I know why you wanna hate me

I know why you wanna hate me

I know why you wanna hate me

‘Cause hate is all the world has even seen lately.

Those lines from Take a Look Around don’t feel like lyrics anymore. They feel like a server log unravelling the truth beneath the foundation.

The song doesn’t ask who you hate. It doesn’t ask what you’re angry about. It doesn’t even accuse you. It simply tells you to look around and then explains the outcome. Of course you want to hate. Hate is all you have been shown.

Hate is not what people feel. It is what remains after everything else has been filtered out.

That framing matters because it shifts responsibility away from individual intent and toward the environment we inhabit. Hate is not presented as a choice. It is presented as exposure. Repetition. Saturation.

And when you actually look around, it is hard to disagree.

Hate has become ambient. It sits inside conversations that used to be casual. It leaks into timelines that once existed to kill time. It dominates news cycles that no longer even pretend to inform. You don’t seek it out anymore. You absorb it.

We didn’t become angrier as a species. We just optimized for the emotion that travels fastest.

This didn’t happen because humans suddenly became worse. It happened because hate turned out to be efficient.

Social media was supposed to show us how people work together. Different lives, same emotions. Different cultures, same struggles. That was the hopeful version. What these systems discovered instead was something far more scalable. Fear spreads faster than empathy. Outrage travels farther than context. Hate is simple, compressible, and endlessly reusable.

This wasn’t ideology. It was optimization.

The most efficient systems do not care what they amplify, only that it spreads.

Anger keeps you scrolling. Fear keeps you sharing. Hate keeps you loyal. Loyal not to truth, but to tribe. Once platforms discovered that, everything else became secondary.

This is where Scott Galloway’s lens becomes unavoidable. In The Algebra of Happiness, he describes how the big technology companies didn’t just build products. They mapped themselves onto human vulnerabilities. Not users. Organs.

The brain, where ego and status live. The heart, where belonging and love are negotiated. The amygdala, where fear overrides reason. And the deeper hunger for meaning and identity.

Once those pressure points were understood, hate stopped being accidental.

Hate is powerful because it offers certainty in a world that demands understanding.

Hate is the lowest-friction identity available to humans. You don’t need to build anything. You don’t need to understand complexity. You just need an enemy. An “other” to react against. It gives instant clarity without effort.

Hate survives because it asks nothing of us except allegiance.

Politics noticed.

In India, Bharatiya Janata Party has refined this into a governing strategy. When economic stress, unemployment, and institutional decay demand slow and uncomfortable answers, identity offers a shortcut. Emotion replaces analysis. Loyalty replaces accountability.

When enemies are easier to create than solutions, leadership becomes theater.

Globally, the pattern repeats.

Benjamin Netanyahu survives through perpetual conflict. War is no longer a tragedy to be resolved but a condition to be maintained. As long as the threat never ends, neither does scrutiny. And when a man accused of war crimes nominates someone else for peace, irony doesn’t bend.

Irony doesn’t die loudly. It dies when no one pauses anymore.

Then there is Donald Trump. A figure sustained almost entirely by outrage. Hate is his oxygen. Attention is survival. It doesn’t matter whether the attention is positive or negative.

Once attention becomes currency, division becomes policy.

What makes this moment different from every other hateful chapter in history is the feedback loop.

Politicians perform for algorithms. Algorithms reward intensity. Media amplifies what spikes. Reality becomes optional. The screen replaces the world.

We live in an age where the screen feels urgent and reality feels optional.

We argue online while infrastructure decays offline. We fight avatars while real suffering goes unnoticed. We perform morality instead of practicing it.

The danger is not that we believe false things, but that we stop noticing contradictions.

This might be one of the most absurd periods in human history. A civilization with unprecedented abundance, science, medicine, and knowledge choosing to fight over stories. Gods. Flags. Identities. Optics.

A civilization does not rot from scarcity, but from narratives that no longer require reality.

And I don’t know how this ends.

I don’t know how systems optimized for hate unwind themselves. I don’t know how platforms built on emotional extraction learn restraint. I don’t know how politics returns to reality once spectacle becomes more profitable than governance.

When everything around you is designed to provoke, calm starts to feel like dissent.

All I know is this. When a twenty-year-old song can say “take a look around” and explain the world better than most headlines, something fundamental has shifted.

Hate didn’t suddenly appear.

It was shown. Repeated. Optimized.

Until it started to feel inevitable.