Fear or love?

I just watched Letterman’s show “My next guest needs no introduction” with Kanye West, and I was reminded about one of my favourite binaries. Love or fear.

On the show, Kanye talks about how he want’s to create love rather than fear. How the world today in many aspects is built on fear. Fear of rejection, of being outed as crazy and the fear of being alone.

There’s much to what he’s saying. There is a lot of fear moving around between us in the conversations we have today. People are scared that Trump will bring the whole world to ruin, that the planet will die a painful death from environmental changes and so on. I’ve never heard anyone talk about the love they have for humans being the reason of their commitment to the environmental activist groups. Never.

I think many of us needs to reasess why we’re doing what we’re doing, why we argue the way we do. We get a really strange conversation otherwise.

Gary Vaynerchuk recently posted a video on Instagram TV with a short verion of it in his regular feed. Over the actual video of him it says “I hate dogs… here’s why”. In the video, a woman is about to ask him about her business, and starts to say that she knows her why, and that she’s working on the how. He interupts and asks what the why is, and she replies “I just love people!” He smiles and says that he feels her. That he loves people so much, he hate dogs.

Now, that’s an overstatement, but there’s something to it. He’s getting at the love part at a really high speed in what he says, he just goes at it. He loves people, that’s why he does what he does, and thinks what he thinks.

I think that most people act out of love, whether or not they think so themselves or know it. I think environmental activists are so because of their love for the planet and all of the life living on it. I think that people talking about their insecurities and doubts about Trump just really love their lives and all of the things that they think Trump might take from them.

I equally think that the people polluting love their lives and the things they have. I think they love their families, and love them enough to do things to protect them. I think Trump loves power and the country he wants to build for the people in it. There needs to be empathy on both ends.

We need to start talking about the intentions of our actions more. It’ll help build empathy and understanding. It’ll also build a stronger motivation for doing what we want to do.