Democratising Love and Hate
We’re living in strange times when the words love and hate lack a clear sense of meaning, stranger still they’re regularly tossed around like Cheerios at a breakfast brawl to good effect.
Part of the problem lies with an idea borrowed from the Greeks called dichotomous thought which shaped much of western literature, philosophy and politics, with examples of dividing contrasts such as black and white, good and evil and yes love and hate.
But there’s more, it’s fair to say the terms love and hate have been appropriated and weaponized by opportunistic politicos everywhere.
Consider the cliché ‘you must love everybody’ where does it come from? Well, a mentality of indiscriminateness makes it a moral imperative because anything else is regarded as discrimination.
But indiscriminate also means uncritical, naïve and subjective so there’s a disconnection as well.
Also, according to classical interpretation love is an ideal embracing both choice and preference, making it at odds with the democratized version of the 21stcentury.
It’s as if the traditional interpretation of love was considered too idealistic and elitist so it had to be downgraded to an ideology for inclusive mass appeal.
The question is why has this revised meaning of love been packaged, perfumed and gift-wrapped wholesale for public consumption? That’s because it’s good marketing strategy that feeds populist sentiment for political reasons.
Although it’s not said in as many words, but hinted at, okay certainly not denied, a hater is someone who holds a contrary view.
As an older article in The Atlantic describes it everything’s been politicized and the political beast is a different animal altogether, where politics is a zero sum game or a form of total warfare with its goal of obliterating the other side.
If you’re not with the political being you’re against him, so you’re the target, a leper to be shunned.
The growing, now fully developed, political gridlock was a concern in the US even back then.
Post modernists reject love as dogma, believing there’s no such thing as orthodoxy of love but insist on defining it in their own terms regardless.
One mainstream blogger asks the question; how can we develop a politics of love? Then equates the politics of liberty (as he calls it) with the concept of love converging them into an identity he calls love politicized.
Liberty is one of those terms that have to be viewed in context to be appreciated, as in liberty from what.
He admits the term “I love you” can mean different things to different people so he suggests using a substitute “As you wish” basically meaning I want for you what you want for yourself.
He continues labouring the point saying liberty that is not Loving is not true liberty, and yes he writes love using capital letters.
He insists that for most people politics informs societal morality- a fair number of people might be surprised to hear this though.
At this point the argument gets convoluted with him saying he doesn’t want people to THINK of liberty as a political system in the love = liberty equation, but a state of the spirit, or the soul, or simply humanity itself.
I must let the author speak in his own words at this point for you to appreciate where he’s coming from;
Love is not indifferent. Libertarians may be entirely right that civil society should take care of most of what the state does today. But if the rest of the country cannot see the movement care — cannot see that it is concerned to offer those civil solutions and alternatives in as much detail as it points out the faults of what we have — they will rightly believe that we’re more concerned with our philosophy than with people. They’re more concerned, in other words, with Liberty than Love. And that would be a contradiction in terms.
Seriously, as they say, cool story bro…………..…
He doesn’t realize civil society made up of Non Governmental Organizations, think tanks, and foundations, are government by another name through the backdoor of wealth and influence and since Libertarianism stands for liberty FROM government, it stands to reason this involves drastically reducing government in all its forms.
It seems this guy not only hasn’t a clue about Libertarianism, he wants another (improved) version that by its very definition isn’t libertarianism at all, right, got it.
Good grief, can these people leave anything alone, do they have to hijack and steer everything in the direction of their agenda.
In George Orwell’s futuristic story 1984, he mentions a time when love as a human emotion will be destroyed.
Presumably he could only have been referring to our traditional understanding of love way back in 1934 the year the book was written.
Based on the orthodox concept of love there’s a paradox in contemporary wisdom where people are told they must love everybody even though it means they can love nobody.
The reason behind this push for the democratization of love can be attributed to the quest for the conformity of society at large, the removal of choice and preference, the elimination of love itself.
The global elites know full well people cannot be forced to love everybody but like your typical spurned lover they’ll make sure they can’t love anybody else either.
