Politics & Power Quote by Paul Harris

Harris writes like a lawyer trying to talk a jury down from its appetite for vengeance. The sentence is structured as an inventory of human scale: individual, sect, clique, nation. By stacking them, he argues that hatred isn’t an occasional glitch in politics; it’s a portable habit that reproduces itself at every level of society. The real pivot is his claim that hatred is not just wrong but misinformed: despising someone means you “simply do not know” them. That “simply” is doing rhetorical heavy lifting, recasting a moral failing as a cognitive one.

The subtext is a hard bet on contact as cure. Harris isn’t describing hatred as an ideology with material incentives; he’s describing it as a byproduct of distance. To hate is to reduce a person or group into an object - a caricature that can be managed, blamed, or purged. “Objects of their hatred” is quietly damning: hatred turns subjects into things.

Context matters. Harris lived through the high tide of nativism, racial pseudoscience, and the nationalist aftershocks of World War I. As the founder of Rotary, he was invested in the era’s civic-internationalist faith that commerce, clubs, and conversation could sand down the jagged edges of conflict. His intent isn’t to psychoanalyze; it’s to prescribe: replace ignorance with acquaintance, prejudice with proximity.

There’s an optimistic blind spot here: hatred often survives knowledge because it offers status, cohesion, and a convenient enemy. Still, as a piece of civic rhetoric, it works by making hatred look not powerful but embarrassing - the posture of someone who hasn’t done the basic homework of seeing others as real.