Is hatred ever a productive thing to have?

[Angrboda]

I have a fanciful notion which has been languishing in mind for years and never fully developed.

According to my theory, hate is the exteriorization of the need to protect the group. We hate those that do not belong to the group. We distinguish between those that are "like us" and deserving of rights, resources and protection, from "the other" whose existence and actions are a threat to the needs and preservation of the group. A simple example is racial prejudice. White people placed the other in the negro, and viewed the negro as the enemy of the white man. The possibility of blacks being given equal rights, resources and protection resulted in an eruption of violence in the American south. In my view, hatred is the emotion we use for "the other," that group which we see as a threat to our group. (Thus terms like discrimination: we discriminate between those that are like us, and those that are unlike us.) Unfortunately, it's not a very precise or reliable mechanism, and the emotion likely ends up being generalized to cases where it isn't primarily geared at protection of our needs and such.

Anyway. I haven't really developed the idea, but that's my notion.