2/21 Love

1) Well, first, what is love?
From passages on Wikipedia, this is what it is:
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Love is a universal concept related to affinity, with different interpretations depending on the point of view taken (personal, philosophic, artistic, religious, scientific). In the Western World, love is considered an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. In philosophical context, love is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection. In some religious contexts, love is not just a virtue, but the basis for all being, as in the Christian phrase, “God is love” or Agape in the Canonical gospels. Love may also be described as actions towards others (or oneself) based on compassion. Or as actions towards others based on affection.

This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.

Buddhism sets attachment and desire as negative emotions that release anger and cause suffering; love and ego are incompatible. In the buddhist philosophy, true love is compassionate love.[7] For pure altruism (unconditional love for one's neighbor), there is nothing to trade with; social relationships are not competitive, but collaborative: one seeks others' well-being and others seek one's; that's also the philosophy of human relationships preached by Jesus Christ (“love your neighbor as yourself”). Pure altruism is also Gottfried Leibniz's conception of love; he states that “to love is to place our happiness in the happiness of another”.

The above conception (pure altruism) is diametrically opposed to the conception of capitalism, which promotes the so called inherent selfishness of the human being, and on which it's supported. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari consider that capitalism produces a perversion of the natural concept of love, by placing the human being as a part of a production machine, and thus destructing the concepts of body and soul. Ayn Rand, on the other side, states that selfishness is in essence a noble feeling (one should be responsible for his own happiness, and not others'). In the same line, Sigmund Freud thinks that unconditional love leads to perpetual dissatisfaction: “When you were incontestably the favorite child of your mother, you keep during your lifetime this victor feeling, you keep feeling sure of success, which in reality seldom doesn’t fulfill”.

Science defines what could be understood as love as an evolved state of the survival instinct, primarily used to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species through reproduction.
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What does this all say? Well, it says that love is defined either as altruist or selfish. Which one is yours? Well, you probably believe in selfish love, or capitalist love, like almost everyone else. Why is that? Well, I think it is quite simple, the society makes us believe that this is the right defintion for love, and it has been part of the culture all your life (e.g. Disney movies) and so you believe it is right since it is true that it is adopted everywhere.

Now you may have guessed that I do not believe in selfish love but altruist love. If you do not want me to use my definition of love, then let's say that I only consider everyone as equal, and I have the same feelings for everyone. So I "love" my closest friends as much as I "love" the complete stranger living in a different country that I have never met or heard of before.

TBC (I am too sick right now...)