Libertarians of the Love Economyor, Why I Don’t Care What Buddha Would Do

Solving Problems with Love

I had an exchange the other day with a good friend who was good friends with a former work associate of mine. The associate had been manipulative and deceptive, and we did not part on good terms. The mutual friend, a wealthy and buddhist tech CEO, wanted us to make up in a deep way.

Now you can imagine that any story that starts this way doesn’t go well, and indeed this one doesn’t.

At one point my friend asked, “What would the Buddha do?”
I answered immediately, “I don’t care what the Buddha would do!”
He went on, “The Buddha would tell you to embrace him.”

We talked a lot about love and spirituality. The two of us have very similar values, and similar metaphysics. But one key philosophical difference made all the difference in whether or not to embrace this guy, so at the time I refused.

“I don’t think all problems can be solved by love,” I explained to my mother later.
“Actually, all problems can be solved by love,” was her immediate answer.

Actually, I do believe that all problems can be solved by love. In the sense that, all deep rifts are matters of the interaction of traumas and toxic learned patterns, that can be healed in any given party with enough love and safety. I am really, really into deep conflict resolution. The fact is that “love”, by the broad sense of creating a world in which someone can start to feel okay because of your presence and caring, can unlock most anything with enough time and depth.

There’s another word for “love” though. It’s “emotional labor.”

The Fallacy of Sufficiency

Anything can be solved by love, but each person has a finite amount of love to give. Some of it must always go to oneself, to maintain and care for one’s own being. Some of it goes to those that one is closest to. Often, some of it goes into one’s work, clients, environment, community. When we’re lucky, some of it is left over and goes into strangers, enemies, and perhaps those associates whom we stopped seeing.

I’ve found, in my time, that those who say “love is infinite, there is enough love to go around” actually mean one of two things, often both:

1. “I have trouble imagining profound scarcity”

The first is that they have had enough of a supply of love ready on hand that it’s difficult for them to imagine treating it as a fundamental scarcity. These are people who are often had childhoods of relative support and security, often had previous relationships fail for compatibility rather than abuse, and are somewhat more often male.

When they say that “there is enough love to go around”, what they really mean is that their biggest challenge with finding enough love has been more about looking inside themselves rather than to others. They almost certainly never lived in a situation in which they were forced to give out love to others until they ran dry, and then fake it night after night, smile after smile, just in order to survive; to slice themselves smaller and smaller in order to live on receiving less and less. (Such people never take the availability of love for granted.)

Much of the world labors all the time to give love to another portion of the world, who then also only apply it to themselves. There is enough love to go around because they grew up having at least double their portion, and never learned to share or make do with less.

2. “There should theoretically be enough”

The second meaning of “there is enough love to go around” is that there is the potential for being enough love in each given moment. If we worked, truly and undividedly, to love a given person before us, it can be found.

In this, I do not disagree. What I do take issue with, however, is the idea that the potential should be equated with the actual. In other words, just because an individual has the capacity to have enough love in any given situation doesn’t mean that we should take actions based on the assumption that they will actually have it.

This is because there are trade-offs. Spending the emotional labor to solve a given problem with love means not having the emotional energy to solve another.

Love is potentially infinite in the way money is potentially infinite. Anyone has the theoretical potential to make an arbitrary amount of money.

But it’s also scarce the way money is scarce: in a given moment, each person has a limited spending capacity.

Its production is limitable in the way earning ability is limitable: each individual’s situation is different and a lot of it is luck.

I could heal my relationship with my ex-associate. It would just cost me too much attention away from more important things in my life. And my ability to produce love for him is very different from my friend’s.

The Love Economy

Love also flows like money. In a community where everyone freely transacts a lot of it and labors to create it, the overall wealth of the economy flourishes. In a community where everyone hordes and conflicts, the overall love economy is weak.

When you’re trying to build a community (as my friend was), it makes sense to want to build one that is vastly wealthy in love. And he put in a great investment of love to get things started and flowing.

But the belief that love is unlimited, that acceptance is the answer, and that buddha would tell us to embrace everyone — that is the libertarianism of the love economy.

It’s a very, very common position I see with the surge of buddhism in Silicon Valley. And essentially it goes, “I’ve had a life where I’ve never been desperately short of love. I have found that all problems I’ve had up until this point have been solvable by the love I was able to bring forth. It was available to me because of a combination of my personal determination and my emotional safety privilege, but I think of it as a choice. Since I did it, anybody can also do it too. Those who resist a try-more-love solution are bringing negativity to our community (aka burdening our economy) and should learn to be more accepting.”

“Be accepting” has become the “work harder” of the love economy to me. It’s the naive admonition given by the successful lover who abstractly sympathizes with the destitute, to those in a completely different situation, because the lover lacks a deep understanding of how love inequality actually works.

Love Inequality

The next thing I said in response to my friend was, “The Buddha was not female or ptsd!” It was an inelegant reply, because it sounded like a cop-out and also completely failed to get my actual meaning across. He thought I was being distancing.

What I really meant was, in this world where love actually is finite (even if capacity is arbitrarily large), we spiritualists still have to be pragmatic. By all means let us each contribute with abundance, enriching our community and one another, and healing all whom we can. But in cases where there is insufficiency or great expense, we must also have principles for how to decide who receives it.

We must be just. We must also look at how much love each individual will take, whether they cherish what is given, whether they are able to restrain the harm that they do. We must be responsible for the consequences of our distribution choices.

The fallacy of infinite love gives rise to inequality in exactly the same way as the fallacy of abundance in libertarianism — if we truly believe there will always be plenty out there, then there is nothing to stop us from spending huge amounts immediately on the close friends and compatriots right around us and never getting around to the others.

The principles (laws) we adopt emphasize the importance of empowering the flow of love (being “pro-business”), rather than of justly clarifying the recipient.

In reaching to our immediate neighbor, we are able to pride ourselves on virtuously sharing our love, while forcing the less proximate to fend for themselves. After all, there is plenty out there and it will be easy for them to get more (anyone can succeed). Our love for our neighbor will reach them through enriching the community (wealth will trickle down).

Love Libertarianism in a Community

Nowhere does the problem with this belief system manifest itself more than in the penchant for religious institutions to protect sexual predators.

The claim that the offenders need love most of all is actually, in my spiritual value system, factually correct: They have the biggest problems in that their problems are the deepest pits and the farthest away from being solved by love, while still technically being thusly solvable. In that sense, they “need” it the most.

Because these predators are also “closer” to the sources of love in the organization (more socially known, better friends, and/or higher ranked), they are more often the recipients. And then the lovers in question come to believe they are virtuous by working to love them, all the more so because of their need.

This is sort of ridiculously, though, because there are other people who were hurt by the predators. They need it, but are too far away to successfully receive a sufficiency of unregulated love. Nonetheless, they are still censured for suddenly not being able to act as sources, ostracized from the economy.

The human absurdity of this is clear. In the economic metaphor, however, this situation is just as absurd: Resources are poured into the points of lowest leverage instead of the points of highest leverage as a matter of principle. It’s a natural way to impoverish the entire system.

All situations can be solved with enough love… the way that all situations can be solved with enough money. That doesn’t mean all situations should be solved in this way.

It’s not about what any religious figure told you to do. It’s about the fact that in order to nurture any thriving economy — or love ecosystem — you have to pick & choose your miracles.