{"id":184146,"date":"2026-04-23T18:04:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T02:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=184146"},"modified":"2026-04-23T18:06:03","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T02:06:03","slug":"the-neutralization-theory-of-hatred-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=184146","title":{"rendered":"David Myers & The Neutralization Theory of Hatred"},"content":{"rendered":"

UCLA historian David N. Myers<\/a> spends his career mapping how Jewish communities build and police collective self-understanding. The Sell paper<\/a> gives a functional theory of one of the forces that does the policing. Hatred, on this account, is not an extreme form of anger but a distinct adaptation that neutralizes individuals whose continued existence lowers the hater’s reproductive prospects. The theory predicts four triggers, a negative welfare tradeoff ratio toward the target, three behavioral strategies (killing, information warfare, avoidance), and a set of terminating conditions.
\nFirst, Myers is a target. His affiliations and public positions mark him as hostile in the eyes of right-wing Zionist and Orthodox coalitions. The Sell framework predicts the pattern of response he receives. Not open physical aggression, which modern conditions make prohibitively expensive, but information warfare. Negative reputation work. Gossip networks. Efforts to deprive him of platforms, honors, and institutional allies. The theory predicts that truth is incidental to this process, since great gains come against a target provided no one counters the negative information. It also predicts the perverse corollary Myers’s defenders keep discovering: that defending a hated target makes one a target as well. Coalition members who speak up for him find their own association values revised downward.
\nSecond, the theory clarifies what Myers violates. Sell argues that hatred functionally requires aversion to understanding the enemy’s perspective, because understanding generates sympathy and sympathy dissolves the negative WTR hatred maintains. Myers’s signature move is the one hatred exists to suppress. He insists on engaging the motives of parties hatred wants to render unreadable: the Satmar separatists, Palestinian nationalists, anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals like Rawidowicz, dissenting minorities inside majority Jewish institutions. To coalition members who hate these targets, Myers’s generosity reads as sabotage. He dismantles the adaptation’s core prohibition on letting the enemy speak.
\nThird, the theory reframes the Yerushalmi problem. Yerushalmi treated the break between Jewish memory and Jewish history as a loss. Sell’s framework suggests that what Yerushalmi called memory included the social apparatus for identifying toxic others and coordinating hatred toward them. Modern Jewish history, by giving voice to those others, weakened that apparatus. Myers extends the weakening. He wants a Jewish self-understanding that keeps the archival rigor but drops the functional hatred. The Sell paper suggests why this is harder than Myers supposes. Hatred is an evolved coordination device. Communities that abandon it lose a competitive edge against communities that keep it. This is the unacknowledged force behind the Kiryas Joel puzzle in American Shtetl. Satmar maintains strong collective WTRs by maintaining strong collective hatreds, against the secular world, against Zionism, against modernity. Myers documents their reproductive success without connecting it to the functional work hatred does inside the community.
\nFourth, the theory explains the asymmetry Myers keeps running into. He treats his interlocutors as bargaining partners in anger’s frame, people whose WTRs recalibrate through evidence and argument. Sell distinguishes sharply. Anger negotiates. Hatred neutralizes. Many of Myers’s fiercest opponents are not in anger toward him. They are in hatred. The terminating conditions for their attacks are not apology, reparation, or improved conduct. The terminating condition is that Myers stop functioning as a force in Jewish institutional life. No amount of careful argument reaches that endpoint because the argument presupposes a WTR his opponents have set to negative.
\nFifth, the theory illuminates Myers’s own reticence. He rarely names his enemies with the diagnostic clarity his analytical tools permit. The Sell framework predicts this too. Naming them openly is an act of information warfare that invites retaliation. A scholar whose coalition protection is thinner than his opponents’ has functional reasons to keep his pen careful. What looks like principled scholarly restraint might also be prudent non-escalation.
\nOne warning. The Sell theory is explicitly speculative, and the authors note that few of its predictions have been empirically tested. Applied to Myers, it generates sharper readings than most frameworks on offer, but treat the readings as hypotheses. The claim that Myers’s opponents run a hatred program rather than an anger program is testable in principle. Their behavioral pattern (continued cost infliction after apologies, aversion to letting Myers explain himself, willingness to damage shared institutional capital to harm him) fits. Other frameworks might fit too.
\nRight. The paper does not make the application but the framework maps onto the case with unusual tightness.
\nThe paper’s core claim is that hatred responds to cues of negative association value, meaning cues that another individual’s continued existence depresses the hater’s reproductive prospects. Scale that up from individuals to coalitions and the Arab-Israeli case becomes almost a textbook illustration. Each side perceives the other’s presence in contested territory as a net fitness cost. Land, water, demographic weight, political sovereignty, and security are all reproductive variables in the evolutionary sense. A Jewish family in Tel Aviv and a Palestinian family in Gaza both calculate their children’s futures against the existence and power of the other group. The calculation does not require hatred to be manufactured by elites. The material conditions generate the cues that the adaptation evolved to detect.
\nSeveral predictions from the paper track the conflict with eerie precision.
\nThe theory predicts that hatred motivates information warfare before and alongside physical aggression, that the information need not be truthful to be effective, and that negative information about the target spreads through coalition networks to deprive the target of allies. The propaganda apparatuses on both sides behave exactly this way. Each portrays the other as uniquely cruel, as incapable of reciprocity, as biologically or culturally disposed toward the destruction of the hater. The content of the accusations varies. The functional shape is identical.
\nThe theory predicts that hatred generates aversion to understanding the enemy’s motives, because understanding produces sympathy and sympathy erodes the negative WTR. Both Israeli and Palestinian publics police this aversion aggressively. An Israeli who tries to explain Hamas’s strategic logic without moralized framing faces social sanction inside Israel. A Palestinian who tries to explain Israeli security anxieties without moralized framing faces social sanction inside Palestinian society. The Richard Gere example in the paper generalizes. Voices that model understanding of the other side get shouted down by their own coalition, and the theory says they must, because understanding is functionally incompatible with the hatred the coalition runs on.
\nThe theory predicts that defenders of a hated target become hated themselves. This explains the treatment of Jewish anti-Zionists inside mainstream Jewish institutional life and the treatment of Palestinians who normalize with Israelis inside Palestinian society. Neither side tolerates defection from the hatred consensus, because defection weakens the coalition’s ability to neutralize the toxic out-group. The defector becomes functionally allied with the enemy and receives hatred calibrated accordingly.
\nThe theory predicts that hate copying spreads through networks where the copier shares interests with the hater, and that converging evidence from many haters increases the credibility of the toxic designation. Zionism’s hasbara infrastructure and the Palestinian solidarity movement both function as hate-copying systems in Sell’s sense. They broadcast the toxicity of the other side to audiences whose shared interests with the originator make the copying functional.
\nThe theory predicts that hatred deactivates when association value becomes zero or positive, through several routes: corrected misperception, recalibrated WTR from the target, shifting alliance structures, new avenues of cooperation, or failure of all hatred strategies to neutralize the target. This is where the framework becomes pessimistic. Misperception is not the issue. Each side’s reading of the other’s intentions is substantially accurate. The targets cannot easily recalibrate their WTRs because the structural conflict over territory keeps generating new evidence of negative AV. Shifting alliance structures occasionally intervene (the Abraham Accords are a live test case) but do not touch the core dyad. New avenues of cooperation exist but operate against the hatred gradient rather than with it. And neither side has succeeded in neutralizing the other, which according to the theory means hatred persists rather than deactivates, and the spiteful behavior continues even when it imposes net costs on the hater.
\nThe theory’s account of predatory aggression also maps. Sell describes predatory aggression as characterized by no signaling, no escalation, no monitoring for surrender, continued aggression upon the target’s submission, no interrogation of the target’s motives, and willful violations of the implicit rules of combat. October 7 fits this profile. So does the conduct of some Israeli operations in Gaza. The paper’s point is not that one side is uniquely predatory but that the hatred adaptation, when fully activated and unconstrained, produces behavior of this kind on any side that activates it.
\nThe framework also clarifies why negotiated settlements keep failing. Negotiation is anger’s behavioral strategy, not hatred’s. Anger bargains over WTRs. Hatred neutralizes. If the dominant emotion on both sides is hatred rather than anger, then the cognitive architecture of the negotiating parties is not set up to recalibrate WTRs through agreement. It is set up to produce the appearance of agreement as a tactical move in a longer campaign of neutralization. Oslo read in this light becomes intelligible in a way that the standard “missed opportunity” narratives cannot make it.
\nOne implication the paper half-states but does not pursue. If hatred is the adaptation both sides are running, then the conditions for deactivation have to be engineered deliberately against the adaptation’s functional logic. The paper notes that having a stake in the other’s welfare can defuse hatred. Economic integration, shared institutions, and intermarriage are the obvious candidates. The adaptation resists all of them because it perceives them correctly as threats to its operation. Any serious peace project has to out-engineer an evolved system designed to defeat exactly such projects. That is a harder problem than the diplomatic literature usually acknowledges, and the Sell paper, without saying so, provides the theoretical reason why.<\/p>\n

Grokipedia<\/a> v Wikipedia<\/a> (April 23, 2026)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wikipedia frames<\/a> Myers as a mainstream scholar who faced an ideologically motivated attack he survived. The Center for Jewish History episode gets structured around Sarna<\/a> and Ellenson’s defense, Smotrich’s involvement as a flagging marker of the attackers’ politics, and hundreds of historians rallying behind him. Myers’ own quote closes the section on a note of equanimity: after two unpleasant months, he had a great time. The New Israel Fund presidency gets a single factual sentence. Views on Zionism receive no section at all. The reader meets a distinguished historian who does respectable work, briefly ran an archive, and sits on a liberal Jewish board.
\nGrokipedia treats<\/a> the same life as a pattern of contested political engagement. The NIF section names specific grantees, Adalah, Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem, Peace Now, and cites NGO Monitor as a source documenting ongoing support for groups that critics say delegitimize Israel. The CJH controversy gets longer treatment with more critic voices preserved. A separate section on views covers the Haaretz interview, the Los Angeles Times op-eds on judicial reform, the post-October 7 commentary, and the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate with the “total systems failure” quote and the April 30, 2024 encampment attack. The Grokipedia Myers is a political actor whose scholarship runs alongside his advocacy.
\nBoth descriptions point at real features of the public record. Myers does hold the Kahn Chair and chaired the history department. He did lead NIF for five years. He did give the Haaretz interview. He did write the op-eds. The question is which facts constitute the story.
\nWikipedia’s silences are the more revealing choice. An encyclopedia entry on someone who chaired NIF through the 2023 judicial reform crisis, who runs a hate studies initiative at UCLA during the post-October 7 campus upheaval, and who publishes regular op-eds on Israeli democracy, cannot treat these as background color without making an editorial decision. The decision protects Myers from readers who might form independent judgments about his politics. Grokipedia makes the opposite decision and supplies the material for those judgments, which creates its own risks because some of the framing language, “accused by critics,” “post-Zionist narratives,” “asymmetric threats,” does work the sources cited cannot quite support.
\nThe CJH episode is the clearest test. Wikipedia tells you Smotrich and ZOA attacked him, Sarna<\/a> and Ellenson defended him, and he had a great time after two months. Grokipedia tells you the same thing and adds that he resigned after thirteen months amid reported tensions with the board over strategic direction. Both versions draw on the Forward coverage. Wikipedia selects the exoneration. Grokipedia selects the complication. A reader who wanted to know whether Myers succeeded as CEO gets more usable information from Grokipedia. A reader who wanted to know whether the attacks on him were legitimate gets a cleaner answer from Wikipedia.
\nWikipedia’s Jewish studies entries pass through editors embedded in the field, and the field closed ranks around Myers during the CJH fight. The entry reflects that closure. Grokipedia draws on right-leaning source ecosystems that tracked Myers as a political figure. Each reference base produces its own Myers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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