Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.

I wrote this after reading a lot about herd mentality. I couldn’t really write this story without trying to understand that part of human behavior. I think I was also heavily influenced here by the many, many coaches in different sports who had told me that the most effective tool to really unite a team is to create an outside enemy. One coach said that even if it wasn’t true, he always tried to convince his players that, “no one believes in us! Everyone has counted us out! No one WANTS us to win! They all HATE us!” He didn’t want players, he said, he wanted warriors. I wrote that down and it translated to the way I later tried to describe the whole community. Hate is easy.