'The Instinct to Hurt Those with Whom One Disagrees,' Robin Koerner

The Instinct to Hurt Those with Whom One Disagrees

By Robin Koerner   September 17, 2025  

 

To those of us old enough to remember the before-times, these “woke” times feel different because we never saw that instinct to hurt manifest in political discourse. Back then, live and let live was the fundamental assumption that enabled Western politics. Today, for all too many, it is not: literally, politics has become, for millions, live and let die. That is the honest feeling of the woman in the hospital reception room, the woman in the bus in the airport, and they find themselves today in a culture in which that feeling is openly and easily expressible. Similarly in kind (although of course not in degree), the students in my department are operating in a culture where organizing against a person in an institution in which he has earned every right to participate seemingly requires no pause for thought. 

And that is the problem. It is not so much that the psychopathological instinct to hurt one’s opponents exists: it is that it has become normalized; it has become accepted. People voice it without fear or shame. It is so normal, and so accepted, that it has buried in large swathes of our population the most basic and formerly ubiquitous moral sentiments. 

That this single phenomenon – an instinct to hurt those with whom one disagrees – is the sine qua non of what ails us is obvious when written down.