Image by Antonello Veneri and Henrique Gomes
These days, I don’t use any political or ideological terms to describe my views on political issues. Even though my stances are only getting more radical, I have become disillusioned with movements that use political terms to identify themselves. For example, people at my university use the term “Socialism” to refer to the very vocal community of people who have left-leaning views. The student-run publication is full of essays in which people are making the case for Socialism in terms that feel highly political and focus on political activism. Their discourse is somewhat frustrating because it is restricted by all the pitfalls of politics. Topics they discuss are often drawn directly from the most recent cycle of political controversies. Political discourse is heavily tied up with the 24-hour news cycle, numerous debates and issues are forgotten prematurely because they stop making headlines. Socialist conversations most often feel reminiscent of popular social media talking points that don’t allow themselves to search for deeper nuance. In Australia, as well as the USA and the United Kingdom, the two-party system of parliament encourages political binaries (us vs. them mindset) and this polarisation flows into leftist discourse. Additionally, Socialism’s proximity to politics imparts a sense of competitiveness and hunger for power that detracts from its messages of equality and generosity.
As a result of Socialism’s political quality, I cannot connect with it. Recently, I have been thinking about the idea of using love as my guiding principle in my socio-political life. Using love as my ethic is more emotional than logical; to practice it allow yourself to feel emotionally and spiritually connected to people. Acknowledge that their lives are as complex, beautiful and tragic as yours, and feel the connection that creates between all people. With an emphasis on feeling this connection, because humans are so diverse that there is no rational way to connect us other than our biology. Instead, you have to rely on an extremely abstract felt sense of attachment. That feeling of being inextricably connected draws me to something even more irrational: love. I feel a profound love and warmth for all people. As a result, I try to give people as much compassion as I can at any given time. This line of thinking and feeling always leads me to the same left-leaning stances and allyship and always makes me a hippie.
When using love as the guiding force in our socio-political lives, community becomes exceedingly important. Communities allow us to distribute our kindness, foster intimacy and belonging and become each other’s allies, both in a political sense and a familial or relational sense. Through community, we can organically learn about the issues the people around us face, and when we use that as the foundation for activism it comes from a place of love and it is vastly less performative.
There are also several practicalities to using love as an ethic:
- The principle of love can show me problems in our society that need to change and love also gives me the solution; love is optimistic. Whereas, leading with ideology and politics makes us angry and eventually nihilistic.
- Words like “socialism”, “communism”, “liberal”, and “republican” mean vastly different things in various languages and cultures, even within the West. Whereas, love is a more universal idea/feeling and so it has more potential to unite us.
- Love is anti-political, and thus, anti-kyriarchal[1]. Politics is a way of dealing with power that was constructed within kyriarchy. My proposition for love as an ethic is to try to counter inequality and domination by offering an alternate set of tools to the ones that built our hierarchal society.
There are so many fucked up wrong things that happen in this world, we have to keep pushing for change. Love would be a kind of beautiful way to get there, so I do hope you find my ideas inspiring. But, even if you still take the explicitly political route, we are still on the same side and I still love you. xo.
[1] In feminist theory, kyriarchy is a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission. (Wikipedia)