You Cannot Hate What You Are Indifferent To

On connection as the hidden motive behind everything we do.

Whatever we do: meditate, fight, travel, love, create, destroy: we are, at the deepest level, seeking the same thing.

Connection.

Not connection in the soft greeting-card sense. Connection in the visceral, biological, existential sense. The felt experience of mattering. Of being seen. Of the boundary between self and other becoming, however briefly, permeable.

The reason people do jiu jitsu isn’t really about self-defence. Ask someone who trains seriously and they’ll struggle to articulate it : because the real answer lives below language. What jiu jitsu does is strip pretence. When you are physically helpless, there is no performance left. What remains is just presence. Pure contact between two people with nothing in between. The community that forms around that kind of shared vulnerability is unusually deep precisely because it was forged without masks.

Meditation does the same thing differently. So does a genuine conversation. So does travel into unfamiliar cultures. So does psychedelic experience at its best. The forms are different. The destination is identical.

But here is where it gets uncomfortable.

What about hatred? What about violence? What about the most extreme destructive forces in human history?

Consider Hitler: not to rehabilitate or excuse, but to understand. A young man shaped by a cold brutal father, a mother he lost at eighteen, repeated public rejection, years of homelessness and invisibility in Vienna. Someone who experienced profound disconnection and found no genuine pathway through it.

What he built was a grotesque substitute for connection. The German Volk became a merged collective identity : the belonging he never found individually, manufactured through shared ideology. The enemies he named became the necessary shadow : the projected receptacle for everything he experienced as wrong and broken.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: “ You cannot hate something you are indifferent to.”

Hatred is paradoxically a form of intense relating. It requires the other to matter enormously: to occupy your mind, to organise your identity around their existence, to need them as the explanation for everything that has gone wrong. Indifference is the genuine opposite of love. Hatred is love’s shadow twin: the same intensity, inverted.

Hitler was seeking connection. He just sought it through the most catastrophically distorted mechanism imaginable.

What is sought in hatred, in domination, in ideology: is the same thing sought in meditation, in jiu jitsu, in genuine love. The dissolution of the isolated self into something larger. The felt sense of being part of something real.

The difference is not the drive. It is the degree of distortion applied to it by trauma, ignorance, and the absence of genuine self-knowledge.

This is either deeply consoling or deeply disturbing, depending on how you hold it.

Consoling because it means no human being is fundamentally alien to you. The most extreme behaviour you can imagine is still, at its root, the same reaching you feel when you sit in silence and wait for the noise in your head to settle.

Disturbing because it removes the comfortable distance between “Us” and “them”. The line is not between people who seek connection and people who don’t. It is between those who have found genuine pathways to it and those who have not.

Every time you are genuinely present with another person: not performing, not trying to get something: you are doing the most radical thing available to a human being.

You are giving someone the direct experience of being seen.

That is what jiu jitsu is. That is what meditation is. That is what a real conversation is.

And in the end, the only genuine antidote to the distortions that hatred, ideology, and violence create is simply presence : the willingness to be fully seen and to fully see another, without performance, without agenda, without the armour we spend a lifetime constructing.

We are all, underneath everything, reaching for the same thing.