NT Experience

“You are a threat to my world; you should not exist.”

In NT people hate is an emotional/moral feeling. It i the designation of an individual or a group as malignant. Hate functions as a social signaling and conformity tool. For in-group NT people, they both signal allegiance and ensure conformity of hate toward an entity that threatens the group’s values or status. Individuals may hate on their own if they are personally threatened.

Typically hate is restricted to things with will. In some cases the word may be applied to anthropomorphized objects temporarily. Hate is typically applied to other people where there is some relationship, perhaps to their in-group. Hate is relational and requires a social audience.

The mechanism is a variant on Disgust – the same biological feeling that people have toward feces is directed at other people. They think and feel that the target is evil.

Typically hate is a longer term feeling than Anger and its function and intent are different.

My Experience

For me “hate” is a term I use to indicate high intensity dislike. It might be triggered by a ethical judgment (the target is lying or harming people) or I might use it for very strong opinions, e.g. I hate fish.

In the case of ethical violations, my “hate” is more of a label: “this person does bad things”. I don’t feel a strong emotion, though if I focus my thoughts on their actions I may feel Anger. This is a much colder emotion than the NT emotion of the same name. It is putting an “evil” name tag on something, not aligning forceful thoughts against them.

Unlike NT people I can “hate” objects. I don’t ascribe evil intent to them, I just don’t like them. They might be inelegant, they might taste bad, they might be fundamentally flawed. Again, it is just a label of dislike.

I can “hate” people that I have never met, will never meet, am not affected by, etc. For example, if I heard about a mass murderer in another country I would “hate” them (and perhaps an NT person might not – they won’t like them, but hate is a little more personal). I don’t hate people who don’t like me, I don’t really care. If somebody tries to harm me and they succeed I might hate them: they did me harm. If they accidentally did me harm (without malice or negligence), I might be angry at the situation, but I would not hate them.

My hate toward people is two-fold:

• I label them as “bad” mentally – facts are important
• I wish they would stop whatever they are doing that makes me hate them

Vengeance or spite is not really my thing. I think.

In some cases the feeling might be Disgust: I am not allergic to fish but I would feel ill if I ate some (Caesar dressing aside). This is a distinct feeling from my typical use of the word and is more a description of the sensory effect of something that triggers the gag reflex. I hate fish and mushrooms. There are other foods I might describe as “hate” but they are simple dislike.

Comparison

Other than both NT and my version of hate being a longer term feeling, there is not much overlap. NT people hate the essence of another person while I hate an idea, the output or an object (typically food, but anything I might have a strong opinion about).

Note: that the NT use of the word hate is also a bit heteronymous like my own. NT people can “hate” a certain type of food – it overlaps with the Disgust feeling. They can also “hate” inanimate objects such as computers: they can feel targeted by them. They use the word hate, but it sounds a bit more like Anger to me.

This is a term where being a heteronym causes problems, though I didn’t realize it until recently. My “hate” is quite a different emotion and using this word can be misleading. Perhaps it works out as NT people can be a bit sloppy with its use too.

Semantic Divergence: yes.