The Bad Thing About Love

That is a good argument and not to be underestimated. I was convinced a malevolent or rigid social environment (the others) posed the largest obstacle to love for the longest time in my life.

Let me expose what is my conjecture now: Beside the possibility of a slightly malevolent universe, 2 further things are to be considered.

• The social values and world models your environment sported while you where still impressive are deep inside you and it is not very healthy to try to fully remove them.
• From the time, when your done with self-reconstruction and peer and self-oriented secondary socialisation you might have a rather well put together self-universe interaction model that governs your social actions, feelings, misgivings, possibilities for spontaneous fits of likes and dislikes and so on and on.

This model must satisfy certain structural requirements and limits. And the model in a way is your universe and not just a representation of it.

The civic (or bourgeois as the self appointed revolutionaries say) selfmodel demands that nothing is bigger or more important than the individual ego structure. Hence the entrepreneur, hence the abolition or at least disempowerment of kings and gods. In this model even patriotism, the abstracted substitute for loving one's larger family or tribe, is reserved for farmers, workers, military officers and other not quite civilized persons.

And, if that weren't enough, any cross gender love is further complicated by a series of culture shocks and wariness on both sides that has been nurtured for at least the past 3000 years.

Still, all of that is not the point. The point is to experience love and so to really know that it is already possible transgress civilization's boring borders and continue to do so. The corresponding transgressions, done properly, are helpful in the long time survival of our selfs. At least, that is what my main prophet, Bento Espinoza, would confirm, methinks.