It started, as these things often do, with a tweet.
A perfectly normal Tuesday morning, scrolled into oblivion, until I saw it: a short, cutting remark about a man I’d never met but had learned to hate. He was, according to popular consensus, a terrible human being. His name trended regularly, his face a meme of outrage, his words dissected and ridiculed across the internet.
I had, without ever intending to, absorbed this collective loathing. He was, unquestionably, awful.
And yet, I’d never spoken to him.
This was an inconvenient realization. Because it turns out, when you spend enough time investigating people—psychopaths, extremists, those we other in society—you begin to suspect that things are rarely as simple as you want them to be.
Which is why, a week later, I found myself sitting across from him at a small café, waiting for the waiter to bring us tea.
The Hate Economy
Before we get into the actual conversation, it’s important to understand that outrage is, and always has been, lucrative.The internet rewards certainty, rewards enemies, rewards the feeling that there are Good People and Bad People and that we must, at all costs, be on the right side. It’s a compelling narrative—one that’s far more engaging than the messy, ambiguous truth.
I’d spoken with psychologists before about this phenomenon. Dr. Elaine Harris, a cognitive researcher, once told me that the human brain evolved to recognize patterns for survival. “It’s easier to process the world in simple categories,” she said. “Tribes versus enemies, heroes versus villains.”
The internet, she explained, had weaponized this instinct.
It’s why we hate people we’ve never met.
Which is exactly why I was here—to find out if I really hated this man, or if I just liked the feeling of hating him.
The Villain in Real Life
“Didn’t expect you to actually show up,” he said, smirking.
“Me neither,” I admitted.
Now, if this were a story designed for maximum emotional impact, this would be the moment where I realized he was, in fact, a misunderstood genius, or he said something so profound it made me reconsider my entire worldview. But that’s not what happened.
What happened was this: he was annoying.
But he was also… human.
He talked too much, interrupted frequently, made exaggerated gestures as if everything he said was of earth-shattering importance. He believed, as most people do, that he was the hero of the story. He justified his worst takes, downplayed his mistakes, and when I challenged him, he deflected, as we all do when confronted with something uncomfortable.
But in between all that, there were moments—small, fleeting moments—where he became something else: relatable.
A story about his childhood, oddly similar to mine. A nervous tick that suggested insecurity. A hesitation before answering a question that hinted at self-doubt.
None of this made him right. None of this made him good. But it made him harder to hate.
Which, honestly, is kind of annoying.
The Problem With Meeting Your Enemies
Because once you see someone as a full person—flawed, irritating, but real—it’s impossible to go back to the clean, satisfying simplicity of villainy.
I thought about what another researcher, Dr. Megan O’Leary, once told me about the psychology of distance. “The further away you are from someone—physically, emotionally, ideologically—the easier it is to dehumanize them. But proximity changes that. Even a small amount of real contact can disrupt those clean categories.”
This, it turns out, is deeply inconvenient.
Because what happens when the people you hate turn out to be, well… people?
What happens when certainty erodes into something more complicated?
The tea arrived. I took a sip. It was too hot.
And so I sat there, listening, wondering if he’d ever had a moment like this too—where he met someone he was supposed to despise, and instead, felt an uncomfortable, inconvenient flicker of understanding.
This investigation is part of The Deconstructionists’ ongoing exploration into the stories we tell ourselves—and the ones we choose to believe.
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