On Unconditional Love
You don’t question unconditional love. The second you do - it becomes something else.
As a person torn between two worlds I’ve been struggling to put the distinction between East and West into words. I felt like there was a root cause for the continuous misunderstanding, but simply using logic, perhaps a tool of the West, I could not arrive at a conclusion. I know good, incredibly intelligent, kind and loving people who share completely different opinions on the ongoings in the world. It’s tempting to say it’s propaganda but what is it about the propaganda that affects people from different sides differently? I think even if the West was subject to Eastern media for months on end and vice versa I’d stipulate it would make little difference for anyone with any conviction. There’s a deeper divide that seems to boil down to the approach to life, a core part of ourselves established at birth and reinforced throughout our young years.
I think the way honest traditional Eastern people feel about their country is akin to the love felt for a family. The West is the land of reason and the East the land of the soul. The people are of strong faith and care about their culture, their family, their friends above all else. Family comes first and Brotherhood is more important than being right. Truth is relative to one’s beliefs. They have interest and respect of other cultures but for them there’s no place like home and betrayal is the highest form of crime.
The West is seen as a Hedonistic state that tours in other cultures because it does not have a strong rooting in its own. It opens doors simply because there are doors to be open, because the soul is hungry for something the eyes can never satisfy. The intellect is an incredibly powerful tool, that sets us apart from all others, but it cannot penetrate the ground which we stand on. Without understanding of the soul we’re left wandering the endless surface. Without intellect we’re trapped beneath it.
Unconditional love is faith and bravery. One could say it feels much easier to question things, decide what we want to believe or identify with something because of one reason or another and jump onto a different belief as soon as that suits us better. We’re never truly in any danger and we always feel in control. We can even find attachment and have good reasons to justify it. There’s order and perhaps even the illusion of ground truth or the path towards it. It’s hard work, it’s rewarding and it leads to real world results. But on the questions of meaning, what is love which bends with the remover to remove?
Unconditional love is a wonderful feeling. You have complete and utter faith in something and the leap into the abyss has been made with no exit door or return. The cost is - if the Fall comes, one is exposed to everything one has been necessarily blind to. One exits the garden with little hope of return.
The highest good comes with the highest price. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape and murder of children have all been continuously justified in the name of the good of “our” people. Remove the threat at any cost. An idea so powerful it puts myth above the lives of real people. If love and hate are analogous feelings then unconditional love must come with unconditional hate. Any judge of the actions of such love will appear to the perpetrator to be someone who is indifferent. It truly feels like a joke on us if this kind of love is precisely the thing that leads to real, unjustifiable and unforgivable evil. I feel a heaviness that’s much beyond myself trying to rationalise this. If we’re all human, how can another human commit these acts? If evil simply exists - there would be little use in thinking about it. Much like free will, if we assume some responsibility for it perhaps we can find a way to live better.
I hope that the problem is not this kind of love but the subject of it and its lack of autonomy. The myth of the Motherland has grown, artificially or otherwise, and now unconditional love means extending support for everything a country chooses to do, in whatever form it is. The love that evolved for community, friends and family has extended to an anthropomorphised modern state that feeds off this condition. It’s a beautiful trait and it’s heartbreaking if this is what leads some people astray.
A trusting animal will continue to trust even the most abusive owner. Within itself it will find nihilism, it will find meaning through suffering, it will do anything to justify its pain but it will not question its love and loyalty. In it it is the highest form of good and to lose that is to lose yourself. But to build a new world one must break the old. This must also be our responsibility, perhaps one that defines us as human.
I hope one can find their way back to the garden again, this time choosing unconditional love for the right reasons, for the world and all the people around us. The intellect we’re given bears a responsibility to be used for good and while one might let the heart guide the way, the mind, once gifted, cannot go back on its awareness of what is guiding the heart.