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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42220
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

All of the answers here already are good answers. It's a complex topic, and all three answers addresses key points the others miss or touch too lightly. But I feel there's a few important things that have not been said. I doubt I've covered them all.

The lack of a reason good enough to hate someone hasn't stopped... just about everyone.

Most of the people I've talked to who claimed to be free of all hate did, in fact, hate someone, and this came out after talking with them for a while. The person they hated was themselves.

This is not a big statement about people hating one thing or another; it's a statement about people tending to encounter others who are like themselves. I've talked to a number of other people who noticed this and thought it was a great power of the universe, but it isn't. It's us. We prefer to be around the familiar, and we are the person with whom we are most familiar. For some of us, this is harder than others; different people are different, and some of us are more different than others.

Hating onesself doesn't have to continue; I've more or less made amends. I have my problems and I try to worth through them, same as anyone else. It was easier for me, because as a straight guy in the US, I haven't been taught to hate myself, I just did. Many people in many cultures are taught to hate themselves, and that can run deep. Most people can't work on fixing it until they notice it.

If self-hatred is also not your thing, understand that even dislike is similar to hate in many aspects. Start with dislike, and add frustration. This thing that is disliked is always there, there's no getting away from it. Most people who hate others but not themselves do so by blaming any inadequacy they feel on the target of their dislike.

Galastel mentions injustice. That's almost a distraction. Justice is a refined concept and hate is a raw emotion. But if you understand the concept of justice, you can harness it to feed that raw emotion, regardless of whether it is properly applied or not. I've seen someone physically assault a police officer and then claim that his subsequent arrest was unjust. I'm sure they were angered by their arrest more because of that thought, regardless of how false it was.

Galastel's mention of blood libels is also an especially good point. Most of the people I've had extensive discussions about why they hated one thing or another have had a significant amount of misinformation about the subject of their hatred. This misinformation was rarely enough to be the source of hatred, but always a significant contribution to it when it was present.

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