It is a worn-out cliché that the human being is a social animal. There is an innate need to belong and to relate. It speaks to the primal essence of our being and informs our core identity processes. This need is dealt with in a variety of ways – owned up, denied, camouflaged, compensated, diffused, even overplayed. The context, as always, is in some cases an enabler and with others, the spoiler.

Tribalism is at the heart of our sense of ‘who I am and who we are’. It engenders connection but also erects barricades, demands homogeneity and frowns upon dissent, promotes safety within while also stoking fear of the other, fierce loyalty and aggressive vigilance, protection for one’s own and fear-fuelled hate for the ‘other’.

In my experience, religion too, can be the glue and a basis for such identification and for drawing deep lines that differentiate and divide. It has often been a vehicle to evoke and manage fear, and thus render division and hate. Its failure to instil faith in the universality of human experience, love and compassion for all is often evident. The consequent competitive claims by adherents are a potent poisonous brew.

So yes, hate has a useful function in rallying and binding the troops, of inflaming people and torching passivity by invoking the outsider, the enemy, the dragons and the demons. The power of repetition cannot be underestimated in cementing fear and transmitting content that elevate unchallenged information and opinions as facts and lore. It legitimises one’s shame, guilt, inadequacies and anger with one self over unresolved issues.

Hope lies in the thesis of an expansive idea of self – an idea of ‘me’ as a collection of multiple (at times, conflicting) selves and which allows one to go beyond the narrow definitions of a tribalistic self and to view it as a clutch of diverse, layered and interacting identities. I think our hope and our future lies in recognising and valuing this multiplicity within ourselves, first and foremost, in order to see and recognise it in others and in this process, resist the urge to regress to the most base elements of our identity – the tribalistic – at the first sign of difference, provocation and threat.

Thus, a more inclusive ‘us’ is possible only if we evolve collectively – transcend our ‘tribal’ moorings, embrace the multiplicity within and plurality around us, critically examine our fear of the ‘other’ and go beyond the language of either/or – ‘you are with me or against me’.

At this moment, the picture at the individual and collective levels is obviously muddied by a cocktail of rank inequality, deprivation, historical injustice and grievance, revisionist history to support claims and counterclaims, new narratives, heroes and villains. Amidst the distress of this context, how do we bring up the relevance of universal love, humanity and the idea of a shared destiny?

For many, the notion of a global citizenship is appealing. Often, it is a cop-out, a flight from the messy task of co-holding our multiple systems of belonging, loyalties and concerns. Such flight does little to honour one’s roots while it celebrates one’s wings. One soars, hoping for a utopian alternate world, and landing where one started, cynicism and rage now added.

There is too, the regular paean to our inter-connectedness and the frequent call to respect norms that underline order in the midst of divisions, rivalries, animosities and hate. Technology and the global marketplace as a connector have sometimes been hailed as the platform to get past our narrow differences and realise our true interdependence. They are false gods to whom our responsibility and difficulties in forging meaningful ties at a human level have been outsourced. All that they have done is create new dividing lines amongst a new group of digital tribes, accentuated lines between the haves and have-nots and sowed new seeds of conflict.

So, what is one to do?

In this complex world being torn asunder, I hear exhortations to keep it simple. To do so, does one focus on the ‘I, me, my’, become insular, become selective about what one takes in and responds to, dull one’s senses so that each day is unvaried or the peaks and troughs of daily life impact with dampened amplitude?

Or, do we start with understanding simplicity a little differently: as the clarity that one acquires by learning to see the totality of ‘what is’, having a subjective position on what it is to be human, and a set of convictions around this to guide choice-making and action. Such simplicity in no way suggests an easy passage through life. Instead, in reality, I imagine it would be courageous, responsible, and in our context, perhaps, even activist.

The trigger for this note was Sonali Ranade’s The Politics of Hate, that I read on Twitter (13 February 2021). It was an interesting, reflective piece. It got me thinking about the origins of hate and from there, on to related inquiries. Here, I have attempted to put it down.