Why does Donald Trump insist on bashing immigrants? His advisors have told him to concentrate on the economy if he wants to win the current presidential race with Kamala Harris But he always goes back to the idea that entire countries are emptying their jails and their insane asylums, then sending their “worst” citizens to the United States And why, when his advisors tell him it’s the economy, stupid, does Trump preach the Hitlerian idea of rounding up all these “illegals” and pulling off the biggest mass deportation in American history?
When he descended an escalator in the lobby of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City on June 16, 2015, to announce that he was entering the presidential race, Donald Trump introduced the MAGA worldview, the Make America Great Again worldview. Complete with folks you had permission to loathe and despise. Immigrants from Mexico, Trump said, are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.”[i] You are free to look down on them. You are free to abhor them.
Democrats aim to take your freedoms and your guns away. Please feel free to hate them, too. There is one and only one savior from the immigrant hordes and from the Swamp of the Deep State. His name is Donald Trump. That was the MAGA vision.
In other words, Donald Trump was preaching hate. And hate is a tool of social construction. Hate bonds us humans in tight-knit groups.[ii]
There’s more. Groups define themselves by who they hate. Tenants groups give permission to hate landlords. Progressives give permission to hate billionaires. MAGA gives permission to hate progressives. “Patriots” hate globalists. Globalists sometimes give permission to hate “patriots.” Worshippers of a fearless leader give permission to hate the enemies of that fearless leader. And anti-fascist groups give permission to hate that “fearless leader’s” followers.
Why is hatred so irresistible? Hate gives us scapegoats. And scapegoating gives us pleasure.
In 1962, experimenters Roger Ulrich and Nathan Azrin put eight rats in a box with an electrified floor.[iii] When they turned the current on, it sizzled the rats’ feet. Painfully. How did the rats react? Did they huddle together to give each other comfort from the pain? Not at all. It appears that the seven strongest rats felt out who they were and mauled the weakest rat among them. They apparently turned the pain of their foot shocks into a bonding experience.[iv] For a gang of seven. And they chose the eighth as a target. They marked out a rat to hate. Then they mauled him mercilessly.
Beating up a bottom rat, a scapegoat, was apparently social glue. Which is one reason a movement like MAGA or progressivism gives permission to hate.
There’s yet another reason that a leader who tells you who you have permission to hate is so gut-grabbing. That additional reason is what researchers call “altruistic punishment.”[v] We get a kick out of hating those who are our group’s designated scapegoats. Or our group’s chosen enemies. We get a jolt of dopamine.[vi] Yes, dopamine, the neurotransmitter that gives us the pleasures of cocaine and heroin[vii] highs. In other words, when Donald Trump descended the escalator in Fifth Avenue’s Trump Tower in 2015 and told the folks in the audience that they had permission to hate immigrants, it was as if he was handing out trays of cocaine.
Why would evolution plant such powerful rewards for hatred in your brain? Why would establishing an us-versus-them give us humans a survival advantage? Because humans cannot survive on their own. Humans only thrive in groups. And the competition between groups is vital to evolution. Vital to nature. And vital to you and me.
The leader who can mobilize the biggest and most committed group wins. The idea that can mobilize the biggest pool of true believers reigns.
How has group size helped organisms like you and me survive? If your group is wiped out, you will be wiped out, too. If your group thrives, you are likely to do okay.
What’s the role of ideas in all of this? A clan based on genes will be limited in size. But a group based on ideas, a group based on a worldview, a group based on a view of who to hate, can take over huge swathes of humanity.
What’s more, leaders eventually die. But worldviews can survive. Worldviews can organize societies for thousands of years. And the longer societies hang in there, the bigger and more powerful their worldviews are likely to become.
Take the religion founded in 622 AD by Mohammed. From 622 AD to 750 AD, Mohammed’s brainchild, Islam, pulled together the biggest empire the world had ever seen. An empire eleven times the size of the conquests of Alexander the Great, five times the size of the Roman Empire, and seven times the size of the United States.[viii]
The influence of those conquests has survived. Big time. In 2015, there were more than 1.9 billion Muslims.[ix] That’s more than the entire human population of the planet in 1910.[x] It’s nearly six times the size of the entire population of the United States. This vast sea of believers is held together by a worldview that has stayed strong for roughly 1,400 years. Islam.
And at the core of Islam is a vision of who to hate. Unbelievers. Infidels. Apostates and hypocrites. Jews. Scapegoats and enemies.
Thanks in part to its designation of who to hate, the worldview of Islam—complete with Muhammad’s holy law of sharia–is vividly alive today in the 57 nations of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. In fact, the Muslim worldview is trying to take more territory as we speak, fighting to swallow nations like Nigeria,[xi] Kenya,[xii] Ethiopia,[xiii] and even Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean,[xiv] 6,643 miles away from Islam’s birthplace, Mecca.
In other words, the survival of your group in intergroup tournaments counts. When your group succeeds, you thrive. When your group loses, you die. Like the six million Jews who died in the ovens of the Nazis. Like the Nazis themselves, 5.3 million of whom were killed in World War II.
And a vital factor pulling groups together is the permission to hate.
Why does Donald Trump ignore his advisors, bypass the issue of the economy, and amplify his message of hate? Why does he continue to build ever more extravagant fantasies against immigrants? Because Donald Trump knows a primal secret. Hate grabs us by the gut in a way that economics never will. It’s built into our biology.
[i] Donald Trump, “Announcement of Candidacy, Trump Tower, New York, NY, June 16, 2015,” P2016, Race for the White House, https://www.p2016.org/trump/trump061615sp.html
[ii] Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (2017), Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns, United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, p. 228. Bosson, J. K., Johnson, A. B., Niederhoffer, K., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (2006), “Interpersonal chemistry through negativity: Bonding by sharing negative attitudes about others,” Personal Relationships 13, pages 135-150, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-6811.2006.00109.x Markham Heid, “How Shared Hatred Helps You Make Friends,” https://forge.medium.com/how-shared-hatred-helps-you-make-friends-40f5c988c76a
[iii] Ulrich, R. E., & Azrin, N. H. (1962), “Reflexive fighting in response to aversive stimulation,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 5(4), pages 511–520.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Fehr, E., Gächter, S., “Altruistic punishment in humans,” Nature 415, pages 137–140 (2002), https://doi.org/10.1038/415137a Sören Enge, Hendrik Mothes, Monika Fleischhauer, Andreas Reif, Alexander Strobel, “Genetic variation of dopamine and serotonin function modulates the feedback-related negativity during altruistic punishment,” Science Reports, June 7, 2017, https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1038/s41598-017-02594-3.pdf
[vi] Martin Reuter, Bernd Weber, Christian J. Fiebach, Christian Elger, Christian Montag, “The biological basis of anger: Associations with the gene coding for DARPP-32 (PPP1R1B) and with amygdala volume,” Behavioural Brain Research, Volume 202, Issue 2, 2009, pages 179-183, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2009.03.032 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166432809001958 Nancy K. Morrison and Sally K. Severino, “Moral Values: Development and Gender Influences,” Psychodynamic, July, 13, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1521/jaap.1.1997.25.2.255 Bimm, Morgan, “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Tumblr Publics, John Green, and Sanctionable Girlhood,” Youth Mediations and Affective Relations (2018), pages 213-231, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98971-6_13 Jean Kim M.D., “Anger’s Allure: Are You Addicted to Anger?,” Psychology Today Blog, August 25, 2015. Daniel Taylor, “Righteous Anger and the Pleasure Centers of the Brain,” Wordtaylor.com, December 6, 2017, https://www.wordtaylor.com/neither-nor-blog/righteous-anger-and-the-pleasure-centers-of-the-brain
[vii] Gianluigi Tanda et al., “Cannabinoid and Heroin Activation of Mesolimbic Dopamine Transmission by a Common µ1 Opioid Receptor Mechanism.” Science, 276, 1997, pages 2048-2050, http://doi.org/10.1126/science.276.5321.2048
[viii] Bloom, Howard K. (2016), The Muhammad Code: How a Desert Prophet Brought You ISIS, al Qaeda, and Boko Haram, Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.
[ix] Pew Research Center, “Muslims,” April 2, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/muslims/
[x] Pew Research Center, “Global Christianity–A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population,” December 19, 2011, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2011/12/19/global-christianity-exec/
[xi] Harvard Divinity School,“Islam in Nigeria,” Religion and Public Life, Harvard Divinity School,
https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/faq/islam-nigeria
[xii] “2022 Report on International Religious Freedom: Kenya,” Office of International Religious Freedom, U.S. Department of State, https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-report-on-international-religious-freedom/kenya/
[xiii] MEMRI, “ISIS, Islamic State (ISIS) Weekly Editorial Exploits Unrest In Ethiopia Over Demolishing Mosques, Calls On Ethiopian Muslims To Wage Jihad Or Join ISIS In East Africa,” MEMRI–Jihad & Terror Threat Monitor, June 9, 2023, https://www.memri.org/jttm/islamic-state-isis-weekly-editorial-exploits-unrest-ethiopia-over-demolishing-mosques-calls
Desta Heliso, “Ethiopia’s Increasing Vulnerability To Islamic Extremism And What That Means For The Horn Of Africa,” Religion Unplugged, November 17, 2020, https://religionunplugged.com/news/2020/11/17/ethiopias-increasing-vulnerability-to-islamic-extremism-and-what-that-means-for-the-horn-of-africa
[xiv] Daurius Figueira, Jihad in Trinidad and Tobago, July 27, 1990, iUniverse, 2002. Michael Adams, Michał Pawiński, “‘Caribbean Jihad’: radical social networks and ISIS foreign fighters from Trinidad and Tobago,” Small States & Territories Journal, November 2022, the journal’s homepage, https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/44404 For the full article: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365306630_’Caribbean_Jihad’_radical_social_networks_and_ISIS_foreign_fighters_from_Trinidad_and_Tobago
From The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature Is Wrong, Howard Bloom’s new book, coming out February 1st, 2025.
Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on the highest-rated overnight syndicated talk radio show in North America, Coast to Coast AM. Bloom’s new book, coming out in February, 2025, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is wrong. For more, see http://howardbloom.net.
