matter how emancipated a parent you are, steering the ship hurts because of friction, opposition, undercurrents and so forth.

So we start to dislike the attention we get. As we grow up this is repressed. up until the usual adolescent identity seeking begins. Does your teenager seem to hate your guts? They are! But they’re not hating you, they are hating that they love you. With adolescence comes the wrapping up of our sentimental foundation. From then on we build on that, and once it is complete we are finally able to experience the sentiment of hate. To comprehend that you don’t want to love something requires the ripening of our self reflection. As teenagers, we get notified by self reflection that we love our parents in some place which is so deep that it cannot be taken out, and that puts in place hate, which is a form of creativity (like all sentiments), a way to deal with something we cannot entirely define. It doesn’t matter if you are not raised by biologic parents. Parents as in the people who you look up to and wait on as a child, could even be more than two people.

Then, once we learn hate in our most fragile period of life, as nature intended, we’ll be using it our entire life. We’ll hate food, we’ll hate friends, we’ll hate summer hits! We hate Christmas, we hate birds singing at 5 AM. Every time we’re trying to move away from what we love, but we wish we didn’t love, we’re hating like hell. Hateful people are not full of spite. They are consumed on the inside by two things which do not oppose each other. You see, love is not the opposite of hate. Love is the opposite of indifference, yes this trope is true.

What Trump is doing in his campaign, is not hate. What terrorists killing children are doing, is not hate. What furious people do, when shooting people indiscriminately is not hate. We need to name these things, or otherwise we’ll never get a chance to know what to do about them. Trump lies and encourages ignorance. There is no hate here, just strategy. Terrorists who are not mentally ill, nor blackmailed, nor extremely poor and paid to do it, are true believers in a violent ideology, which is religious whether we like it or not. Most of these suddenly radicalized terrorists are mentally ill, and our society doesn’t notice them. Mass shooters are sociopaths who have a plan, and they act upon it. And just as sudden radicalized terrorists, they are not noticed by our society. In the case of sociopaths it is even farther from hate, it is a lack of consideration about any aspect of the notions of good and evil, right and wrong.

I see so many authors talking about love, blaming things on hate, praying to humanity to start loving one another. This is not helping. What we’re dealing with are the substance of other concepts: disenfranchisement, opportunity, education, religion, propaganda, society building or humanity goals etc.

Trump, I am sure, loves some people, hates some people. He doesn’t hate Mexicans! He might hate a Mexican or two, meaning he loves them, those two folks. He is using “Mexicans” as ammo to put holes in the badly implemented immigration system, so he can cling on these holes as he is climbing to the top of political achievement (not power!). He is after achievements, not power, and that makes him a poor choice for those fools trusting his campaign. They want a powerful person, interested in power, who will make America great again, but Trump is not it. He is keeping a scoreboard and POTUS is the ten thousand points bonus.

Terrorism and hate are the darlings of the media. Sensational as it sounds, terrorists don’t hate us folks, they want us dead. You see, had they hated us we’d be having a successful propaganda machine in place by now in the middle east. We don’t, we can’t have one because they don’t care about us, that is the opposite of love. You don’t hate a rodent, it is actually cute until are enraged at berserk level when the animal breached into your house. That is not a metaphor about us vs them, it is a description of human behavior to highlight where hate and love are. Love and hate are not found in terrorist camps, or in Nazis who are power addicted humans.

Immigration and borders have nothing to do with love. Nothing. It is demagogy at the highest level to use the words hate and love in this context. Immigration control is about making a society ready to fit the immigrants, who is doing this work?

Do not generalize or misinterpret, the following sentence, it is literal: mass shootings are not about gun control. Sorry. Mass shootings are a symptom of a societal disease. Not all societies caught the bug yet. Focus on that.

The biggest problem with this hate and love discourse we’re invaded with is that we change the channel. I was outraged at the number of people who wanted to tune out, in a week when people were shooting each other like crazy in the US, in Turkey a power hungry sociopath threatened the longest lasting peace system humanity ever created, and in France children died while their parents were holding their hands, after watching fireworks. Who are you to tune out? Are you some deity superior above all this suffering? Excuse my rage, do you think those parents in France could tune out of the death of their child, do you think the parents, friends, lovers of the people who died in Orlando could tune out of their grief, or the thousands who are suffering persecutions in Turkey can tune out of the seal of pain and wasted life they were suddenly branded with? But I understand why people tune out. I understand if you tune out, despite my fury.

People tune out because we’re talking non stop about love and hate. Love and hate consume us. We get dry and empty, hollow shells of beingness. We want to regroup, rebuild our inside, suck life back in from this unforgiving universe and fill ourselves up with the sparkling joy of existence. If you are an influencer, a thought leader, a journalist, a politician, an extrovert of any kind, do humanity a service and put a cork in the love and hate hose. Talk, discover, act on the real issues and be alert to wipe away bad advice, corrosive ideas that keep us wanting to escape this reality which dries us up of our own sentiments, and help people use wisely their love and hate.

Hate is not bad by itself. Hate is defining who you are, and what you start to hate shows which branches of your self are getting in the way of light, hate is the sap and work that twists you such that you can keep growing. Hate is bad if you don’t know what it is and, chill, you are hated and loved by a lot less people than you even think or hope for. So am I. Hakuna matata.