Your Only Allegiance Is to Yourself
It feels natural to hate everything about a person once you hate that person. Doesn't matter how many arguments they make. Doesn't matter how true those arguments are. Doesn't matter their track record. If we dislike someone, our first instinct is to contradict them. To oppose them. That's simply how our brains are wired. They don't prefer truth, they prefer comfort.
This raises a question I love to ask everyone: if you hate someone with all your might but they've made an excellent point, would you agree with them? Let's twist the knife further: they've discovered a flaw in you and given you the most precise feedback on how to fix it. Would you accept it? The split-second pause people face before lying through their teeth tells you everything you need to know.
There's no such thing as perfect objectivity. Our minds cannot be truly objective or rational. It's all theoretical. We can only be as rational as our reasoning allows. Some people reason better than others, but that doesn't make them objective. They're just more skilled at concealing their biases and true opinions. If we're aiming toward objectivity, we have to separate our bias from the argument being made.
A better way to handle this conundrum is to focus inward. Be selfish in gathering feedback that can improve you. Acknowledge that impulse to argue with the person. To tell them they're wrong. To prove them wrong by any means necessary. Recognize that this impulse comes from anger toward them, nothing more. If you truly love yourself, your first priority is self-improvement. Doesn't matter the source of that improvement. Everything is a means to an end.
Once you acknowledge that the person you hate matters less than the person within you, detaching from the dominating emotion becomes easier. You can notice the thought before taking it personally. Self-love has to triumph over hatred of the other.
In order to defeat Napoleon, Lord Wellington studied every one of Napoleon's battle tactics. He studied his strengths, identified his weaknesses, and devised a strategy that covered every base. And even then, he won by the thinnest of margins, owing, as some historians claim, to the timely arrival of the Prussian army.
But consider this for a moment: Wellington had already won battles in India, defeated some of the subcontinent's mightiest kings, and cemented the dominance of the East India Company. That man had every right to feel proud of his achievements. He could easily have dismissed studying Napoleon's tactics as an insult to his own military prowess.
But he knew exactly who he was dealing with. The man was battered, ravaged by disease, stripped of his strongest army, but he was still Napoleon Bonaparte. So Wellington swallowed his pride and stayed objective. For the glory of the British Empire. As long as Napoleon lived, there could never be a British Empire.
No matter how much you hate the British, if there's one thing we should learn from them, it's resourcefulness. Swallowing pride, learning even from enemies, and eventually surpassing them. Your only allegiance in life is to yourself. Everyone else is temporary. Gather everything from the world that helps you conquer it. Your feelings can wait.