The Beast Revelation

[Jarhyn]

Love is not formulaic.

Love must have some abstract way in which it is real, or the word wouldn't exist nor find common ground.

You can, potentially, will yourself to love another.

You can call the material results of doing the right things for others within their consent or within the bounds of publicly acceptable breech of consent something other than "love" , but you will be wrong unless you were just using those words to form a definition that evaluates to "love". If you do the things that help others, and do those things explicitly under the expectations you have to seek consent, for whatever stated reason, you are loving them.

You can claim what you evaluate as "cold detachment" isn't love and you would be wrong. People can use whatever excuse they want to imagine they hold no love when they help people indiscriminately, but the end result is that they act within their rights to help people when they lend not-for-interest even to people they expect to not return the money. Their love may be complicated and weird and cobbled together from all sorts of strange emotional sources, but the result ends up evaluating to that save abstract formula: some need in them that exists so as to drive them to do for others is being pressed for satisfaction.

To that end, it doesn't matter what components came together to produce the logical result but rather that this is the logical result that the components came together so as to express.

You can call it alien or cold and whatever else I've heard it called by people who seem not to understand love in the first place, but that just tells me your expressed understanding lacks something important, and that you value the "feeling" rather than the "doing".

"Feeling" can be deceptive. You can misunderstand what you feel, but it's very hard to misunderstand actions, or the recipe on which action is taken.

Its in fact a rather selfish sort of "love" if the "warm fuzzies" you are probably talking about are a necessary "reward" for the activities.

Maybe I'm stepping out on a limb here, but if love is something you are supposed to extend even to those you hate, and especially so when it is hard or uncomfortable or outright painful... Well, it just can't be this thing you think it is.

I understand the formula of love well enough to know that every time I apply it, it's dispassionate enough in the same moment for me to set aside my predispositions and "stick my hand in the garbage disposal", and at the same time packed with all the exquisite passion that it takes to have the resolve to "stick my hand in the garbage disposal", and every time it goes (at least for me) exactly as one might expect from "sticking my hand in the garbage disposal".

I think rather you misunderstand what passion is really shaped like and where it lives.

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

Its in fact a rather selfish sort of "love" if the "warm fuzzies" you are probably talking about are a necessary "reward" for the activities.

That remark is baseless tripe. Nothing I said depends on "warm fuzzies". Indeed, the very notion or principle of an act which is done personally "for the sake of the person of an encountered other" entails an act done without consideration in terms of any sort of benefit for the person acting personally for the sake of the person of an encountered other.

This does not mean that one is never to feel pleased at having successfully benefited an other person; it simply means that one does not seek to benefit an other so that one can be pleased with oneself. The pleasure had from having acted with love is fleeting, because love in the heart (so to speak) is a love that never knows the rest had with satisfaction. Rather, that love with veritable immediacy again seeks to be made manifest outwardly at the earliest opportunity.

if love is something you are supposed to extend even to those you hate, and especially so when it is hard or uncomfortable or outright painful... Well, it just can't be this thing you think it is.

You have not even sought to grasp what I "think it is." Not that there is anything wrong with that. However, there is a problem had with speaking of love as if it is a determinately definable thing or condition or what have you. That is why I note love as necessarily determined circumstantially and necessarily done differently such that it is frankly impossible for love to be formulaic.

There is no formula or equation or any way to analyze that is sufficient for assuring either the manifestation of love or the receipt of love or the effect of love. For that matter, the effect of love proffered might not be realized until much later.

If you do the things that help others, and do those things explicitly under the expectations you have to seek consent ... you are loving them.

Consent on the part of the one loved is not a necessary condition (or a necessary pre-condition) for love. An act of love need not even be noticed by the one loved. It need not be recognized or acknowledged by the one loved. Given the very indeterminateness of love and the associated necessity of it being done differently according to circumstance, it should be obvious that this does not mean that consent is never necessary.

that just tells me your expressed understanding lacks something important, and that you value the "feeling" rather than the "doing".

More baseless tripe. Baseless because it does not cohere with anything I have said, and tripe insofar as it at least implies that "doing" and "feeling" are inherently, necessarily incompatible. That "doing" is not a matter of truth; it is a matter of importance, and importance is closely associated with "feeling".

"Doing" can be programmed, but a human who is programmed for "doing" and who is devoid of "feeling" (or who thinks "feeling" is necessarily irrelevant such that "feeling" is ideally to be extirpated) is a human with too much (I'll just call it) residual inhumanity.

 

[Jarhyn]

"doing" and "feeling" are inherently, necessarily incompatible

No, rather, "doing" is the indicator of what is really "felt".

I think "feeling", absent having also "thought" is broadly incompatible with being effective in generating outcomes, however.

And yes, consent insofar as we expect consent IS expected of love, otherwise we call it "parasocial" and broadly make judgement against the behavior.

However, there is a problem had with speaking of love as if it is a determinately definable thing or condition or what have you

If love cannot be defined, quantified, or expressed in terms of some "terms", then it does not exist.

Either it exists, is real, and can this be quantified, or it does not exist, is not real, and is a made up concept.

I understand why many would seek to proclaim it mysterious or even impossible to understand, but it's really not all that hard: love is made of actions (and boundaries). Either you respect someone's boundaries and act within them to help them achieve their harmless goals (or at least hold yourself harmless to those goals), or you do not love them, you love yourself and your idea of yourself and you doing the things that you feel selfishly as a result of doing and you love the result of them doing what you want, rather than actually loving them.

This is the whole problem with 'Christians', in point of fact: that they do the whole 'I'm helping!' thing, where they do ineffective bullshit with great aplomb and try to claim importance in their efforts worthy of Heaven itself when they haven't even earned a worthless gold star sticker.

Love is made not of your beliefs or feelings, but of your actions, and of the recipe that produces those actions and the respect it pays to others' boundaries (to the extent that they abstractly respect your own).

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

Either it exists, is real, and can this be quantified, or it does not exist, is not real, and is a made up concept.

That statement goes beyond mere bias to absolute scientistic drivel. It exhibits qualities expected with the sort of utilitarian impersonality which is absolutely incompatible with the at issue love-the-neighbor notion.

If love cannot be defined, quantified, or expressed in terms of some "terms", then it does not exist.

If love exhibits trans-contextual indeterminateness, then it cannot be defined trans-contextually. This is to say that, even if any trans-contextual necessary condition is identified, it remains the fact that there is no sufficient condition to be identified - and, yet, love does in fact obtain and exist. Also, love can certainly be expressed and described without it having a determinate definition.

love is made of actions (and boundaries). Either you respect someone's boundaries and act within them to help them achieve their harmless goals

In itself, the word "respect" can indicate impersonal, dispassionate detachment. Therefore, "respect" in itself is not love and is not sufficient for love. This is not to say that it is impossible for that sort of "respect" to inform love while being replaced by love. The word "boundaries" can be interpreted in a way that would be readily compatible with the love-the-neighbor notion, but that way of interpreting would introduce the personal aspect that is missing from the expressed notion that "respect" and "boundaries" are sufficient to be identified as love.

The fact that there is no such thing as impersonal love points to an aspect of love which the scientistic/utilitarian obsession with quantification can never take into account. Being never impersonal and always personal indicates that love is a skill or an ability, and all human skills and abilities are matters of and subject to development.

An obsession with quantification to the point of it being imagined that being quantifiable is a necessary condition for existence or actuality is a great impediment to the development of the ability to love.