Sunday, May 10, 2009

What if people lost the ability to Love?

What if people lost the ability to love? What would our world be like? I am sure that today a great amount of suffering is caused by love, but there is also a great amount of happiness. On the surface, one might think that erasing love would just make it more neutral, but considering this complicated connected world, I don't think it would end up a level playing field. Without love would other things connected to it disappear? Things like family, compassion, romance, tears, appreciation. Almost every book, poem, or movie considered great now would be wasted on this new generation of cold-hearted machines. Every society on earth would fall apart, change, to be replaced with a new way of life. Religion would be completely scraped, or at least geared more towards personal gain. Without love, there is no need for compassion for others or piety or friendship unless it is to benefit yourself. Love creates connections, without it people would have no relationships based on anything other than personal gain. In the end, people who possessed the hardest exterior, who had the least amount of love in them in the first place would rise to the top. When no one can love, those that can do it with the most profit, who are the greediest, can rule this new world. There would undoubtedly be those that remembered love, that wanted it again, but how could they get something so precious back? People would no longer suffer because of love, but a greater amount would suffer from war, from famine, from greed. Although thinking about this is admittedly pessimistic, I think its valid (or at least interesting). If something inside the human brain or the human machine enables us to love, couldn't that part brake? Couldn't it disappear? In order to calculate the importance of something possessed, we must also acknowledge the things (good or bad) we would endure if it were lost.

1 comment:

Margot said...

Wow, Tess. What a scary thought! I can't imagine what the world would be like if we lost the ability to love. So much of the future I have imagined for myself (and I'm sure it's similar to the future almost everybody else has imagined for themselves) revolves around love of all different kinds. Really, though, how would the world function without love? If a person cannot love, are they evil? Or are they just empty? Either possibility is ghastly to think about. I think about in Harry Potter, and how people who have received the Dementor's Kiss are described. "Worse than death", they say. I think it would be worse than death, to live unfeelingly. That's not exactly what your post was about, of course, but living without love, whether the emptiness is filled with evil or with nothing, is something very frightening to think about. I am hoping that love is a mechanism that can't be broken, because it is so essential to people and society. Great post!