All You Need is Love
It is true that mankind need love. However, do we understand what love is? The word love has been used in poems, sung in various songs and also it’s being talked about in the media. Love is everywhere. We look for love in different forms. Love manifests itself also in the social media. People post about love in Facebook, Twitter and many more. As a result, love is always regarded as the solutions to most of our problems, hence the famous saying, All you need is love.
If what one needs is love, then why is genocide, atrocities, oppression and wars everywhere? Tens of thousands of people die everywhere in war-stricken countries and continents. Children and women are being killed daily as hundreds of thousands of people get displaced. Does it mean that love does not exist? The people who champion for peace in such countries are detained and tortured. Why? Reading from the Bible, Mark 12: 30-31, Jesus tells his disciples that the greatest of all commandments is loving the Lord your God with all your mind and strength. He goes ahead to tell them that the second commandment is loving one’s neighbor as one’s self.
When we critically examine the above statement, it is seen that love has been misunderstood by mankind for a long time. It is a heavily abused concept. People tend to fill gaps within them using the word love. Some people do not do as is expected of them and end up blaming love for it. Some of the terms that have also been confused to mean love is desire, indulgence, feelings and even sentimentality. The above distortions in most cases are used as cushions to help mankind avoid facing the reality. Mankind, therefore, has a myopic view of the world. They do not look at it more objectively as they would have done if they faced the reality (Daly-Weir et al. 7).
When we talk about love between two people, which is known as the interpersonal relationship, it is always coupled with jealousy or envy. These two are not love. They are rather miens and behaviour that are based on apprehension and need. Love has a relationship between one’s feeling and emotions. In most cases however they are based the chemical reactions that happen in the brain. It then leads psychic vampirism, a condition where people feed for each other. It is this feeding mechanism that many relationships are based on. However, it is not related to love. It is a parasitic need that results in co-dependence. Sexual attraction has also been mistaken for love. Different people get into relationships for various reasons. Many people lack valid reasons for being in a relationship. The result is people failing to see themselves as they are (Vallejo et al. 5).
So that we succeed in loving one another, we should try as much as possible to see them as they are. We should not try to change them and make them be as we want them to. This then would be the basis for the “All you need is love”. The unconditional love. We, however, cannot succeed in this if we don’t see ourselves as us. We need to know ourselves. Knowing ourselves helps us avoid having sham projections that might lead to disappointment and injure us once the amorousness is over. All that you need is love and bright or critical evaluation of the situations around us.
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