"Folks never understand the folks they hate"
About this Quote
Hatred isn’t just a moral failure here; it’s an epistemic one. Lowell’s line turns the usual indictment of prejudice into a colder, more surgical claim: the people you hate are, by definition, the people you refuse to know. The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Folks” is plainspoken, almost folksy, collapsing social rank and signaling that this isn’t a rare pathology of villains but a common habit of ordinary citizens. Repeating the word twice also traps the hater in a loop: you’re still dealing with “folks,” not monsters, not abstractions. The sentence has the blunt rhythm of a proverb, which matters because proverbs travel farther than sermons.
Lowell writes as a 19th-century poet deeply entangled with the political argument of his time, especially around abolition and the moral self-mythology of the American public. In that context, the target isn’t merely personal animus; it’s the machinery of dehumanization that made slavery, nativism, and sectional contempt feel “reasonable.” Hatred needs caricature to function. Understanding - actual curiosity about motives, constraints, fears, humor, family, survival - dissolves the cartoon, and with it the emotional convenience of contempt.
The subtext is more unsettling than “be nicer.” It suggests that hatred depends on a chosen ignorance, a willful refusal of complexity. And it carries a warning for reformers, too: if you can’t understand the people you oppose, you’ll misread their power, their incentives, and the stories they tell themselves. Lowell’s sting is that hate isn’t just cruel; it’s incompetent.
Lowell writes as a 19th-century poet deeply entangled with the political argument of his time, especially around abolition and the moral self-mythology of the American public. In that context, the target isn’t merely personal animus; it’s the machinery of dehumanization that made slavery, nativism, and sectional contempt feel “reasonable.” Hatred needs caricature to function. Understanding - actual curiosity about motives, constraints, fears, humor, family, survival - dissolves the cartoon, and with it the emotional convenience of contempt.
The subtext is more unsettling than “be nicer.” It suggests that hatred depends on a chosen ignorance, a willful refusal of complexity. And it carries a warning for reformers, too: if you can’t understand the people you oppose, you’ll misread their power, their incentives, and the stories they tell themselves. Lowell’s sting is that hate isn’t just cruel; it’s incompetent.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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