More than 70 years after WWII, few topics stir such heated conversations in France as the collaborator vs resistant debate. It boiled back up after the Eichmann trial and never left the surface. In 2008, the Bibliothèque de Paris hung the work of André Zucca on its walls. The pictures depicted ordinary Parisians going about their daily lives under the occupation. His work revealed a third, seemingly larger category of French people: the passive citizen. It was a scandal. It seemed the passive citizen drew almost as much hate as the "collabo."

Hello, I listened to your recent episode concerning hate. The guest Berit Brogaard suggested that hate when not acted upon can have positive benefits for a person, although she did not disclose any details about how these benefits manifest in individuals or society. The reason I believe is because there are no examples of this.
What happens when such a strong emotion as hate is indulged? I think it would seek an outlet. What happens when one is not provided because of philosophical constraints? Is the individual who holds hate and does not act on it destined to just constantly grumble and become bitter?
I think this creates an atmosphere wherein we want to blame other humans for all the problems in the world.
When we blame we create enemies. This tendency may feel good at the moment and bolster our egos but is ultimately self defeating. The reason is that whether we like it or not we are all to some extent dependant on each other collectively, and wouldn’t it be a more happy and functional collective if we held feelings of goodwill towards our fellow humans rather than hate?
I would like to ask your guest Berit if she thinks we are controlled by a need to hate or do we have a choice.
Cheers! Love the show!
PS: Most People are a product of their conditioning and do not make conscious choices.

All good questions about a universal human condition. But, as usual, I'll offer something a bit different. My question is: Do we hate people for who they are, or is our hatred more about what they do---or don't do? No one, it seems to me, is intrinsically abhorrent,solely based on their ethnic and/or racial characteristics. Anyone who claims to hate a group, is naive, as to the foundations of such hatred. Why? Because, those sorts of stigma are mired in fear; mistrust; suspicion and a few other misconstructions.. Such unreasoning behavior can also emerge from superstition and personal history. But, all else equal, it is not who someone is, but what she does that makes her abhorrent to someone else. I would charge gentle readers and thinkers to consider this position carefully. Think of those whom you dislike or with whom you may even violently disagree: ask yourself where that truly comes from.

Are you feeling threatened? Jealous? Envious?---because of something they have but you do not?
Is that ' something' a something you can, in all likelihood, never expect to attain? Hatred is a trickster.
It fools us, far more often than we are fooled by other people. And, it is such a drain on those better angels of our nature.. Think of these remarks as a primer on a philosophy of psychology. Whether you can agree with them, or no.

Or, in fewer words, we tend to hate people and things foreign to us; those we don't understand. Hate then, at bottom, springs from fear. Blind, unreasoning, irrational fear...