I have been thinking a lot about hate recently. How it works. How it grows. How it spreads through communities like a virus, doing its damage quietly before anyone realises the harm is already done. In recent years, it has begun to feel more and more like something we are learning to live with. Hate has become normalised in our feeds, amplified by algorithms, and spoken aloud with a confidence that once would have given people pause. In just a few short years our communities, our workplaces and our politics have become suffused with the language of hate and division.
That concerns me, and I don’t think I am alone with that concern.
Hate is easy. It requires nothing of us, no imagination, no effort, no faith in what might be. It simply takes what already exists, fear, grievance, difference, and ignites it. If we are honest, it is not entirely unproductive. Hate builds something; more hate. It builds walls, suspicion, the hardening of positions, the narrowing of who counts as ‘us’ and who gets cast as ‘them’. Communities consumed by hate do not collapse dramatically. They erode. People stop talking to their neighbours. Trust thins. The shared sense of a common future, the quiet and unsaid understanding that we are in this together, slowly dissolves. When it goes, we fall on each other like wolves.
This is not just metaphor. Researchers who study the preconditions for mass violence have identified a consistent pattern: dehumanisation, polarisation, the withdrawal of trust, the targeting of moderates, stages that in case after case have preceded catastrophe. The Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia. Historians note that the warning signs are rarely hidden. They are simply ignored, or normalised, until it is too late. Research shows that exposure to hate, online and off, erodes trust, drives people into fear and withdrawal, and fragments the social bonds that hold us together. Hate does not need to culminate in atrocity to do serious damage, that erosion begins long before.
I realise that this might be dismissed by some as catastrophising, but I think that the danger is real. Tribal, us and them thinking is not a sign of weakness or moral failure. It is deeply human, one of the oldest instincts we carry. The anger that feeds it is often legitimate. When communities have changed, when promises have been broken, when people feel invisible to those who are supposed to represent them, that anger comes from somewhere real. I also know that for many, change is something to be feared rather than celebrated. I’m not immune from those feelings.
I know that I see all of this from a particular vantage point and I also know that I cannot entirely escape that perspective. What I can do is keep asking what I am missing, and keep listening to the answers. What I have come to understand so far is this: the danger is not the anger itself, but what happens to it next.
There are platforms and media channels that have built entire business models on identifying that anger, targeting it, and turning it into something that serves their interests rather than yours. They know that grievance travels faster than hope, that outrage keeps people scrolling, that division is, quite simply, profitable. Those who feel most let down, most invisible, most betrayed by institutions that should have helped them, are precisely the people most vulnerable to that exploitation. That is not a criticism. It is an observation about how power works, and who it works against.
But here is a question you might consider: if the institutions failed you, can you imagine what better ones might look like? If it is community you fear losing, what does your response to that actually do? Does it build bridges, or does it put up walls? Hate is very good at walls. As we have seen, it is very good at building more of itself. It has never been much good at anything else.
Which is why I keep returning to the other side of the equation. To hope.
Hope is harder. It asks something of us. It requires that we believe, against all the evidence presented by a difficult world, that things can be better, that we can be better. It is not passive. It is not wishful thinking dressed up in better clothes. It is gentler than hate, less insistent, and it does not shout. In a world that rewards noise, that makes it easy to overlook. Hate confirms itself at every turn, loud and self-reinforcing. Hope works differently. It requires us to stay curious, to ask what we are missing, to listen without already knowing what we think.
For decades, hope was understood primarily as a way of thinking, a matter of setting goals and finding pathways to reach them. New research, led by psychologists Megan Edwards and Laura King at the University of Missouri, has broadened that understanding considerably. Across six studies involving more than 2,300 participants, they found hope to be something more than cognitive. It is, at its core, a feeling. It is one of the strongest positive emotions we experience, and uniquely among them, it consistently predicts a sense of meaning in life. Not happiness, or gratitude, or contentment. Hope. “Experiencing life as meaningful,” Professor King notes, “…is crucial for just about every good thing you can imagine…”
This matters enormously when we think about community, about what holds people together and what pulls them apart.
The evidence that hope can hold even when hate is at its most ferocious is closer to home than we might think. In the summer of 2024, the horrific murders of three young girls in Southport unleashed a wave of grief that rapidly turned into something uglier. Mosques and minorities were targeted. Violence spread to towns across the country. It was, for a moment, possible to believe that hate had won. Until something else happened. In Southport itself, just twenty-four hours after the attack on the local mosque, a woman stood outside it alone, holding a handmade sign: “One Race — Human. Hope Not Hate. Racism Not Welcome Here.” She had simply decided that this was not who or what her community was. In the days that followed, tradespeople turned up to help clear the damage and rebuild what had been torn down. They just came, with their tools and their time, and they got to work. Across the country, in town after town, people made the same quiet choice. That is what hope in action looks like. It is not comfortable or easy, but it is always available, and it is always a choice.
A community without hope is not simply an unhappy place. It is a dangerous one. When people cannot imagine a better version of their circumstances, they have little reason to invest in the shared project of making things better. They turn inward, or they turn against each other. The bonds that make collective life possible, trust, reciprocity, the willingness to extend good faith to a stranger, all depend on a background sense that the future is worth building towards. Strip that away and you are left with competition for a shrinking pie, and all the ugliness that follows.
This is why the question of how we manifest hope in those around us is not a soft or sentimental one. It is, at root, a practical question about what holds a community together, because the dangerous alternative is already visible all around us.
The Missouri researchers suggest that hope can be cultivated through surprisingly accessible means. Paying attention to small positive moments. Recognising opportunity even in chaotic times. Appreciating growth, in ourselves and in others. Investing in activities that nurture rather than deplete and perhaps most importantly: remembering that nothing is permanent. Situations can change for the better. Hope begins with the belief that they can and they will.
These are not grand gestures. They are, in many cases, part of our ordinary conversation. The most powerful tool we have for building hope in a community is also the most underrated: talking about it. Not in an abstract or performative way, not hope as slogan or political brand, but genuine conversation. The kind that starts with a simple and genuinely curious question: Can you imagine a better version of this? Of your street, your town, your working life, your family? Can you picture it, even vaguely?
The distance between imagination and reality is shorter than we tend to think. If you can see it, you can move towards it. If enough people in a community can share that vision, even a rough and provisional one, something remarkable becomes possible. Not utopia. Just progress. Just the next step.
This is where hate and hope part company. Hate is always oriented towards the past, towards wrongs done, ground lost, groups singled out. It is retrospective and closed. Hope faces forward. It is open. It makes room for people who are different from us, because a better future is large enough to contain more than one version of a good life.
I am not naïve about how hard it might be to imagine something better, when you are deep in your own problems and concerns. Nothing worthwhile ever comes easy so they say. And I am not naive about the forces working against this. The platforms that profit from outrage, the politicians who harvest division, the sheer exhaustion that makes it easier to scroll past than to engage. These are real, and they are powerful. But I also know that hate, ultimately, only serves to tear things down.
Hate never built a foundation. Hope can.
Not hope as an escape from difficulty, but hope as a discipline. It requires us to stay curious, to ask what we are missing, to listen without already knowing what we think. It is a skill that belongs to anyone who has ever changed their mind, or been surprised by a stranger, or found common ground where they expected none. Once you begin to see hope, you can’t unsee it. Hope is always there. We just need to remind ourselves to look. It begins, as most important things do, in conversation. With a neighbour, a colleague, a stranger. With the simple act of asking: What would better look like?
Start there. The rest follows.