“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” – Epictetus
The Ayatollah’s obituary
It’s a good time to be in the hate business. You probably feel it too. If someone bothered to plot it on a graph, the line would look like one of those stock charts from a bubble economy: steady climb, minor dips, then a vertical. Ever since the internet became our second brain and social media the public vomitorium, the opportunity to despise people at scale has never been greater.
Let’s not pretend this is new, though. There have been far more dramatic surges of hatred in history. The 1930s were pretty full-on, albeit the media was less in-your-face. Back then, people had to go to a cinema to see a lunatic with a funny tache get very cross about things – and I don’t mean Charlie Chaplin but the other guy he was mocking.
Mocking tyrants is a good thing, by the way. Celebrating their downfall even better. Which is why the media obituaries for Ayatollah Khamenei struck me as a little odd. The Washington Post noted his “bushy white beard and easy smile”, his love of Persian poetry, and his fondness for Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Excuse me? Who am I reading about here? This is like an obituary for a bohemian Santa Claus, not the psychopath who ran the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism for 35 years and ordered the murder of thousands of his own people.
A “propagandist and a fucking idiot”
Yesterday, in a Substack Note, I urged caution about what we can expect in the coming days regarding the Iran war: the poisonous ‘hot takes’ dripping into our news feeds every day like a leaking chemical drum. In restacking a Note by a well-known author, I wrote, in what I considered a display of heroic moderation:
“Let’s brace ourselves for weeks of hot takes like this. I’m not immune to the impulse either, by the way – although my bias will run the other way. But notice how the same media that all but ignored the slaughter of Iranian civilians in recent weeks will now pummel us daily with stories like this – long before the dust has settled and as the facts inevitably shift in the fog of war.”
That’s about as measured as I could make it. What I actually wanted to do was take a flamethrower to his post, but that would have undermined the point I was trying to make.
He replied that I was “a propagandist and a fucking idiot”, a line that I’ll add to my LinkedIn page if I ever set one up. Which I won’t.
He was disagreeing with my view that the mainstream media all but looked away while the Islamic regime massacred its own people. I mentioned that I was merely echoing historian Simon Sebag Montefiore’s essay in the Free Press. But no, came the reply. Because “The Free Press is literally funded by Israel”.
Hugo and the daily sacrament
Confirmation bias is the wrong diagnosis for what we're seeing play out online today – everywhere and always. What's really being confirmed isn't belief but hatred. And while every tribe does this, the left has a particular genius for it – the kind that comes wrapped in moral certainty while showing off its credentials. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown that self-described liberals are often less accurate about opposing viewpoints than conservatives, and more confident in that inaccuracy. Education makes it worse, apparently. Who knew.
Meet Hugo – friend of Poppy, Tarquin and Oliver, a cast of progressives I introduced in earlier articles. Hugo, like the others, doesn’t read the headlines to learn what’s happening in the world or what’s true. He wants to know who’s awful today.
The modern news diet makes for a delicious mix of revulsion, hatred, and schadenfreude. Some get their fix from drugs and alcohol. Not Hugo. He ingests a daily sacrament of righteous disgust from the outrage feed, convinced that it’s a healthy and virtuous use of his time.
The Guardian’s answer to the question ‘who’s awful today?’ comes prepackaged with villains identified, motives simplified and moral conclusions colour-coded in a Manichean Lego set of political groupthink. Hugo simply has to rearrange a few blocks, and behold! – a totally original opinion on the matters at hand, fresh and ready for amplification on Bluesky.
Relief follows; the fix is in. The world is still legible and the bad people are still bad. Hugo’s irritation, resentment, and fury have been officially endorsed.
The most delicious of moral treats
As I say, none of this is new to our age; it’s just better exploited and algorithmically sorted. Aldous Huxley pinned it down 100 years ago:
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
Today, what we call “being informed” increasingly means knowing who to despise and why. Hugo will corner us at the after-work drinks party and recount every last detail about the latest “genocidal” atrocity, quoting Hamas BBC statistics, parroting his favourite progressive columnist and searching your face for signs of scepticism – for which he has another few paragraphs ready to recite. He imagines all this makes him the voice of moral reason rather than a pain in the arse.
But Hugo’s not grappling with complex reality. The media has simply given him a permission slip to indulge the most dangerous emotions of our age — righteous hatred, moral superiority, and utter certainty.
Which is exactly what Epictetus warned about. Hugo would agree, if only he weren't so busy being right.
You might also like:
A small note of thanks. I discovered the Huxley quote via one of my subscribers. It should be much better known. The Epictetus epigraph was suggested by another reader in a separate conversation in the Gadfly chat.
And while I’m here, another subscriber recently recommended ground.news, which I’ve been finding fascinating. It aggregates news from across the political spectrum and shows how different outlets frame the same story and where blind spots appear in media coverage.
I really do have the best subscribers.
Also, if you don’t know Hazlitt’s famous essay 'On the Pleasure of Hating', Richard Parker has kindly posted a link to it in the comments below – well worth a read!
I get what you're going through. These toxic hate-posts by rabid Leftists are draining. Their hatred for Trump and Israel is so intense that they're blinded to all else. I had my own brief encounter with one, which you can read at the link below. He defended the Iranian regime, which is unconscionable. It was the second time I'd sparred with him, and the last: I blocked him. The toxic reply is from "Franz Kafka"
https://www.junonews.com/p/cbc-pushes-unbelievable-propaganda/comment/222039496
I continue to go back to Rene Girard's theory of scapegoating to explain this. I think it's the most robust explanation for how entire groups of people lose their minds in a collective frenzy - against Trump, against Israel -- and long before that, many other targets going back into prehistory -- though Jews have always been a favoured target in the last few thousand years because they are successful and intelligent, so they inspire resentment. The same thing happened to whites and East Indians in Uganda in 1972 for the same reason.