Amor omnia vincit: Love conquers all. That seems to be the slogan these days. Or, it would be if people still studied Latin.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges has spawned riots of color all across the country. People are raising rainbow flags here, there, and everywhere. At the same time, the Confederate battle flag is being lowered and removed from all corners of respectable society. This now famous graphic illustrates the noble triumph of Love over Hate.
Wait a minute. “Triumph of Love over Hate”? Aren’t love and hate emotions that everyone feels at one point or another? And isn’t it the direction of these emotions, and the actions motivated by them, that’s important?
Not if you’re a Leftist. In that case, you are on the side of Love, while your enemies are on the side of Hate. The Love-Hate Dichotomy defines how you think, how you look at other people, everything.
The first thing to remember is that Love is not merely love and Hate is not merely hate. Love and Hate are not only emotions but cosmic forces and eternal forms. Well, Hate isn’t eternal: we’re in the process of stamping it out.
The Leftist dichotomy is nothing like that of the Greek philosopher Empedocles. Way back before Socrates, Empedocles theorized that the universe passed through several phases according to the waxing and waning of φιλότης and νεῖκος, Love and Strife. In Empedocles’ system, Love is an attractive force while Strife is a repulsive force, and both of these forces are masculine. Empedocles seems to have believed that men naturally rule the world, a belief which firmly plants him in the camp of Hate.
Hate is pretty easy to define, and we are all familiar with the general outlines: Hate is what we believe, what normal people believed ten, twenty, fifty or more years ago. The 1950s were the darkest days of Hate in living memory, but since 1964 or so, Love has been gaining ground through the gradual dismantling of racism, sexism, homophobia and heteronomativity, transphobia and cis-normativity, fat shaming and body shaming in general, and whatever is cooked up in the coming months and years.
Love is a trickier concept. It can just mean Leftism, but the political and social angle is only part of the picture. Love is the ultimate reason for doing anything. You should always aim to do that which you love. If you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life, or so they say. The flip side of this notion is that you shouldn’t do things you don’t love doing. If circumstances force you to do things you don’t love, then your circumstances need to change. Love informs Leftism as much as it is a synonym for Leftism.
The ever-expanding welfare state is one outgrowth of this view of Love. If someone has to work long hours in unpleasant conditions for low pay or can’t get medical care, then obviously they can’t do what they love, whatever that may be. If a woman doesn’t have birth control and so might get pregnant when she has sex, then she can’t go out and do all the loving she wants. If a person can’t go to college, then they can’t get the job they would love. Any financial obstacles you might face need to be eliminated so that you can pursue Love freely.
Leftist social views also flow from the Love-hate Dichotomy. People should love each other and so should abolish barriers that separate each other. Barriers, differences, separations, and partitions: these things cause Hate and are exempla of Hate; either way, they must be destroyed.
People should be allowed to do whatever Love commands of them too. If two people love each other, then they have to be allowed to have sex with each other. They also have to be allowed to marry each other because marriage is the highest expression of Love. There’s nothing magical about the number two, of course, and that restriction will someday be eliminated and omniamory will reign.
(I should mention that you should never judge anyone for doing what they love, as long as it’s not Hate, of course. And by “judge” I mean “judge negatively.” To judge someone positively is to celebrate them, not judge them. Love must be celebrated; Hate must be judged.)
Love involves sacrifice: the lover is willing to sacrifices his happiness for the sake of his beloved. This means that Leftists, who love oppressed peoples, must be prepared to sacrifice their own well-being to improve their standing. Activism is not sacrifice, mind you, since Leftists love to engage in activism, but if anyone mentions that they and their families and friends will suffer if Leftist proposals carry, well, that is a sacrifice they say they are willing to make.
Fully fleshed-out, the Love-Hate Dichotomy is transparently artificial and insane, but that does not mean it completely lacks plausibility. Doesn’t it make sense that you should love people, treat them well, and not to hate them for no good reason? Should people strive after something other than what they love? The success of the Love-Hate Dichotomy is largely due to its appealing simplicity.
The biggest logical problem for the Love-Hate Dichotomy is precisely that it is a dichotomy. As emotions, love and hate are not completely opposite feelings; indeed, they are both a kind of obsession, often occurring simultaneously. There is a whole range of attitudes one might have about any given object that are neither love nor hate.
Adding to the confusion is that “love” is often used as an intense form of “like,” so to say “I love chocolate ice cream” simply means “I very much enjoy eating chocolate ice cream.” “Hate” has a similar secondary usage as an intense form of “dislike.” These two feelings, “like” and “dislike,” are not dichotomous either: “I like Jim most of the time, but he’s a real party-pooper”; “Sweetie, you know I hate it when you leave your shoes lying around”; “Wow, she’s looking good tonight; too bad she’s completely nuts!” Complexity typifies emotions, not simplicity.
Simplicity, however, appears to work.
Love is inextricably intertwined with hate. To love something, you must hate what opposes and harms it. So God hates, hates with a furious passion all injurious to his Good.
The truth is love. What is true is good, and cannot be bad. Truth is terrifying to leftists, so because they are afraid of it they think it must be bad, that is must be hate.
The current problem isn’t lack of love, although what is generally called love is based entirely on lies and thus is appallingly evil. We need to start with the truth to know what is love, and what to love, and what to hate.
I suggest you listen to the enemies neurotic babbling fears and become the boogeyman they seem to need: Become Hate.
We can have Wrath Day to meet Pride Day.
This isn’t a genius level problem nor is there a genius solution. We’re born knowing the solution. You’re men not “Chappie” dears. You don’t need to reprogram yourselves for action as evolution did it for you.
Basically, love-hate to a leftist is the struggle between hedonism and a desire for order. Leftism is teenage rebellion gone pathological.
This was a really great piece. Sums up the love/hate dichotomy perfectly, and I agree with what Thrasymachus has said. I hate in the same way God hates, that is to hate all which opposes goodness and truth. If such a thing is worthy of eternal damnation, is it not worthy of my scorn and derision? I can’t see why not.
Every time I see some variation on “Love Wins” I have to fight the urge to counter with some variation of “If by ‘love’ you mean ‘sodomy’, yes.”
Unfortunately for you, φιλότης is feminine: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%86%CE%B9%CE%BB%CF%8C%CF%84%CE%B7%CF%82
Oh, and νεῖκος is neuter: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BD%CE%B5%E1%BF%96%CE%BA%CE%BF%CF%82
Dehumanization, stigmatization, and similar things are all methods by which a normal, average, everyday, psychologically nominal person can deal with the threat represented by ‘barbarians’, abstractly speaking.
Its the answer to the question: how do you get a population that has generally altruistic tendencies (which are adaptive on personal and local scales for things like having Nice Communities), but don’t end up destroying themselves through pathological altruism (which is unadaptive on a civilizational scale) when they gain knowledge of or come in contact with barbarians?
A person who can consign a population of untermensch to death with no second thought is probably a sociopath, and those kinds of traits are not exactly adaptive on personal and local levels (or even administrative levels). Yet it is often precisely that capacity on a civilizational level that tells the difference between a society that survives, or a society that falls to barbarism.
To put it too a point, it doesn’t matter to an average well adjusted altruistic western europoor if, for an example, that in 1949 the population of Africa was around 200 million, while today it is over a billion, a nearly quintuple increase in hardly half a century, and that really something should be done about that (or at least stop making it worse). It doesn’t matter because as soon as you show that average well adjusted white person pictures of starving babies, he can’t help but help feed the ever growing calamity, to kill himself to save a barbarian.
Certainly, if you happen to posses a giant brain gifted with continent spanning imagination, you might be able to have your cake and eat it too; to contextualize your own psychological responses with a mind towards the ultimate teleologies of that which you advocate. In a word, to have more *agency*. But such people are not exactly common. It is precisely those average, everyday, well adjusted, well meaning people that need the proper psychological tools to square the circle of society, to both be a good neighbor and not be dissolved by the acid of entropy expressed in human forms.
‘Awareness’ becomes a memetic hazard, they are uncomfortable with talking about or acknowleding issues of the unpossesed. And it is very well that they are, for if they did, evidence so far clearly indicates that masochistic self-flagellation and sacrifice is sure to follow. To try and deny them these tools is akin to denying a crutch for the lame (dig that altruism plug), yet so much the worse, as the externalities of such matters implicate all of us as well in the deluge.
Give hate a chance.