Social Matter

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.