Why Hate

Today, we look at hate groups with bafflement. Unless you are part of one, it is near impossible to understand the ideology and the rationality behind it. In fact, our core understanding of hate groups is that they aren't rational. They aren't logical or understandable. But did they start in a logical or understandable place, beginning somewhere that we, even though we don't endorse or recognize the actions of these groups as acceptable in any way, could possibly relate to?


SOURCE:  http://www.veteranstoday.com

The KKK was founded in 1865 by six college students in the town of Pulaski, Tennessee. Surprisingly, they didn't begin as a hate group. Instead, they were merely six young men in a social group causing a bit of an uproar at night. However, they soon realized that they were causing fear in the slave population. Though this was not their original intent, they latched on to this very quickly. Soon, hundreds of Civil War veterans had joined, and the Klan became an organization divided into realms, dominions, provinces and dens.

But why? Why did these veterans flock to what started out as a club of sorts between six college students? The answer is fear. As the policies of Reconstruction awarded more and more rights to former slaves, life was changing drastically for these former slave owners. Their entire existence was in upheaval. Everything they had ever known was gone. They had lost the war, and now they were losing their way of life.

People react to uncertainty with fear. The KKK was a way to counter that fear. The opportunity cost of the KKK (the hate, the violence, the terror) did not outweigh the utility gained from the organization: that these people felt, in some way, that they were preserving the way they felt things should be. 

http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/history.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=4&item=kkk