Hate – The Binding Chaos Lexicon

The experience of the expenditure of energy in creating or defending an endosocial membrane.

Expanded explanation

Hate is what building a wall feels like from the inside. The definition names an experience of expenditure, so hate is the sensation of energy being spent on a membrane rather than an attitude towards whoever is on the other side of it, which reverses the usual direction of explanation. Its counterpart is exact. Hate is the creation of endosocial membranes and love is the creation of connections, and love is a desire to create or maintain euphoric bonds, so the two are opposite operations rather than opposite feelings. Two consequences follow that are hard to reach any other way. The first is about who can be hated. It is impossible to hate anyone who is not part of one's social network, currently, recently or potentially, because a membrane can only be built where a connection could otherwise exist. Distance produces indifference rather than hatred. The second is about what hatred indicates. Hatred arises from a need to strengthen a protective membrane and is a sign of weakness, and greater strength has no need of hatred, which makes the emotion diagnostic of the person experiencing it rather than of its object. Exosocial people feel attraction to sources of euphoria and revulsion towards whatever blocks or destroys access to them, which is a different response entirely and directed at obstruction rather than at people.

In Heather Marsh’s words

Marsh makes hate an experience of expenditure, which locates the information in the hater rather than in the hated.

“Hatred arises from a need to strengthen a protective membrane and is a sign of weakness”
The Creation of Me, Them and Us

Examples

Nobody hates a stranger: Hatred requires a possible connection to wall off, so genuine distance produces indifference instead.
Opposite operations: Love creates conduits and hate creates membranes, which makes them contraries structurally rather than emotionally.
A reading of the hater: Since hatred is the cost of reinforcing a weak membrane, it says more about the person feeling it than about its target.

How others use it

Psychology treats hate as an intense emotion or attitude, with Sternberg's duplex theory decomposing it into negation of intimacy, passion and commitment, and social psychology studies prejudice, dehumanization and intergroup hostility as its social forms. Allport's work on the nature of prejudice remains foundational. The common thread is that hate is directed outward and explained by what the hater believes about the target. Marsh inverts this completely. Since the emotion is the experience of maintaining one's own boundary, its intensity measures the effort required rather than anything about the object, which predicts that hatred will be strongest where connection is most possible and weakest where it is genuinely absent.