Hate.

[Aven]

I have "grown up" around people who are perfectionists and in many ways, hate different things about different people.
I think hate can be useful in fact one could even say it's healthy to hate at times. It is when hate becomes such a habit that it becomes an obstacle.
I don't hate easily, in fact I considered it a huge waste of time, it turns out I was repressing lots of angry emotions and hate was one of them. Oftentimes though, hate is really just a bunch of other emotions strung together like frustration, fear, etc.

What do you think of hate? Do you think it serves a purpose? When is it productive to hate and when has it gone too far?

[P-O]

From a third party standpoint, it's easy to see when it's no longer productive. For me, hatred is often an impetus to action and in that sense, it's very valuable. The way to know if you're going overboard is to ask a trusted friend to evaluate the situation objectively.

[Thevenin]

Hate is one of the more distorted negative emotions and, thus, is likely to distort action and purpose. It tends to foster irrationality and impulsivity. Hatred has as its dual, fear and fear is often translated into hatred as a matter of emotional self-defense. Somebody or something that elicits hatred is better dealt with rationally and analytically. And, if you need hate to energize your actions, they're not worth doing anyway. Most people are too quick to hate and too slow to think.

[Blorg]

Hate is a more rational emotion than generic anger, since it has a defined source and/or target. edit: never mind.

Also, if you're normally a considerate (or eager to please) person, a dose of hate can counterbalance your preexisting fuzziness and allow you to see the world more clearly.

it's probably more useful when it's (re)directed against an inanimate goal, rather than a person, and combined with some sort of positive emotional drive.

[Aven]

I feel there is a stigma to hate, in our culture, seeing is as the worst emotion ever. I asked someone who often felt hateful and they said this:
"Disgust is more powerful than hate, because at those times you dehumanize whatever the person/situation is and you actions are no longer accountable for."

I agree with that although if I was to be honest, I was not very familiar with hate, until very recently, perhaps because I dealt more with everyone else's emotions around me than my own.

[msg_v2]

I feel it is better to acknowledge hate than to repress it, for certain. It's more dangerous when people don't know or think they have it, I think. And if you feel like someone screwed you over and they kind of did, hatred is perfectly acceptable as an emotion, at least in the short term. It gets burdensome to carry on too long, though.

I think anger, fear, and hatred are not dealt with very well by society. People (including myself, I think) try too hard to be free of them, but it just ends up causing worse problems.

[Hexchild]

I think from an evolutionary viewpoint, hate must have been advantageous, or we wouldn't be doing it so much.

It is similar to fear in the sense that it motivates you to pay attention to things that are detrimental to you, and to try and do something about them (e.g. by escaping, attacking or undermining). Both hate and fear are also traps that tend to blind you and thereby discourage you from forming a better understanding of the same detriments (simply by forming opinions early and avoiding too much contact).

I see both as a type of safety precautions that often malfunction in modern culture yet are so deeply hardwired it's a bad idea to ignore them.

[Thevenin]

I think from an evolutionary viewpoint, hate must have been advantageous, or we wouldn't be doing it so much.

This may be true, but what may have been an evolutionary advantage for hunter-gatherers may be detrimental in a complex, modern society that so efficiently kills.

[Starjots]

Emotions motivate action. Hate motivates ________. Fill in the blank. My answer is violence or destruction.

If I feel hate toward an individual, and it has happened a few times, I think about it until I can change downshift my emotion. I see no great harm in disliking, as that disliking motivates avoiding, which I excel at. Sometimes avoiding isn't enough, the reason for the hate is compelling. Then I narrow it to hating whatever aspect is the problem and trying to deal with that. I'm not going to screw up my life destroying someone else or getting ulcers because I can't destroy them.

Some people are devils though.

On the other hand, hating an idea seems perfectly reasonable to me, and since people are such copy cats you are bound to see ideas you hate oozing out of their pores from time to time. Don't shoot the messenger.

[Thevenin]

I believe that hatred distorts perception and can make you into a loser when you could have otherwise won. If my competitors hate me, they're going to lose because I'm going to out-think them while they're mired in emotion. It's happened.