The real problem is that society teaches people to suppress negative emotions. Then someone can harness those suppressed emotions and focus them on something.

I hate articles like this

Hate is absolutely natural. Just like steeling or lying, hate doesn’t need to be taught. When people realize they have wants and needs that require competition they become jealous and coveting. That leads to hatred. The only way to fix it is teach people the world doesn’t revolve around them and to do unto others …

>'Hate is neither intrinsic nor is it inevitable... it's constructed,' says political scientist

It's very nice that he believes this, but he couldn't be more incorrect. The fact that there are _nurture_ reasons that hate gets reinforced does not actually mean that its basis is not in _nature_.

As a comparison, imagine something much less controversial: mothers deeply loving their babies. The mothers are told that they must love their babies, they're shown examples of loving their babies by all of their peers, their own mothers. The hospital just _expects_ that mothers will love their babies! Clearly this is just a social construction, and tabula rasa mothers might have a 50/50 chance of loving their babies.

This is an intentionally absurd example, but I hope it paints a clear picture; there are lots of ways in which the expectation that mothers love their babies is socially reinforced. But the fact that there are social components to this psychological state does not actually tells us anything about whether or not it's innate.

This doesn't mean that everything is nature, but people seem to be exceptionally bad at figuring out how nature and nurture might interact. Now, it's clear that nurture can either inhibit or reinforce our innate traits, and with something like outgroup hate it's clear that we'd need to acknowledge that it is impossible to extinguish, but possible to minimize.

In a world where people compete for resources and control, why wouldn't people have feelings that some researchers would characterize as "hate?" My parents were in their 20s when West Pakistan refused to recognize the results of the 1970 elections, where the party from Bengali East Pakistan won. There was a war, in which hundreds of thousands of Bengalis were killed, and hundreds of thousands of Bengali women were raped. This was a rational fight on both sides. East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) has various geographic advantages, and it was in West Pakistan's interest to keep control of that territory. For East Pakistanis, meanwhile, seeking independence made sense. It was ignored by the central government in West Pakistan. And separation worked out great in retrospect: Bangladesh has a 70% higher GDP per capita than Pakistan today.

Insofar as Pakistanis have a group identity, and insofar as Bangladeshis have a group identity, what kind of feelings should they have towards each other today?