“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” – Sun Tzu

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him” - Ender Wiggin

“Haters gonna hate, hate, hate” - Taylor Swift

I think you should love your enemy, rather than hate them. I think this will substantially improve your life and make you better at accomplishing (almost) all of your goals, including goals oppositional to your enemy.

By enemy I mean anyone who you think of as “enemy,” but in particular people whose interests you believe to be in opposition to your own.

By “love” I mean both emotionally and cognitively. Emotionally, I think you orient your enemies with lightheartedness, appreciation, and grace, rather than hatred.

Cognitively, I think you should treat your enemies much like Ender Wiggin in Ender’s Game tried to, and try to understand your enemies completely and deeply, before you set out to destroy them. Though you might not wish to destroy them afterwards.1

Why should you love your enemy?

Play full-court tennis

The simplest reason you might want to love your enemies more is that understanding their motives and perspectives helps you fight them more effectively. You can’t predict or understand your adversaries well if you flatten them into cartoonish villains. Strategic advantage often comes from genuinely understanding their perspective.

If you just impute random cartoonish ideals, capabilities, and motives to your opponents, or worse, if you don’t even bother thinking about their perspective at all, you’d be completely blindsided by their actions.

Sarah Paine, a historian at the Naval War College, calls this tendency “half-court” tennis. If you only worry about your own side of the tennis court, you won’t be very good at tennis. Similarly, if you never study your opposing country/political opponents/businesses/ideological movements, you’d be stupefied by your opponents making otherwise completely predictable actions based on their own interests and capabilities.

See the Deals Hatred Blinds You To

My earlier post on the Puzzle of War points out that the game theory literature would suggest that reasonable states, under most circumstances, prefer negotiated settlements to mutually destructive war. And yet, wars still happen! Why?

In addition to the standard answers in the literature, I brought up two reasons:

1. Irrationality: States might be irrational (either because they’re composed of irrational individuals, rationally irrational, or have principle-agent problems that undermine state rationality)

2. Unreasonableness: states might be acting in their rational interests, but their interests in themselves are unreasonable (eg either an intrinsic preference for destruction or a preference itself for war, as a consumption good).

Loving your enemies and meditating on their interests can reduce both. Irrationality: by studying your enemies and understanding their motives and interests, you are more able to understand and grasp mutually beneficial trades. Unreasonableness: by loving your enemies, you may become less inclined to destroy your enemies for its own sake.

A possible example here is the second Iraq War. If the US understood the geopolitical pressures Saddam Hussein was under, maybe the US would understand the need for Iraq to keep up their kayfabe for some plausibility of WMDs, and have a mutually beneficial trade that did not entail trillions of war costs.

Your enemies likely have virtues you can learn from

This idea was brought to my attention by Vaniver from the Inkhaven fellowship!

In many cases, if you are “enemies” with someone, this is because you’re competing with them, either directly or indirectly (think business competition for customers, political competition for votes, or ideological competition for mindshare). If your enemies are your peers, or at least a significant threat (and sometimes they’re more powerful than you!), this likely means they have useful virtues that allowed them to get in that position.

Emphathizing with them might allow you to learn their virtues and harness their powers for other uses, even if you can’t directly use those virtues against them.

What If They’re Right?

Some conflicts are indexical. If Bob and I both want the same parking spot, we are thus at an impasse.

But many conflicts (religion, politics, AI stuff) are ideological, and hinge on difficult moral or empirical questions.

If you’re locked in an ideological conflict, there’s a real possibility you’re wrong. Hating your opponents actively prevents you from recognizing when they have a point. You ought to remain epistemically open enough to update if the evidence points their way.

Hatred as Moral Corruption

To once again quote the great poet Swift: “Haters gonna hate hate hate”

This is arguably not just definitional but causal, hating makes you have more of a character of a hater. If you want to inculcate positive character and being, loving your enemies and seeing them with grace can help you build to be a better person.

To some degree, the first person you punish via hating someone else greatly is yourself.

Hatred as Moral Corruption

Hatred is a powerful source of motivated reasoning that distorts your entire understanding of the conflict. It prevents you from seeing your own mistakes, acknowledging when you’re wrong, or recognizing valid criticism. Hatred can be a powerful source of epistemic corruption, and loving your enemies a necessary counter to such memes.

Prevents escalation spirals

Finally, disasters in conflict frequently come from escalation dynamics neither party wanted. By seeing your enemies’ humanity and practical interests, you may be able to get out of these negative spirals and build something more beautiful and good, or at least less obviously terrible.

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Reasons Against Loving Your Enemy

There are many reasons one can give for hating your enemies instead of loving them. I discuss what I consider to be the four most salient/strongest arguments below.

Resisting Temptations

Kendrick Lamar often talks about the temptations of Satan/Lucifer(“Lucy”):

Your enemies are often your enemies because they are more powerful than you, and while you’re more morally in the right (or at least feel that way), they are more powerful and thus have the ability to tempt you through material means, whether it’s money, fame, political power, legitimacy, compute, or something else you deeply care about.

In my circles, the most common temptation is safety-motivated, anti-unsafe AGI company people nonetheless joining AGI labs and working towards the very thing they sought to slow down or destroy.

Perhaps it’s better to see AGI labs more straightforwardly as the hated enemies. Rather than just misaligned incentives/organizations with different interests, or even people that you can love and emphasize with.

Perhaps a more normal “enemy” relationship will make the temptations less salient and you less likely to be cajoled by them.

Coalitional Maintenance

Having a common enemy is one of the easiest and most effective ways to unite otherwise diverse coalitions. Loving your enemies too much might undermine this coordination, and prevent effective action (both against the enemy directly and in terms of coordination in general).

Asymmetric Vulnerability

If your enemy doesn’t reciprocate your goodwill, you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back while they exploit your openness. This is one of the most common arguments given for California’s recent gerrymandering: If California and other Blue States play by the spirit of the law, they’d just let Republican lawmakers in states like Texas play hardball for no conceivable benefit, and thus lose Democrat votes in the House and get nothing in return.

I see the force of this argument, however I’m suspicious: Why can’t you maintain your political power plays while still maintaining deep love and understanding for your political enemies with deep ideological disagreements and competing interests?

It’s fun

Ozy Franz makes a compelling argument against an earlier version of this post: hating people can be very fun!

As someone with significant utilitarian leanings, I have to concede the point here: if hating others cause you much greater joy than either a) you get from loving them, or b) from positive externalities, then it seems like prima facie good reason for hate!

Future Work

How to Love Your Enemy?

This article only talks about the arguments for and against loving your enemies. Follow-up work ought to discuss details and strategies for how to love your enemies in practice.

Loving specific enemies

I think it’s very easy to talk about loving your enemies in the abstract. It’s also not very difficult to talk about hating specific enemy X.

A much more ambitious post might wish to discuss why you should hate enemies in the abstract. More interestingly yet, you might want to discuss the case for loving specific enemies.

A future post might pick out specific people or movements I dislike (Trump, Sam Altman, Dean Ball, e/accs, ISIS, etc), try to understand them deeply, and list their specific virtues.

Keep tuned!