Why Do Haters Hate?

[~asdf~ 110]

Actually there is a similar thread that discusses why haters, hate in general. I've put my reason in there and Kyronea has to so you should check that thread out.

 

http://mlpforums.com/topic/6611-why-do-haters-hate/page__fromsearch__1

 

I think this will help a bit, If not a bit more.

[SrFrog 927]

Well like Weyland said, there are Bronies out there that tend to be some what loud and obnoxious. Yeah, it's fine to share your love for the show and community but there is always a time and place for that. And I doubt that bombing the comments sections of different pages with ponies leaves a nice impression of the Community.

[I_wesley125 393]

 

 

Theres been a study where they found that most homophobic people are actually gay but in denial and won't admit it. Which is pretty amusing.

 

I wouldn't say most, but some.

[Mist Blitz 9]

They hate because they havent seen the show, or they dont know what it si about.

[~asdf~ 110]

I wonder who merged these topics.

 

Hopefully the posts before your topic was merged with this one, the original posts in this topic, will help your question.

[Sheogorath 1,155]

I took my time to read over this entire thread up to this point, and it is a decent analysis on the hate, albeit a little naive.

 

Hate as an emotion is something one needs to understand first and foremost in order to be able to both survive it and even to be freed from it.

In its most basic form hate is fear, there is always fear with hate. Person who is expressing hate is masking fear or acting from it. Those two emotions walk hand in hand. The reason haters hate is not because they think it is cool to hate on something, they fear that if they do not express their hate they might be themselves judged as accomplices to the activity they have witnessed only by not acting against it. This is a tribal function in human being and its roots lie in our ancestor species that started their journey to modern man as a group of apes sticking together.

Back then politics were much more simple than they are today. You sided with the biggest roughest and toughest ape around so you didn't get your ass handed to you by the same said ape. This became a social instinct in our species and its modern cousins, and now all beta or lower social mentality males are susceptible to "hater" mentality if they deem something unlike what they deem is acceptable to the bigger monkey around, they fear judgement via association and loss of status in the eyes of their peers. In order to bolster their own masculinity they protest loudly and hate on things they deem as non-gender normative.

 

This instinct in them is instinct that surpasses rational thought and as long as the person they are judging (Brony) is not in the same room as them and able to smack them around for being a dumb screaming monkey they will do that as means to feel better about their own masculinity which they constantly feel is threatened. Feelings of inadequacy and social inferiority leads to haters becoming vocal and stubborn. They do not dare to like anything that their peers might judge as non manly, because they already are the beta in their group running along with a tail tugged between their legs.

 

This weak social status makes them scared and nervous, and that in turn turns to hate and aggression, and they try via aggression to enhance their own social status (luckily modern age judges such stupidity more eagerly than earlier generations) as "strong reliable and eager to fight" male. In the end nobody is a hater unless they feel like there's something to gain from that behaviour.

 

Sure this is not as "feel good" and feely analysis of the hater response but it is biologically valid and predicts entire spectrum of behaviour exhibited by beta types.

I could dwell deeper in this subject but it would go too much into nurture versus nature and other exceptions to the rule sort of details that are not directly relevant,

Anyhow, nice post Braun!

[CookiePie 0]

I can't stand haters. Why don't they just let us love what we love?

 

These haters are mean and stupid.

[~asdf~ 110]

I can't stand haters. Why don't they just let us love what we love?

 

These haters are mean and stupid.

 

Read mine and Kyronea's analysises and you will get an idea. Haters are scared of us and feel uncomfortable accepting us because of it.

[FIMChangedmylife72 58]

Because everypony is entitled to an opinion.

[Comet Tail 808]

First, let me apologize not noticing this thread before, since you specifically called out to me as a knowledgeable person, something for which I feel honored.

 

Secondly...I feel like your analysis was fairly spot on, at least in regards to understanding your own emotional reaction to the show, and how you would have characterized your prior dislike for the show as a result of that. Hatred is a difficult emotion to process, to understand. At its core, at least in the type of hatred we are discussing, it's about fearing and not understanding something that is different from oneself.

 

One's experiences and point of view sums up how we view life. We can only filter everything we see and hear through what makes sense to us. This is a difficult concept to explain, so let me give an example.

 

I find it extremely difficult to understand religious faith. I have never been able to believe in God or some other deity, because it never made sense to me. I always felt silly or ridiculous whenever I attempted to explore various spiritual or religious beliefs. I've tried my hand at many, both mainstream religions such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, etc, as well as a few other less mainstream views, but in every instance I found myself unable to believe. I just couldn't, because for whatever reason, that is the way that I am. That is my perspective, my viewpoint, how I process the universe. It extends into a number of different aspects of my life, such as how I interpret circumstances. Whenever I encounter something that most would accredit as being supernatural or at the very least possible to interpret as proof of their beliefs, I look for an alternative, more empirical explanation, because I can't accept that one doesn't exist.

 

This is in many ways the sort of thing Twilight went through in Feeling Pinkie Keen when she attempted to understand the nature of the Pinkie Sense. It baffled her, conflicted with her worldview and with the knowledge she had about the extent or limit of Earth Pony magic/magic-like abilities. As usual I was able to see the episode through Twilight's perspective, because in her horseshoes I would have been acting the same way as she did.

 

It could be easy enough for me to take this lack of understanding and allow it to twist into hatred. For a long time I was the angry sort of atheist, the type who viewed organized religion as a poison or even an existential threat to humanity itself. I no longer have that viewpoint because I've learned just how silly that notion even is. I didn't understand the religious viewpoint, therefore I feared it and hated it and saw it as a threat to me.

 

Thus, the sort of hatred espoused by haters of Friendship is Magic is based on a lack of tolerance for a viewpoint different from theirs. Whether it is based on a perception of masculinity, or a dislike of anything that could be characterized as girly, or even hatred aimed instead at fans of the show, such as those who would accuse male fans of being outright paedophilic, it's all about a lack of understanding, about how the show represents a different point of view from how they perceive everything, and that represents, at a basic level, a threat, a threat they lash out at with their hatred.

 

Too often we don't think about why we have the emotional reactions that we do to the world around us. Your typical FIM hater isn't going to think about why they hate the show, because people just don't do that sort of thing in general. We as a society tend to look outward rather than inward, even stereotyping those who look inward as being weak or foolish. It ties back into a much broader range of subjects than I feel I should really get into, because whole books can, have been, and will be written about this topic.

 

But basically, I feel, as I said, that your analysis was fairly spot on. Not every hater's experience will be like that of course, and there are plenty of haters of the show who would never be converted no matter how much they examine themselves, because the things they may dislike about the show will never change and they may dislike those aspects because of aspects of themselves that will never change, like my inability to understand the religious viewpoint. And that's fine, because disliking the show isn't a bad thing. When they attack fans of the show, though, that isn't acceptable, and is something we should put more effort towards trying to stop if we can, not through trying to convert them necessarily so much as simply getting them to let us be.

 

Well, it's hard not to, when you make posts like this and write character psychological analysis

 

And thanks, I had some advantage since it is my own mind, after all, hehe.

 

Yeah, I was thinking of what I'd do if I could make a presentation on MLP, once, and one of the things I decided is I'd start by being non-imposing, by saying something to the message of: "This isn't to make you like the show, this is just to get you to understand how people can like what the G4 show is, so you can understand why someone other than a little girl would like it."

 

I actually have a rather hard time with faith sometimes; it's an interesting thing, world-view. World-views are like circular arguments, atheist:

religion is an invention of the human mind -therefore> religion is false -therefore> religion is an invention of the human mind -etc>

But the same applies for any worldview:

God created the world -therefore> God is real -therefore> God created the world -etc>

 

You can't really trace it back, they're like mathematical or theoretical models, they attempt to describe a situation; all of reality. So, you use the one that matches the data best. I've decided that religion doesn't add a whole bunch, but, neither did the elliptic Heliocentric model; it took extensive study to reaveal that orbits are ellipses rather than circles, and introduced a massive amount of new complexity to the model, to explain movements that took extremely precise measurements over years to even notice. But, despite the total aborration to parsimony in the name of only a tiny, tiny amount of imprecision in the data, it proved to be correct.

 

And then there's one incident I'll share. As a little kid, back before I learned to question things like I do now, I was scared at school because we had no teacher, and were wandering the halls. For some reason, I found this lack of foreknowledge to be absolutely terrifying. I went behind a door and prayed. Within a few minutes, my mom was there taking me home. She was in the middle of making dinner, she recalls, when she suddenly had the feeling to go pick me up from school, so she quit, in the middle of it, and did so. Let me note, she's worked many years as a nurse; she's never done these kinds of impulsive actions, never picked me up from school randomly like that ever before, or ever since. That's too much for coincidence. And honestly, I wouldn't believe it if it wasn't for the fact it happened to me _{(sort of like my braces picking up police radio once... Wow, I've had some crazy things happen : P)}. It's really got me to take heed when I hear similar stories, which, lots and lots of them exist just within my social arena, doubtlessly, there are millions more outside my social arena that I haven't heard. It's also taught me to be a lot more open-minded about things. There's a certain dellusional comfort that comes from the assumption that we have any idea how things work. We can run by some numbers and predict how matter will act, but that's a far cry from understanding everything or the fundamental nature of the universe.

 

But like I said, that story and the fact there are so many others is just too much coincidence to leave unexplained, like that extra bit of data which led to the elliptical model...

 

Well, if I believed in coincidence in the first place. Albert Einstein said "coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous". Under close examination of things like the American revolution, the foundations of democracy, turning points like the Battle of Midway, you'll find the course of human history has been controlled by some absolutely astounding coincidences.

 

To really "seal the deal", so to speak, I've recently adopted an old philosophy, which served as the very foundation of science. Today most scientists have more of a nihilistic viewpoint, one that if Isaac Newton, Galileo, Rene Descartes, Aristotle, Pythagoreas, or Plato had, then they would not have been great scientists or philosophers. Those fathers of human knowledge worked off the idea that the universe operates under natural laws, and by examination and study we can learn those laws, later on Isaac Newton and others adopted the scientific method to learn those natural laws, but even now the principle is the same; there's natural laws that explain why everything happens. So how scientists can study those laws and explore new ones, yet say things happen for no reason at all, really baffles me.

 

In other words, for some reason, we're perfectly content to apply that principle to matter and it's dynamic interactions in 4-dimensional spacetime, but not to our everyday lives...

 

 

So, I'm just wondering, why are there so many people that hate bronies and MLP? I just don't get it, what's the difference between me watching MLP FiM and me watching Doctor Who? I understand there are people who hate just to get attention, but they can't all be attention desperate parasprites can they?

 

I'd like to see some reasons you guys think these haters exist like they do!

 

Ironically, me and a few others in my school like Doctor Who. In one class I'm in, there's me and another Dr. Who fan. And there's a Dr. Who hater in there. Honestly, who could be so incredibly closed-minded and idiotic to be a Dr. Who hater???

 

It's a girl's show. For girls.

You're (probably) a guy. Watching a girl's show.

 

Lauren Faust specifically said she made it so anyone can enjoy it. I can't find the exact quote again, but she said she wanted to make the show so that parents could enjoy it, too. So it's not purely a little girls' show. They didn't aim for adults, especially adult males, to become fans, but they tried to make it so even they/we would enjoy it.

 

I took my time to read over this entire thread up to this point, and it is a decent analysis on the hate, albeit a little naive.

 

Hate as an emotion is something one needs to understand first and foremost in order to be able to both survive it and even to be freed from it.

In its most basic form hate is fear, there is always fear with hate. Person who is expressing hate is masking fear or acting from it. Those two emotions walk hand in hand. The reason haters hate is not because they think it is cool to hate on something, they fear that if they do not express their hate they might be themselves judged as accomplices to the activity they have witnessed only by not acting against it. This is a tribal function in human being and its roots lie in our ancestor species that started their journey to modern man as a group of apes sticking together.

Back then politics were much more simple than they are today. You sided with the biggest roughest and toughest ape around so you didn't get your ass handed to you by the same said ape. This became a social instinct in our species and its modern cousins, and now all beta or lower social mentality males are susceptible to "hater" mentality if they deem something unlike what they deem is acceptable to the bigger monkey around, they fear judgement via association and loss of status in the eyes of their peers. In order to bolster their own masculinity they protest loudly and hate on things they deem as non-gender normative.

 

This instinct in them is instinct that surpasses rational thought and as long as the person they are judging (Brony) is not in the same room as them and able to smack them around for being a dumb screaming monkey they will do that as means to feel better about their own masculinity which they constantly feel is threatened. Feelings of inadequacy and social inferiority leads to haters becoming vocal and stubborn. They do not dare to like anything that their peers might judge as non manly, because they already are the beta in their group running along with a tail tugged between their legs.

 

This weak social status makes them scared and nervous, and that in turn turns to hate and aggression, and they try via aggression to enhance their own social status (luckily modern age judges such stupidity more eagerly than earlier generations) as "strong reliable and eager to fight" male. In the end nobody is a hater unless they feel like there's something to gain from that behaviour.

 

Sure this is not as "feel good" and feely analysis of the hater response but it is biologically valid and predicts entire spectrum of behaviour exhibited by beta types.

I could dwell deeper in this subject but it would go too much into nurture versus nature and other exceptions to the rule sort of details that are not directly relevant,

Anyhow, nice post Braun!

 

A little naive you said? Hmm. Maybe. I would think there's some element of hate that comes from competition for resources, too, compelling the apes to fight eachother so population density isn't so high, so resources like food and water are more abundant. But that may be covered in what you said, working on the system of hating those of other groups. Indeed, humans do make the fallacy of thinking in terms of "us" and "them", which has shown to be one of the greatest problems in human history, leading to wars and bloodshed, as per it's evolutionary function.

 

Thanks, I'm honored by the compliment

 

By the way, adorable new Avatar! I like the blue hair, I would've never thought of that, I'm very boring and bland when it comes to pony colors XD

[Fox 5,330]

I think people hate each other, becasue of their differences. How they were raised can be another factor, if the parents raise them in a way where they ignorant, rude, ect. The parents either have the same attitudes, or don't raise their child properly. Social groups can also press on hate towards MLP, an example would be a Jock hating on a nerd, because he likes MLP. Even an event that could of triggered a reaction of hate. If people set their differences aside people could learn/share the same interests and become acquaintances, maybe even friends!

[Comet Tail 808]

Super-duper old thread, but I haven't been 'round this forum much, and I've recently linked this to a facebook page, so I figure, "why not?". So here's some rather late replies, taken from a slightly different me, lol.

 

Btw, I was called "Dr. Braun - EASA" at the time, named after a fanfic I was writing (and still am).

 

Now I'm Mattlight, but same guy (Though quiet a bit older)

 

Why do people hate on homosexuality?

Why do people hate on bisexuality?

Why do people hate on transgender and transsexual people?

 

I am NOT saying that those who hate Ponies or the hate that Ponies get is the same as any of the above, but I am making the comparison on the question...

 

Why do people hate?

 

There is just no answer for that question...

 

"There's no answer" is a very medieval attitude, so it's something best to avoid...

 

This. This appears to be the common reason why people hate. Plus, before FiM came along, dunno about others, but I noticed there was a trend where it it was cool for guys to hate on MLP. Apparently that mindset is still there.

 

 

 

Theres been a study where they found that most homophobic people are actually gay but in denial and won't admit it. Which is pretty amusing.

 

Ironically, that second part of your post pretty well reflects MLP haters, too, according to my OP.

 

I took my time to read over this entire thread up to this point, and it is a decent analysis on the hate, albeit a little naive.

 

Hate as an emotion is something one needs to understand first and foremost in order to be able to both survive it and even to be freed from it.

In its most basic form hate is fear, there is always fear with hate. Person who is expressing hate is masking fear or acting from it. Those two emotions walk hand in hand. The reason haters hate is not because they think it is cool to hate on something, they fear that if they do not express their hate they might be themselves judged as accomplices to the activity they have witnessed only by not acting against it. This is a tribal function in human being and its roots lie in our ancestor species that started their journey to modern man as a group of apes sticking together.

Back then politics were much more simple than they are today. You sided with the biggest roughest and toughest ape around so you didn't get your ass handed to you by the same said ape. This became a social instinct in our species and its modern cousins, and now all beta or lower social mentality males are susceptible to "hater" mentality if they deem something unlike what they deem is acceptable to the bigger monkey around, they fear judgement via association and loss of status in the eyes of their peers. In order to bolster their own masculinity they protest loudly and hate on things they deem as non-gender normative.

 

This instinct in them is instinct that surpasses rational thought and as long as the person they are judging (Brony) is not in the same room as them and able to smack them around for being a dumb screaming monkey they will do that as means to feel better about their own masculinity which they constantly feel is threatened. Feelings of inadequacy and social inferiority leads to haters becoming vocal and stubborn. They do not dare to like anything that their peers might judge as non manly, because they already are the beta in their group running along with a tail tugged between their legs.

 

This weak social status makes them scared and nervous, and that in turn turns to hate and aggression, and they try via aggression to enhance their own social status (luckily modern age judges such stupidity more eagerly than earlier generations) as "strong reliable and eager to fight" male. In the end nobody is a hater unless they feel like there's something to gain from that behaviour.

 

Sure this is not as "feel good" and feely analysis of the hater response but it is biologically valid and predicts entire spectrum of behaviour exhibited by beta types.

I could dwell deeper in this subject but it would go too much into nurture versus nature and other exceptions to the rule sort of details that are not directly relevant,

Anyhow, nice post Braun!

 

Very nicely laid out biological viewpoint. One thing I'd point out, though, is while you've added a tremendous amount of new insight, it's not contradictory, but rather, it's complementary, since a biological viewpoint and a psychological viewpoint are non-contradictory, but in fact, complementary.

 

So, yes, mine was more "feely", but 'tis the nature of psychology, whereas biology is more objective.

 

http://xkcd.com/435/

(I'm still going into Aerospace/Astronautical Engineering. So where do engineers go on this? Well, I guess engineering's not technically science, but still... Right next to chemists and physicists?)

(Lol, each is saying "It's applied, thus lower", but Engineering is applied chemistry, physics, mathematics, with some dabbling of biology and psychology, so where does it go?...)

Edited October 1, 2012 by Mattlight

[aoEAF2FBvC0MIo2Q 3,673]

I'm a little pressed for time so I'll just throw my own thoughts out there and come back another time to look into the points made here. You guys sure have loads to say! Don't get me wrong, I find this interesting.

 

Every fanbase, be it specific parts or as a whole, has haters. People in general tend to jump to conclusions and may also be afraid of also becoming bronies themselves. Whether their reasons are silly, out of insecurity or even legitimate doesn't have relevance for me. I enjoy the show and talking to my brony friends online. Because I don't show that I'm a brony IRL, even the reputation of the community as a whole doesn't bother me since in the end, it's not going to affect me in any way.