How To Be Worthy of Indiscriminate Love
A reflection on love, INTJs, and seeing and being seen.
Because when you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately. That is to love people without any standard. To love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody. — Ayn Rand
I like many things. I enjoy less. I love few. Does that make me a discriminate lover? I hope not.
In one of my favorite PBS series, Blank on Blank, novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand is interviewed on love. She speaks about love in terms of a business transaction, one in which the currency is not compassion or empathy or selflessness, but virtue. Here it’s important to note that her understanding of virtue is not exactly the Platonist conception of an “excellent” state of soul (virtus or the Greek “arete” translates to excellence), but rather “the act by which one gains/and or keeps” values in light of a recognition of certain facts. For Rand, man’s three cardinal virtues are rationality, productiveness, and pride, aimed towards the realization of man’s individual potential and happiness.
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute. — Ayn Rand
When asked in the interview if it isn’t perhaps contradictory that she financially supports her painter husband, Rand responds that helping him is an act of self-interest, since she takes selfish pleasure in it. Essentially, you’re helping yourself by helping someone else. The idea may recall the Buddhist tenet, “If you light a lamp for someone else it will also brighten your path”, but Rand seems to mean it more in an American capitalist way, so to speak, than a transcendental Zen one.
If the pursuit of rational selfishness sounds plain self-serving or cold-blooded to you, you’re probably not the only one. Ayn Rand was a rare breed. Apparently, her Myers-Briggs type accounts for just 2% of the population, and a staggering 0.8% of females!
(In case you’re curious or also mildly amused by personality tests, Rand was an INTJ, an extremely individualistic and skeptical type that holds themselves, and others, to high standards).
As a semi-INTJ female (“semi” because personality is a fluid psychological concept and I consistently fluctuate between two types), I feel somewhat on her wavelength, at least on a purely personal level…? During my hardcore “Mastermind” INTJ days, I certainly thrived on a brutally determined, strictly independent streak of industriousness, readily dismissing anything irrelevant to my super-objective or telos, as it were. Above all else — that is, fleeting emotions or leisurely pastimes — I valued and acted on rational judgment. Blind conviction fueled my relentless drive. Every moment served as an opportunity to expand my intellectual selfhood, and my actions realized what distinguished man from other creatures: the rational aspect and the capacity for critical judgment. Anything that detracted from or was not subsumed under the findings and overarching ambitions of my “analytical prowess” was, as such, unworthy.
Included was love and relationships.
You love people, not for what you do for them, or what they do for you. You love them for their values, their virtues. You don’t love causes. You don’t love everybody indiscriminately. You love only those who deserve it. Man has free will. If a man wants love he should correct his flaws, and he may deserve it. But he cannot expect the unearned. — Ayn Rand
There were distractions, flings, marginal relationships. Was I in love with them? No. But were they undeserving of indiscriminate love? No. If anything, it was only my undivided attention at that time under those given circumstances (of course there were external factors besides my old debatable and extreme personality type). Because when I did fall in love, it wasn’t something earned, it was something I could neither control nor hardly comprehend.
Though the process of critical thinking, reexamining, and exercising discriminating judgment on your choices is still something I keep in mind, I can’t help but question the notion that love, too, operates on such standards. And if unmet, they determine another person’s unworthiness. Love doesn’t strike me as some merit-based exchange systematically ordained by outer rules or guidelines — in fact, one of its most striking aspects is its indiscriminate nature. Whether or not you believe in free will, we don’t choose what or whom we love. Maybe that’s why it can be an agonizing, paradoxical, self-expanding experience all at once. And why it brings out both the best and worst in us.
Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing. — Leonardo da Vinci
In an attempt to distinguish between various sentiments, we’ve coined all sorts of phrases or signifiers with stray meanings: “like”, “care for”, “enjoy being around”, “love”, etc. Not to mention the slew of other fuzzy notions like infatuation, passion, adoration, romance, intense appreciation. In this hierarchical structure of meaning, love remains preserved for a select few, the superlative few. Yet is either the conferring of its feeling or the performing of its action based on ultimate worth? Of course, the other person’s main virtues or positive qualities could determine the sort of initial affinity you form or connection you share, but the more you get to know someone, the more likely you are to notice their flaws (not necessarily understand). With love, or maybe a certain type of love, you most certainly perceive the person’s faults that constitute a component of his inner makeup no less essential than his virtues, and may even play a more decisive role in helping you characterize and discern what exactly it is you feel, seeing through his other selves and outer workings. It is not in spite of flaws that you love someone, or because of them that you deem the person unworthy of love, but rather through and out of those flaws that you may see and understand the person more fully and, thus, love her/him more deeply, all the while actualizing a greater self-awareness.
This sort of knowing and being known, seeing and being seen, is echoed by Portia in Merchant of Venice: “You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand, such as I am.” An energetic, fluid relation displaces the boundary between self and other, contributing to both your integrated suffering and happiness. The very notion of self-interest dissolves into a shared one. There is no teleological purpose or formulaic, rational assessment of merits and virtues, and if it is in fact a choice to love, the choice is of a process, an expanded form of becoming. There is nothing discriminate about loving someone, no selecting the “right candidate” worthy of being treated with kindness, truthfulness, and understanding; there is no judgment.
Nuptials are the opposite of a couple. There are no longer binary machines: question-answer, masculine-feminine, man-animal, etc. This could be what a conversation is — simply the outline of becoming. — Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet
Rand’s assertions appear to be based on the conception of love not only as a merited grace, but also a deliberate practice, as she asserts you should correct your flaws to remain a valid “love object”. I hope we may consciously grow as individuals, develop our standards of personal taste and human values, but it is difficult to insist on or believe in cultivating our worthiness of being loved by another. It is equally difficult to praise a severely judgmental outlook on your peers and acquaintances, all of whom are also hopefully engaged (sub-)consciously in a project of self-transformation, regardless of whether or not you love them. I don’t regret any of my immature teenage relationship choices, but I do regret adhering to such a narrowly defined field of view.
Insofar as love is one of the most unintelligible feelings, dynamic human interactions, and mysterious arts to practice, it seems practically impossible to delineate or codify its shifting ways, its evolution and demise. I am no expert in this subject and haven’t inundated myself with what all the past great minds have had to say. I speak from my mistakes and subjective experience. I’ve never conceived of being worthy of anyone’s discriminate love, and neither did the few people I have loved — indiscriminately. Instead, they just share one thing in common: they are who they are.
