The Opposite of Love Is Not Hate
I will warn you that you need to read to the end of this blog entry to feel hope for our human family and for our world. But please do read to the end. I believe you’ll find it’s worth your time.
The opposite of love is not hate. Hate is the result of loving imperfectly but with ulterior motives. It is filled with codependence, assumption, inaccurate perceptions, half-truths and lies, manipulation, domination, and usury. (To name only a few.) As a result of our hurt and grief, we employ hate to do battle to defend ourselves, creating enmity between “us” and “them.” We process our grief and pain by spewing it to others who relate to our experiences, gaining allies that reassure us that we are not insane. (For we now have validation, which is our proof.) We align ourselves with those who have been similarly maligned and set up battle lines feeling new strength for our cause from being wronged, continuing to enable and justify our victimhood. We become the infantry, captains, and generals of our cause to hate. We vote into office those who will hate with us and for us, believing that creating great armies to eliminate “them”—the ones who have wronged us and disagreed with us—will restore our peace and well-being. As we publish our opinions loudly and divide our family and friends, we become the pawns of governments, institutions, and religions doing their bidding.
As the battle rages, we lose hope because all around us are the walking dead whose vitriol and screams pierce our love-starved souls. There is no point in dying because there is a war to wage. With broken hearts, missing eyes, (because an eye for eye makes the world blind) and traumatized, shattered souls, we expect some ruthless, justice-driven god to make it all right for us because we claim we don’t know how to. But we do really. It's just that we refuse to let go of our justified hate. We sit in our misery and remorse and pretend we have no idea why we feel this way. It's all just so overwhelming, we lament. Our egos scream justice while our souls weep for the lack of love.
But if there is a god, why would this omnipotent being right all of our wrongs for us, denying us the opportunity to learn and understand forgiveness? If this god did such a thing there would be no lessons learned, no understanding or comprehension that we are all the same set of molecules and atoms. No understanding that by our very existence there is no separation between us.
The opposite of love is apathy. Love is the emotion of caring, kindness, and concern for others. It is the universal magnet that binds us to each other, our world, and the universe. Apathy is indifference, a suppression of emotion, and the absence of interest and concern. Apathy is a result of numbing ourselves from hating too much and too long.
The difference between hate and apathy is startling. Hate requires us to stay connected to each other by a chain of enmity. As long as there are negative feelings between two people, that chain and bond of enmity exists. The only way to break that chain is to forgive. Apathy will not break it because getting from hate to apathy means we must cease all feeling and emotion. We are addicted to our hate, and to claim apathy as our new weapon would only be a pretense. Pretending to be apathetic in place of hate is called denial. Denial aligns with other ulterior motives.
The only way to break the chains of hate is to forgive. Forgiveness is one of the most selfish things we can do because we are liberating only ourselves. However, the paradox is that by liberating ourselves, we create safety and love for others to do the same.
It may be impossible for any of us to love perfectly. Loving imperfectly is meant to be an ongoing process of increasing our love. Fred Rogers expressed it better than almost anyone by saying, “Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”
Love says there is no “us” or ‘“them” There is only “we.”