Michael Mitchell: Archive

Let's apply this to a single quality or virtue, my favorite: honesty.

It doesn't matter how physically attractive you are, if you're dishonest, it turns me off. I can't only admire the body and ignore the mind, a person's beliefs and resulting behavior. I can't only see the physical beauty and ignore the bullshit.

Most people get this. "Dumb blonde jokes", for instance, or annoying ex's you used to think were irresistible but now you don't want shit to do with them. But what would happen if you did ignore the spiritual? If you really attempted to love anyone without "conditions", without standards or judgments, you'd be incapable of it, because love is an emotion that's determined by judging things according to your standards. Unconditional love is an attempt to reverse cause and effect, basically to gain or keep someone's love without earning it or to rationalize loving someone who doesn't deserve it.

You can't actually fake an emotion. All you can really do is evade them. And that's what people who take the concept of unconditional love seriously actually do. They don't love everyone equally. They simply don't allow themselves to love anyone more than anyone else.

In practice, the idea doesn't lead to anything positive. It makes you cold and unfeeling and bitter and cynical and jaded and completely devoid of self-esteem. You don't consider your evaluations of others important, so you stop evaluating yourself as well. You expect to be loved without any form of moral judgment at all, just like you do everyone else, only most people don't actually take unconditional love seriously, because it's really impossible, so over time you're just left with this nagging, empty, disturbing feeling which you really don't want to even attempt to identify and couldn't determine what's causing it even if you tried because you're literally ignoring the causes -- your emotions, judgments, values -- on principle, by choice.

If you think honesty is a virtue, then when you see someone else consistently acting dishonestly, it should turn you off, make you not like that person, but you've taught yourself to ignore all the qualities of character you admire, because you think it's good to "love" them anyway, regardless of whether you actually do or not, and that's your idea of love. But all the emotions you evade and repress, positive or negative, they don't cease to exist just because you ignored them. They simply compound until their intensity heightens to the point it breaks you.

The idea of unconditional love is one of the dumbest ideas possible. Love is the exact opposite of that. Of all your emotions, it's the most "conditional", dependent the most on seeing your values and virtues in another person.

It's actually very rare, though, to find romantic love -- which is the highest form of love -- someone with whom you spiritually share so much. Most people never even feel it at all, but only think they do because they don't know what they're missing. They sense it, because they know deep down they're always pretending shit, but they can never figure out why they're unhappy, why their life is nothing but boredom and duty, because they don't really believe in happiness and won't even allow themselves to consider its absence, which is another long-term emotional state, misery, which they also ignore, of course.

Life is all about knowing what you want. If you think love is unconditional, you don't believe in wanting anything. The belief itself in unconditional love is literally antagonistic to your life, beyond mere survival.

But survival alone isn't enough for us because we can project the future. We can imagine better than the present, learn from the past and create a better life for ourselves, and every single second of our existence we're either facing this reality or evading it. You may be happy right now, but will you be happy tomorrow? Next week? Next year?

Happiness is our natural state of being, not suffering or even contentment, but a state of existence in which we have what we want while doing what we want to keep getting what we want, and that constant struggle combined with the satisfaction of consistent success is the whole purpose of (human) life.