Protest Without Illusions
Love Isn’t Just Something that Happens
This was written some time ago when I helped edit and publish a fanzine for the purpose of promoting a burgeoning political organization that was led by a small group of young Chicagoans.
There is a need--a need for those who remain alien to their places and their times — for change. But a change that is beyond what constitutes politics as usual. Beyond the four-year plan. And a change that entails living a life unusual. Beyond what parents, teachers and even peers project for and expect of them. They see a need for the development of new ideas, discussion and debate free from ideological hangups, as we feel that much of the Left is stagnant and offering nothing fresh or exciting; or for that matter, something effective. We have, as a product of our own internal discussion and debate, developed an all-encompassing theme, and that particular theme is LOVE.
“Love,” writes Erich Fromm, “is the only satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” How true. Unfortunately, the word love gets thrown around so much within today’s society that it has practically lost its real meaning. Can we actually “love” chocolate or ice cream? Overuse or constant misuse of a word tends to dilute its true meaning.
Love isn’t just something that happens; it can never be based on looks or other superficial characteristics. Loving is something that is learned, requires a lot of practice, and a hell of a lot of thought and concentration. It requires genuine insight and understanding, first of ourselves, then of our world and other people. We can not possibly hope to love others or our world if we do not first fully love ourselves. Yet most of us are unable to develop our capacities for love on the only level that really matters — a love composed of maturity, self-knowledge and courage.
Loving oneself is not necessarily an inherently narcissistic trait. Those of us who appear to be self-centered or conceited, are in fact victims of our lacking of self-love. We, in reality, hate ourselves because we are unable to care for our real self; the outside image we project is merely a feeble attempt to cover-up and compensate for the inability we have to truly love ourselves.
In the Bible, the idea of “love thy neighbor as thyself” links the love of self with the love of others. We can not separate the respect, love, and understanding we have for and of ourselves from the identical qualities of another individual. Meister Eckhart says it best:
If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really succeed in loving yourself; but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man. Thus he is a great and righteous person who, loving himself, loves all others equally.
“When the individual feels, the community reels” is a slogan from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World which describes a society not too unlike ours today. We all pretty much have the superficial needs of life: food, shelter and clothing; but too often we lack the needs of loving, being loved or understanding ourselves. We are alienated from our self, our fellow humans, and from the real world. We base our relationships on security, staying close to the status quo; our thoughts, feelings, and actions are indistinguishable from everybody else’s.
The ironic part of it is that in spite of this “herd mentality,” with everyone trying so hard to be as close as possible to the rest, everyone remains utterly alone. Our insecurity, anxiety, and guilt are the result of not being able to overcome our human separateness, our lack of love.
Capitalism needs people like us. We cooperate smoothly and in large numbers. We vote, fight wars, and consume more and more each year with barely a qualm being raised. Our tastes have been standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated (an example of this would be opinion polls which do not measure public opinion but prescribe it.) It needs people who are willing to be ordered and do what is expected of them. We must fit into the social machine without much friction and be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim. “Anti-social behavior” is dealt with by various means of psychotherapy and counseling. Lobotomies are a bit too unsophisticated these days.
Young people, faced with no easy answers to many of the complex problems they face today, seek escapism in the many forms of “entertainment” provided by the corporations, all too willing to make profits from the insecurity of today’s society. The false sense of happiness young people experience as a result of their research for “fun” is nothing more than mindless consumerism whereby we thoughtlessly “take in” whatever is offered to us by the media. There is no thought required to consume the many commodities served, be they sights, sounds, food, drink, cigarettes, alcohol — even people, lectures and books. What’s worse is that we see this as “just the way things are.” The world has become one great object of our consumption, which we place all of our hopes and dreams in, and we haven’t the faintest idea as to what it’s all about. It is then inevitable that we are plagued by disappointments. Our personality, our character, is geared to the consumption of commodities; “the fetishism of commodities,” as Marx defines it. The material, as well as the spiritual sides of our lives, are but objects of exchange and consumption.
Since people can not think for themselves, they can not love; robots can not love one another. We have, in essence, become automatons incapable of true feelings. We have become mirrors of a sick society that is based on consumerism, materialism, confusion and alienation. Control is quite easy.
If we do have this revolution, we’re all so hyped about, and the workers still want to manufacture television sets, haven’t we missed something?
