We can more easily understand and access love when we compare it to hate—just as goodness is more fully framed when contrasted with evil.
Many people not only avoid love but actively hate it. Love is a problem for them. If they go anywhere near it, they experience resistance, fear, and even hatred. They sense danger. They sense that love will require them to experience the death of their precious, rigid individuality, the me-first egotism that feels like their core being.
In their resistance to self-development, they’re loyal to their emotional mainstay, their brazen ego. Hatred of love protects this ego, which has no interest in becoming aware of its own superficiality. Deep knowledge of their psyche would set these people free, but they decline through resistance that’s mostly unconscious to liberate themselves from the ego’s wiles. They cling instead to ego-identification, the little me on their one-peg hat rack. The ego, however, is prone to feeling self-pity and disrespect, and it clings with bittersweet fervor to needless suffering.
Love is a red-hot forge that cremates the ego, incinerates inner conflict, scorches ignorance, and liberates our best self. Not everyone can stand the forge’s heat, and those who refuse to be refined psychologically or spiritually often need to wear protective armor against their self-development. Hatred can feel like a suit of armor that deflects incoming malice—but it also imprisons the wearer in rigid misery because the hatred is trapped in one’s own psyche, body, and emotional life.
Those who evolve and become more loving move beyond the self-centeredness with which infants enter the world. An infant’s consciousness experiences only its own little world, and that world is felt to be at the center of existence—or even the whole of existence. Babies experience parents and objects as extensions of themselves. This profound self-centeredness is moderated over the years, of course, but many people go on experiencing themselves and life through its lingering effects. Giving up this infantile sense of reality is construed emotionally as a form of death, though it’s only the abdication of one’s superficial mindset. If we don’t deepen our awareness, we stay stuck at this primitive, self-absorbed level.
With the thought of becoming more loving, inner fear arises. Loving others and loving life can feel like giving away our “essential” and “intrinsic” ego-based identity. Becoming more loving, it is felt, would mean abandoning the me-first mentality, the little me against the world, that many of us experience as our precious grounding and wobbly essence.
Hatred and cruelty give certain people a feeling of substance, like a force or power they can beam into the world. They are desperate for this illusion of power because, in their egotism and subsequent disconnect from their better self, they are unmoored and weak on deeper levels. This emotional disconnect or passive self-abandonment that they unconsciously hide from themselves is fended off with narcissism and displays of importance and aggression.
A surefire way to cling to an unevolved status quo—to allow resistance to dampen our psychological or moral development—is to scorn and hate love and any displays of it. Mockery of “bleeding hearts” and “tree-huggers” are examples of this scorn. Another example is the animosity directed at diversity and inclusion programs intended to compensate for racism.
Fortunately, most of us are not scornful of the good. But that doesn’t let us off the hook. Most people—whether at the political left, right, or center—harbor some measure of neurosis, which blocks us in varying degrees from being wiser, stronger, and more loving. For the most neurotic among us, some passionate intensity or self-righteous conviction must be dug up to “legitimize” the refusal to examine one’s inner dysfunction. Hatred and cruelty directed outward serve that purpose by making others “deserving” of punishment for being the “cause” of one’s disharmony. The malice and hostility of me-versus-them become the rickety base of the one-peg hat rack.
When “little ego” prevails, our better self or best self becomes a foe to be denied, demeaned, and, if necessary, detested. Our fitful ego seeks to set itself apart as it pleads for validation, excludes others as unworthy, and dislikes or hates imagined foes and inner truth. People hate and fear love in proportion to how rigidly determined they are to cling to a superficial sense of self and a bittersweet willingness to accentuate feelings of victimization and weakness. Misleadingly, they conclude that hatred is a legitimate response to the malice, treachery, and danger of others. Hatred becomes the rationale for misogyny, racism, and fascism.
When people can’t feel unconditional love, they’re inclined, as mentioned, to substitute the resulting emptiness with some ego-satisfying passion. One such passion is hatred, another is cruelty, others are lust for fame, wealth, or power. In his great poem, “The Second Coming,” W.B. Yeats wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” One such intensity is the determination to destroy, along with love, the notion or existence of our better self, which is what happens when people undermine democracy, the protective system of government that endeavors to represent what’s best about us. The political attacks on the “Woke” ethos is another example. Here the noble attempt to become more conscious and evolved is mocked and scorned.
Primitive reactive passions often pursue raw power. Possession of raw power stirs up surges of seductive pleasure. Undue gratification in possessing political power hides underlying weakness. As a psychological defense, the pleasure makes this unconscious claim: “I am not an inner weakling who’s disconnected from my better self. Look at how much I enjoy these surges of power. That proves I relate to power, not to weakness.” Raw power, however, is seductive only to those who are inwardly weak. A strong, healthy person has power, but it is practiced wisely and lovingly.
Love is elusive for those of us who refuse to see our bittersweet indulgence in misery. Most of us are mired to some degree in unconscious inner conflict. Unconsciously, we hold on to emotional hurts that are unresolved from our past. We have, in varying intensity, unresolved emotional attachments to feeling deprived, refused, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned (the first hurts of childhood). For some, victimhood and injustice, as experienced through these eight first hurts, are persistent experiences of self. Most of us recycle, in some measure, one or more of these first hurts. Unconsciously, we resist exposing our collusion in generating and experiencing this suffering. The inner conflict through which this suffering is processed is largely hidden from our awareness by our egotism and its misleading psychological defenses. Because of these inner dynamics, we unwittingly impede our capacity to love ourself and others and to maintain and grow democracy.
Love arises as we plunge insightfully into the dynamics of inner conflict, which comprise the many ways we feel at odds with ourself and others. Love grows when we’re dissolving the negativy of inner conflict and discovering our goodness. With inner conflict, we are tumbled and tossed in fretful self-doubt and hateful dissension that disconnects us from others and our better self.
Unconditional love is the desire, inspired emotionally and sincerely, that good should befall all creatures. With such love, we feel goodness arise within our self. With love, the meaning of life comes into focus. With love comes the answer, the freedom, and the truth.
Most of us are not yet sufficiently evolved to maintain this grace or power. But if we’re moving in this direction, all is well. We just need to keep seeing precisely how fear, spite, cynicism, bitterness, cruelty, and hatred are stirred up inside us. We see that taking responsibility for producing this negativity within ourselves is the path to love.
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