Where is the love?
Rethinking the power of LOVE.
Love might be something that we are used to seeing in reality T.V shows as well as on the most liked post streaming in our Facebook newsfeed. Although love is often tied to personal relationships with a significant other, I would like to explore the love that occurs outside of a couple relationship. The most dominate form of love that we exercise to other people comes from our psychological egoism. Which is the practice of doing something only for the benefit of yourself. Not only is our ego dependent on the benefit of ourselves, but it also limits the love we express to only a social or racial group that we associate ourselves with.
In Bell Hooks Journal: Love as the Practice of Freedom, she explains the negative impact that psychological egoism can lead to. Liberating ourselves from this ego can be the solution to our worldly problems “[w]ithout love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed”. We need to have love for others in order to put an end to social issues such as racism and inequality.
A popular band named the Black Eyed Peas released there Elephunk Album in 2003 with a song titled “Where is the Love” which still narrates the psychological egoism that is still present in todays society. As a result we have not walked forward in social change to bring social justice. One of the song verses reads:
“ [I]f you only have love for your own race Then you only leave space to discriminate
And to discriminate only generates hate
And when you hate then you’re bound to get irate, yeah Madness is what you demonstrate
And that’s exactly how anger works and operates
Man, you gotta have love just to set it straight
Take control of your mind and meditate
Let your soul gravitate to the love, y’all, y’all”
Over 10 years after this song was released there has only been a repetition of events happening in the world such as hateful events leading to our current racists President. This song was not only relevant in 2003 but continues to resemble the society we live in.
Protests are made but only for particular groups of people “ feminist white woman who work daily to eradicate sexism but who have major blindspots when it comes to acknowledging and resisting racism and white supremacist domination of the planet”. Protests held over different inequality are held in separate forms ignoring that all races are fighting to stay away from white supremacy.
If all leaders from social change groups alined together and loved one another the world would be impacted in a different way. The categorizing of protests need to keep in mind other races as well as other sexual orientations to keep discrimination from happening within these social change groups. We need to put an end to psychological egoism and realize that “ we only got one world, and somethings wrong with it”.
