Why Are We Being Taught to Hate Each Other?

When did empathy become a weakness? Reflecting on racism, political division and the power of reading, I ask whether stories can help us recognise each other’s humanity again

When a child dies, does their nationality really matter? Do we need to know their religion, their background or which side of a border they were born on before deciding whether we should feel bad about it?

Seriously, look at the way we talk about each other these days, the things people are openly willing to say about other human beings, and the cruelty and brutality they seem quite happy to defend. It makes me wonder where we’re going. Look back at our history and you can see where this sort of thinking has led before. How do we build a better world while we’re busy teaching each other to hate?

I thought we were getting better at this

I experienced what I’ve always referred to, with considerable bitterness, as the “golden age of racism”: London in the 1970s. It was deeply unpleasant, and only much later in life did I realise how deeply it had left me emotionally and psychologically scarred.

Then came the optimism of the 1980s and the computerisation of the 1990s, and I thought things were getting better. It felt as though we were finally evolving and maturing as a species, reaching beyond our petty differences and insecurities towards a more enlightened future. We were rejecting racism, challenging sexism and recognising religious prejudice. We were beginning to understand the damage caused by treating people as inferior because of something they were born into.

There was progress. There was reason to hope.

Then the 2000s arrived with a crash, and fear and suspicion seemed to take a greater hold. Terrorism, war, destruction and death filled our screens. Human life appeared to become cheaper, while people we feared, or were taught to fear, became easier to dismiss.

Today, I hear entire countries and communities discussed as problems to be dealt with. The language can extend to internment, deportation and even extermination, as though the people involved are obstacles in somebody else’s vision of the world. Come on, we’re talking about people with families, jobs, memories and hopes.

Decade	Key events and advances	Why they mattered to that sense of progress
1980s	Home computing takes off: the BBC Micro launches in 1981 and the ZX Spectrum in 1982, bringing computing into homes and classrooms.	Technology offered new possibilities for learning, creativity and participation. The future felt increasingly within ordinary people’s reach.
1980s	The Berlin Wall opens in November 1989, becoming a defining symbol of the collapse of Europe’s Cold War division.	A seemingly permanent barrier could come down. It encouraged hope that entrenched hostility could give way to freedom and reconciliation.
1990s	The World Wide Web spreads: its software is announced beyond CERN in 1991, and CERN makes the technology freely available in 1993.	Access to information and communication across borders promised a more connected world, with opportunities to encounter unfamiliar people and perspectives.
1990s	South Africa holds its first national democratic elections with universal adult suffrage in 1994, followed by Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as president.	The defeat of apartheid’s political system demonstrated that institutionalised racial exclusion could be challenged and overcome.
1990s	The Disability Discrimination Act becomes law in 1995, introducing UK protections against disability discrimination in areas including employment and services.	Greater inclusion was becoming a legal responsibility, reflecting years of campaigning for dignity, access and equal treatment.
1990s	The Good Friday Agreement is signed in April 1998, establishing a framework for peace and power-sharing in Northern Ireland.	Negotiation and mutual recognition offered a route beyond decades of violence and deeply rooted communal division.
2000s	The 9/11 terrorist attacks in September 2001 are followed by US-led military action in Afghanistan in October.	Terrorism and the “war on terror” became central to international politics, contributing to an atmosphere dominated by security, fear and conflict.
2000s	The US-led invasion of Iraq begins in March 2003, with British forces participating.	War, civilian suffering and arguments about intervention further challenged hopes of a more peaceful international order.
2000s	The London bombings on 7 July 2005 kill 52 victimson the capital’s transport network.	Terrorism struck ordinary journeys in a diverse city, bringing questions of safety, belonging and community relations painfully close to home.

When did empathy become a weakness?

All of this leaves me angry, depressed and frankly exhausted. I’m tired of the casual contempt for people because they look, dress, speak, behave, worship or eat differently. I’m tired of the seeds of suspicion being sown, of people being encouraged to regard their neighbours with fear and hostility.

And I’m tired of empathy being treated as some embarrassing weakness, as though caring about someone makes you a fool. When did empathy become a weakness? I always thought it was a superpower.

How have we regressed so badly into tribalism, xenophobia and warmongering? We watch lives being lost and uprooted, property and land destroyed, and vast resources consumed by conflict. I find myself seeing far too much enthusiasm for confrontation and far too little visible willingness to compromise.

Where exactly are we hoping to end up? History warns us about where this thinking can lead, and the destructive tools available today make that warning deeply frightening.

Behind the hate-crime figures are real people

According to the Home Office’s figures for the year ending March 2026, police in England and Wales recorded 146,825 hate crimes, up 7% on the previous year. Recorded racial hate crimes rose by 9%, to 107,926, while religious hate crimes increased by 13%, to 11,419. Within the religious category, offences targeting Muslims rose by 15% and those targeting Jewish people by 10%.

These are police-recorded offences. Reporting levels and recording practices affect the figures, and some other recorded categories fell. The Home Office cautions against using police figures as a straightforward measure of underlying hate-crime trends or prevalence. Underreporting also means they cannot capture every incident.

Even with those qualifications, the scale of what is being recorded is troubling. Behind every digit in a spreadsheet are actual people and the lasting effects of what happened to them.

Imagine explaining to your child why someone shouted that at you. Imagine your mother being frightened to go out because of what she wears, or missing a prayer congregation because you’re scared to walk to your own place of worship.

When the hostility comes from people you know

We live on our phone feeds these days. Imagine opening your phone and finding people you know, perhaps even people you call friends, making excuses for the shit being shovelled at you. Then imagine realising some of them may be doing the shovelling.

How would that make you feel? Sad, angry, disappointed, disillusioned, withdrawn? You might take them on, and a slanging match on social media is hardly unusual, but what does it achieve?

After the posting is done, the trolls move on to the next trending argument. You’re still sitting there, belittled and betrayed, your dignity and identity ridiculed, knowing you may have to go through it again tomorrow.

Perhaps you stop going online, stop going out, stop engaging. That withdrawal can feed the very separation and suspicion that made you feel unwelcome in the first place.

The danger of dismissing whole communities

I’ve never felt comfortably aligned with the political left or right, and that doesn’t automatically put me in the centre either. I find those positions restrictive when they seem to demand a complete package of beliefs. Surely we should approach individual issues logically and consider their particular circumstances.

I find the rhetoric from the far right especially concerning and dangerous: the willingness to portray whole communities as threats, and the enthusiasm for blaming people whose lives you know absolutely nothing about.

Whatever your politics, consider what happens inside your own head when you dismiss an entire community, or begin to question its right to exist. Once a label gives us permission to stop caring about a group of human beings, we have a serious problem.

Have you noticed how quickly a conversation about suffering becomes a conversation about whether the person deserved it? We reach for the flag, surname, religion, immigration status or voting history, searching for reasons to justify and explain away their pain.

A label barely begins to tell you who I am

I’m a British Pakistani Muslim. Technically, that describes me. For some people, my name, colour, age and appearance will be enough to form a complete conclusion about who I am, how I think, and whether I’m someone to fear or laugh at.

Yet those details leave out so much of what makes me a person. They tell you little about what makes me laugh, the people I worry about or the experiences that have shaped me. They certainly don’t explain the ridiculous amount of time I can spend thinking about cars, writing books and Star Trek.

They won’t tell you that even as an English person I’m not really interested in football and being of Pakistani heritage, nor am I into cricket. And that I don’t really like biryani and that I hate daal. They won’t reveal that my favourite movie star was Amitabh Bachchan, or that I mostly listen to 1980s music, with the occasional exception for Bruno Mars.

If we sat down and really chatted, I suspect we’d find far more in common than we expected. Even the differences might fascinate, amaze, delight and enlighten us.

You can collect a handful of labels about anyone and still barely begin to know them. Yet we’ve become comfortable passing judgement on millions of people at a time. How can anyone be so certain about people they’ve never met?

The world our children will inherit

We have differences, some profound, and we’re going to argue about them. That’s part of human discourse. We also want our children to come home safely. We get frightened, we have hopes and ambitions, and we want to trust and befriend people without constantly worrying about what they really think of us.

We have one planet, and we have to share it. Our children will inherit whatever we make of it, whatever we leave behind, including the resentments and hatred we teach them.

That brings me to reading and empathy. I think we desperately need more opportunities to experience another person’s life from the inside, particularly someone we perceive to be different from ourselves.

Put yourself beside that hospital bed

Imagine a father beside his little daughter’s hospital bed. He’s watching her breathe and looking towards the door, hoping someone will arrive with good news. His phone keeps lighting up with messages asking how she is, but he can’t bring himself to answer because he has nothing to tell them.

Stay with him for a moment. Feel that helplessness. Think about how you would beg, pray and plead, how you would give up anything for someone to say she was going to be all right. Imagine the tears on your cheeks, the prayers on your lips, the effort to hear your little girl’s next breath.

Now give that father a nationality you’ve been told to fear, a religion you distrust or politics you despise. Are you still with him, or did that information snap you away from the scenario?

A story can bring us close enough to someone for their feelings to become recognisable and relatable. In a novel, we hear thoughts a character is too ashamed to say aloud. We discover why a remark cuts so deeply, the loss they’re carrying, the fear they’re hiding and the person they’re desperately trying to protect.

They might make a terrible decision, leaving us exclaiming, “Oh, for God’s sake, why would you do that?” We can recognise the mistake and still understand how they came to make it.

Reading and empathy: caring across the distance

We worry about fictional people, defend them and lie awake wondering what will happen next. We become upset when an author kills one of them off. Someone has persuaded us to care about a person whose life we’ve never lived, possibly in a place we’ve never visited.

If we can feel that for fictional characters, surely we can extend some of it to real people sharing this tiny green and blue ball, floating in the terrifying vastness of space.

George Eliot wrote in The Natural History of German Life:

“The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.”

And James Baldwin said in a 1963 LIFE profile:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

God, we could do with extending our sympathies. We could do with widening the circle of people whose pain we’re willing to take seriously.

Someone in another country, another culture or another century can put into words a feeling we’ve barely been able to explain to ourselves. Suddenly, we recognise each other across all that time and distance. That’s extraordinary.

Seeing the world through Jamshed Khan’s eyes

Take my novel, Silent Ruin. Readers spend time in the head of Jamshed Khan, a Pakistani Muslim secret agent. We’re familiar with James Bond and have certain expectations about how he thinks and behaves. How might someone with a similar job, but a different background, approach his choices, loyalties and responsibilities?

For some readers, a Pakistani protagonist will feel familiar. For others, it may be an entirely new experience. I hope they become caught up in the adventure and care whether he makes it through.

There’s something powerful about becoming invested in someone whose background differs from yours, and discovering how readily you can care what happens to them.

Of course, people can read a library’s worth of books and still treat others appallingly. Stories can also reinforce prejudice when they repeatedly present the same people as monsters. Reading offers an opportunity to understand; we still have to consider what we do with that experience.

Another person’s humanity survives our disagreement

We can challenge racism, hold people responsible for cruelty and argue passionately about our beliefs while recognising that another person’s humanity survives our disagreement.

We’re all capable of prejudice and preconceptions. I am too, and I’m constantly working on them within myself. We’ll make mistakes, but we can recognise them and try to become more open, accepting and empathetic.

Before sharing something that makes an entire community sound dangerous, read it properly. Check it. Think about who might have to live with the consequences. When someone says they’re frightened, give them a hearing. When someone is humiliated, think about what our silence might feel like to them.

Martin Niemöller’s warning about the consequences of silence remains painfully relevant. Its closing thought is devastating:

“Then they came for me” and there was nobody left to speak for him.

We’re capable of learning, changing our minds and caring about people beyond our immediate families and communities. We can pause before speaking or typing and think through the consequences of our words.

I’m frightened of where this hatred could take us, and frustrated that we seem so willing to keep feeding it. We have enough problems to solve and enough suffering already. Surely we can stop adding to it so enthusiastically and remember that there’s a real person there, someone like you and me.

If we want a better future, we have to make room for each other in it. To borrow slightly from John Lennon, let’s give love a chance.

Which book or fictional character helped you understand someone whose life was different from yours? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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