Hate comes from ignorance: why we should be more empathetic

Kylie Grunsfeld, Contributing Writer

On Halloween, I saw Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” a film about two conspiracy theorists living in rural Georgia who kidnap a CEO, convinced she is an alien. 

The character Teddy, the main conspiracy theorist whose motives and backstory are thoroughly explored, got me thinking: “How do we view people like him?” Or rather, “how and why do we immediately dismiss people like him?”

Take a Virginian who voted for Winsome Earle-Sears in the recent gubernatorial election as an example. It’s easy to point a finger in their face and call them evil, but ignorance and hate are different things —  even if they can often be found within the same person. 

Earle-Sears’ transphobic campaign — which notably failed — was targeted at people susceptible to fearmongering who don’t actually know much about Gov. elect Abigail Spanberger’s policies. 

One of Earle-Sears’ most prominent advertisements said “Spanberger wants men in girls’ sports, bathrooms and locker rooms.” 

If you take the ad at face value and go down a rabbit hole searching for those allegations, you’ll end up in an internet echo chamber reinforcing what Earle-Sears wants you to believe. 

Spanberger was never campaigning to put grown men in spaces with minors — yet that’s exactly what Earle-Sears’ ads suggest. 

This is why it is so essential to understand people’s “why.” 

Someone who is well-researched and genuinely hateful is different from someone who has only been shown a partial truth or been completely disinformed. 

“Bugonia” took the time to explore Teddy’s “why,” and as a result we got much more than a black-and-white villain — we got a character informed by his traumas and the circumstances of his childhood. 

Nobody is so far gone that they cannot change. As we know, people are often a product of their environment. 

Different geographical, educational, religious and familial backgrounds greatly contribute to who — and what — people elect. Sometimes they have never known anything else. 

Our natural instinct might be to view opposing groups as monoliths, but we must acknowledge the varying degrees of knowledge and experience within that group. 

We don’t have to be friends with these people, and they don’t have to be in our lives. However, taking time to understand why someone believes what they believe will help us all become more successful in educating them otherwise — and being more empathetic as people.