This is the the fifth of eight articles on love, sex and gender. As with the others, it stands on its own, but you can read through part 1, on man and woman, part 2 on sex and excitement, part 3 on emotion and habit, part 4, on courtship and woo, part 6 on making love, part 7 on marriage and part 8 on eternal love.
Society’s War on Love
Where is love? Everywhere one meets the sentimental image of love, the exciting advertisement of it and the fascinating idea of it, but never the reality of it, never the direct experience of it, here in the body. This is because the loveless self-informed system that we live in — and that lives us — fears and hates love.
Society fears and hates the incarnation of love (from the Latin incarnare, ‘into the flesh’), it fears and hates the sacrifice of love (from the Latin sacer, ‘holy’)1 and it fears and hates the passion of love (from the Latin passionem, ‘suffer’), because they threaten the self upon which society is constructed.
It is impossible to be incarnated in society (as every woman knows). You cannot be allow the body to feel (i.e. to be sensitive) nor to act (to be spontaneous). The body must be controlled and its instincts redirected through the polite rational mind, which is why civilisation has waged war on the body millennia.
Sacrifice is also impossible, as is the mysterious, non-institutional, spirit that it is for, or towards. Only what is definable, material and useful is of value in the world. To give that up in favour of something indefinable, immaterial and useless is to incite at best incomprehension at worst active persecution.2
And passion? It is nowhere to be found. Not in the classroom, not in the office, not in the factory, not on the farm. One finds an imitation of passion — emotional emphasis, effort, desperate browbeating and desire — but the passion that comes from the abnegation of self is as rare as the love which inspires it.