On Hatred and Information Entropy

January 21, 2025

Machiavelli was well known for his writing The Prince (1532), and everyone loves to quote him. Few of them know the context, fewer still care. As a result, hardly anyone knows what Machiavelli was actually saying.

Machiavelli spoke of fear and love, how between the two it is better to be feared, but he also said it is best to be both. And he emphasized to never be hated, for hatred in great enough quantities will make anyone cede their security to see the downfall of their enemy.

So I ask now why hate has not saved us, if there is so much hate for the rise of fascism. And I would like to throw some ideas against the wall and make some conjectures with Machiavelli's posit in mind.

First, there is the matter of defining hate. Merriam-Webster states that it is an intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury. Now that's a lot to work with. I certainly have felt fear, anger, and a sense of injury from the right wing in America. I have been a victim of physical violence stemming from the emboldenment of white supremacy, homophobia, and just plain assholery. I have felt bureaucratic and professional losses from policies enacted for fascist ends. I have grown to nurse an intense hostility toward them, and an aversion to any who have sympathy for them. I think it is safe to say that hate is what I hold for them. I know I am not the only one, with my suffering at their hands being comparatively minor compared to others.

Yet, how is it that this widespread hatred has amounted to a majority control of the federal government by fascists with comparatively little resistance? The easiest explanation would be that there isn't that much hate, that my bias has placed me in a position where I observe more hate than average, and there simply isn't enough hatred to warrant an opposition.

It is certainly true that this country has a history of fascist cultural objects that informs the way American thought has evolved and continues to evolve. Empathy is not a highly prized virtue in American morality, and so the widespread harm done to minorities simply is seen as harm to the other and not to us. Furthermore, hatred seems to be a relatively measured quanitity, and any organized opposition to outright fascism is relentlessly framed as not so different and thus deserving of an amount of hate approaching that of direct fascism. This has been accomplished by the use of memetic warfare in social media to dissuade nuance and encourage infighting between opponents of fascism through the mechanism of purity culture.

Memes are powerful things in that they convey a great deal of information in a relatively small amount of communication. In programming parlance we would call that a high level language. High level languages can accomplish quite a bit with a smaller amount of effort, whilst also being inefficient and imprecise on a relative scale. A meme is the same way, by communicating many things that make a human brain load up and connect a lot of information all in a single image or even just some words. Obviously, memes have been around for a long time, the word used to simply refer to an idea that was repeated among a population.

Memetic warfare is commonly have thought to become popular and widely utilized during the 2010s, but has been employed far longer than that. Barack Obama used his internet savvy during his presidency in order to secure support. Images of 9/11 were used by the Bush presidency in order to increase a sense of nationalism and build support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Before that, soundbytes such as "it's the economy, stupid" were repeated ad infinitum in the 90s. This sort of thing has its roots in commercial marketing, from clever slogans to annoying jingles. The idea has aways been to entrench an idea in the human mind.

But of course, ideas do not exist in a vacuum. The human brain both integrates and suppresses ideas based on previous information it has acquired, and tends to accept ideas that agree with the currently existing worldview, and reject ideas that disagree. And so modern memetic warfare takes a two-pronged approach.

The first prong is information that reinforces fascism. This is designed to associate fascist policies and beliefs with positive ideas, most often family, relationships, work ethic & job satisfaction, simplicity, etc. In this sense, nostalgia has been weaponized in order to encourage the belief that things will go back to the good days with a strong enough hand enforcing order among chaos.

The second prong is the dissemination of information that splits opposition. This is designed to emphasize differences in worldview and encouraging the equivocating of all outside forces by putting forth the idea that ideological purity is the only way to establish the correct world order.

However, there is a third prong that is often overlooked. This is information overload. Today's modern information landscape bombards us all constantly with a stream of data constantly coming at us. Much of it is horrifying. The human brain's natural reaction to this is to cease allowing new information. This keeps individuals from being able to integrate with outsiders, and further entrenches the concept of other within us.

So with all this sort of thing in mind, we are constantly subjected to so much information to keep us unchanging, and to keep us constantly upset so that hatred simply isn't that dramatic of a feeling. That our hatred of the way the world around us is changing is simply another part of the modern emotional landscape.

It may seem hopeless, but I would encourage anyone reading this to always take just a short moment to analyze anything you see in your various feeds, especially if it's something you agree with, and ask yourself if it makes you safer, stronger, or smarter to take it to heart.

If you've read much of this blog, you know I always encourage responsible management of the information you take in. Sapience is a responsibility, and I do believe that anyone can exercise it in a way that both minimizes stress and allows for appropriate outrage.

(I recommend Randall Schweller's Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple: Global Discord in the New Millennium (2014))