This may be a disagreement about words. For me, hate comes from disgust and aversion whereas anger comes from a desire for comeuppance and redress. It sounds to me like your definition of hate is similar to my definition of anger. If my definition of anger equals your anger of hate then we are in agreement about reality.
Anecdote: I thought I didn’t get angry. My wife identified a spectrum of emotions, the upper end of which she said was anger, such that I found it obvious I had the middle often enough and the upper sometimes. I did not previously identify the upper as “angry” but on reflection I noted that many others definitely seem to. The lower end of this spectrum looks more like “frustration” than anything else.
To build off of your comment here, the idea that “anger can feel good” is a phrase where the meaning of individual words depends heavily on one’s direct experience, personal background and cultural context.
We seem to mutually misidentify anger and hate. That is surprising. Emotions are usually assumed to be universal. Could be cultural. I looked it up and there found this research question:
I think you are confusing anger with hate.
Like all emotions, anger is adaptive—though it may have been more so in the ancestral environment. Even today anger tells you something. Quick google: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mindful-anger/201606/4-reasons-why-you-should-embrace-your-anger
Hate was presumably also adaptive but I think its purpose is mostly lost in modern society. There I agree that it amounts to useless destruction.
This may be a disagreement about words. For me, hate comes from disgust and aversion whereas anger comes from a desire for comeuppance and redress. It sounds to me like your definition of hate is similar to my definition of anger. If my definition of anger equals your anger of hate then we are in agreement about reality.
Anecdote: I thought I didn’t get angry. My wife identified a spectrum of emotions, the upper end of which she said was anger, such that I found it obvious I had the middle often enough and the upper sometimes. I did not previously identify the upper as “angry” but on reflection I noted that many others definitely seem to. The lower end of this spectrum looks more like “frustration” than anything else.
I like the idea of making emotions continuous or a spectrum but I don’t think a single linear one will do.
for example, anger can feel good—if it works (I can’t say that from personal experience so much as from observation from kids).
To build off of your comment here, the idea that “anger can feel good” is a phrase where the meaning of individual words depends heavily on one’s direct experience, personal background and cultural context.
We seem to mutually misidentify anger and hate. That is surprising. Emotions are usually assumed to be universal. Could be cultural. I looked it up and there found this research question:
Human Emotions: Universal or Culture‐Specific? (PDF)
Anna Wierzbicka has made an effort to decompose this into fundamental building blocks:
Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals
I have not yet fully read it but this seems like a program worthy to communicate wider.
Emotional machinery is universal. Emotional ontologies can be culture-specific. I do differ on a lot of cultural assumptions relative to community here on Less Wrong such as on the flexibility of abstract concepts, civilization-specific ontologies, the essence of goodness and stuff that isn’t even on the Western map.