Does Love have the power to destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that are currently devastating our planet?

“After the failure of humanity in the use and control of the other forces of the universe that have turned against us, it is urgent that we nourish ourselves with another kind of energy…

If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.

Perhaps we are not yet ready to make a bomb of love, a device powerful enough to entirely destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that devastate the planet.

However, each individual carries within them a small but powerful generator of love whose energy is waiting to be released.”

Albert Einstein

According To Einstein, there is a simple remedy to the problems that the world is besieged by at the moment. This remedy is a naturally occurring phenomena, has existed for centuries, and is something that everyone can produce naturally. 

Yet it is not easy to think of love as being a remedy for anything, as we are not sick when we fall in love with someone. Indeed, the pejorative term lovesick is one of those terms used to generate the idea that love is somehow a weakening force, an undesirable emotion to feel, an affliction of the young and romantic. Consequently, when many of us think about love, is it through these poisoned images of love that we perceive and lose sight of love’s overwhelming positivity and effectiveness in making people feel better about themselves and other people? So, does love have the power to destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that is currently devastating our planet?

This short essay will try and answer that question.

What is it to love someone? In short to love someone is to love oneself, for in giving something to someone else we get the benefits of what giving something to someone else gives us. If we only give to receive then the objective of what we want to achieve is limited by what we think we will get from the exchange in advance of the exchange itself. This means that the potential of what we are giving is limited to achieving the thing that we want from the exchange before we have even seen what type of exchange will take place as a result of our interaction with that person.

Therefore, the purpose of individuals guides them to generate more benefits from their interactions than they incur costs from performing the interaction. As a result, all of our interactions are governed by this need to get more out of the interaction than we put in to it. Exchanges that take place and which are not loving are always conditional, because the exchange is always conditioned by the expectations of those involved in the interaction.

This means that all interactions are governed by the principle that more is better than less, and all interactions are therefore skewed to favour one protagonist over the other. This means that all human interactions are currently based on the selfish premise that each person is trying to get more out the interaction than they are contributing to the interaction.

This situation creates prejudices and mistrust in all people when they interact with one another, the fear that you might get less benefits out of your interaction with others than benefits that you put into your interaction, makes decisions difficult to make as you try to understand how much you might benefit from the interaction and as you then compare it with how much you might lose in the transaction. This makes trusting people difficult as you fight with yourself about whether or not you should invest in an interaction with someone.

This situation causes three things to occur. The first of these things is that this situation causes Selfishness. The natural purpose of an individual is to generate more benefits for themselves from their interactions with others than they incur costs in generating these benefits. Many individuals are reasonably successful at this and generate a few more benefits for themselves than they incur costs, and have a life that is comfortable and they survive happily, but the majority of individuals are not successful at this all of the time and have a life of misery as they fluctuate from having enough benefits, to not having enough benefits. However, a minority of people are very good at this and always generate more energy benefits for themselves from their interactions than they incur costs by some considerable margin and the minority of people who are in this group become selfish because the process of generating more and more benefits from interactions and incur fewer and fewer costs creates an addiction to generating ever increasing benefits while incurring ever decreasing costs. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Larry Page, Warren Buffet, George Soros, the banking Industry, the oil and petrol companies, Shareholders and Investors please all take a bow.

The second thing this situation causes is Greed. The addiction to generating ever increasing benefits while incurring ever decreasing costs means that the enormous benefits that are generated by interactions between those who have many benefits and those who only have a few benefits are shared between just a few members of the global society because the rich have become Greedy. As every interaction must generate more benefits for individuals than they already have, individuals with millions of pounds or dollars convince themselves that they are forced to make ever increasing gains regardless of whether or not they need the benefits they will gain. Their greed is justified in their minds by the view that they are just fulfilling their purpose, but the reality is that they have forgotten who they are, and they have forgotten how to love the purpose that they have been given and to love those that they interact with. 

Every interaction stems from the need of individuals to fulfil their purpose. But over fulfilling your purpose is not beneficial to those you are interacting with, if your increasing benefits are built on increasing the costs for those you interact with as you generate benefits for yourself then this will result in the unequal distribution of the benefits created by the interactions between those who have too many benefits and those who have too few creates a situation which fosters the third thing Einstein mentioned; Hate.

Hate flows when a situation that is perverse or monstrous or unjust is allowed to continue unchecked or unaltered. And the situation that exists in the world today whereby the benefits created by interactions between rich individuals (rich because of the companies they own, the shares they have in their investment portfolios, the money they have saved in pension funds, the money saved through tax avoidance schemes and the use of accountants, and who enjoy ever increasing benefits and ever decreasing costs from their interactions) and poor individuals (poor because of exorbitant energy prices paid to the companies owned by rich individuals, increasing taxes, no shares in investment portfolios, no money in pension plans, no way to avoid tax, and increasing local taxes and who endure ever decreasing benefits and ever increasing costs from their interactions) are so unevenly distributed the situation in the world today is all of these things. The world today is perverse, monstrous, and unjust.

The unequal distribution of wealth across the planet is so visible today and so patently perverse, monstrous and unjust that those that do not generate benefits for themselves from their interactions with those that do that hatred for this system grows in the hearts of all those who suffer from this system.

The hatred that grows in individuals who suffer from this situation spreads from individual to individual across the globe and suffocates the love that people are capable of breathing into their interactions with other people, and the injustice of the world that we are living in stops us developing any self-love for ourselves because we cannot find anything good for ourselves in this world if the benefits our interactions generate for us are smaller than the costs that we must pay to generate these benefits. And because there is no love for oneself then there is no love for the others that we interact with and we become selfish and greedy as we try to pursue our purpose and the world becomes devoid of love. 

So, to coin a phrase “what has love got to do with it?”

Well self-love is something we feel when we are happy with what we have, when we have what we need and feel happy with who we are and how we have generated that which we have for ourselves. Self-love comes from being in control of your life, and can only come from feeling in control of the interactions that we must create in order to fulfil our purpose. 

So to feel love for oneself is to feel that you are in control of your interactions and that your interactions with others have given you and the other person in the interaction equal benefits, although this does not mean that you have the same benefits as each other. And when you feel love for yourself from your interactions with others, you can feel love for the others that you are interacting with, and your interactions with them can be directed by self-love for yourself and love for the other. 

This love stems from the fact that creating an interaction which generates benefits for both parties is an interaction that can always be created. Generating more benefits than costs from interactions has been the purpose of individuals since time immemorial but I am suggesting a new purpose for individuals. This new purpose should be for individuals to generate as many benefits for themselves as they generate for the others they are interacting with. 

To generate as many benefits for yourself as you generate for the others you are interacting with is to use self-love and love to guide your interactions. Because to love yourself is to know what benefits you need and to love the other in your interactions with them is to recognise their need to generate benefits from their interaction with you.

And if we are to change the situation that we find ourselves in on this planet today we should consider Einstein’s words as a warning and a mantra that we can use to guide our future interactions with one another.

“If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.”

And to answer the question posed at the beginning of this essay

Yes, I believe that Love does have the power to destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that are currently devastating our planet.

Ben Swan

CEO Mandelo

Multiculture Training