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You SHALL love
- Steph Turner
- Mar 10, 2024
- 9 min read
Updated: Oct 27, 2024
“Love is the answer” they promised us back in the 1960s. What happened to that inspiring vision? Has our love—our honor for others as we would have them honor us—grown hopelessly cold? Is there still room to revitalize our potential to “love thy neighbor”? Listen to this speech and read its text to spark enduring hope that, yes, we shall love.
Which makes the most sense to you?
The ideal of loving one another is mere aspiration, yet we must remain pragmatic.
OR
Love is the chief immovable standard for guiding our responsiveness to each other.
Consider this a call to return to our moral bearings, to once again put love for one another ahead of differing beliefs, differing ideologies, differing priorities. If there is any hope to turn society around from its many types of problems, it's the power of love to inspire us to respond more effectively to the many underserved needs fueling our problems.
Although this speech flows in one continuous presentation, it can be orgnized into the following segments.
NOTE: This was first posted on 2024-03-10 as a preliminary video. A more visually engaging version is still in development. But I wanted to have it up right away. Until then, I will let this rousing text speak for itself.
1. Elusive Golden Rule
Imagine a world where no one lives by the Golden Rule. No one reciprocates kindness or generosity or empathy. Instead, everyone strives only for their own self-interests. Everyone mostly ignores the needs of others around them. Everyone suffers some harm from this, and does little to alleviate such harm in others. Worst, almost everyone accepts this as normal. How far are we from this already?
We’re in the midst of a global epidemic of loneliness. Do you have anyone you can call upon right now if you find yourself in an emotional crisis? Who are you going to call? Are you only surrounded by people all day who don’t accurately know you, nor do you know them? We all crave social connection. While in a sea of countless people, we’re all drowning of thirst.
Who here doesn’t feel lonely at times? Who among us doesn’t feel lonely most of the time? These are fortunate compared to those of us who suffer loneliness all of the time. Is that you?
2. Give love to attract love
Here’s the key to break the chains of despairing loneliness: Find a way to break the chains of loneliness in someone else in need. Someone who needs a warm smile. Someone who simply could use a kind hug. Someone who needs to know that they actually do matter. Is that you?
Here is love: To honor their needs as your healthiest self would have them honor your similar needs. Give others opportunity to know what you need by first serving the needs of others. Start small, planting seeds of kindness that potentially takes root in someone, and then can grow into something much deeper.
Smile more at others, and you will receive more smiles. Offer appropriate hugs to others, and you will receive more hugs. Let others know how much they matter to you, and others will affirm you more.
3. Channel love from being loved
You shall love, and then you receive love. The more you step outside of yourself to serve the needs of others, the more others begin to step outside of their shell to do something for your needs. The more you love, the more you will be loved.
Maybe you find it impossible to muster up the means to give such service first. Maybe your potential for love requires some kind of kickstart. Maybe you crave a spark of love from somewhere, to light up your pilot of a flickering flame of delicate love.
I found that spark of love which I craved after crying out to God—whom I wasn’t even sure existed—that if you are the creator and ultimate source of love, please bring some of that into me. Immediately after that cry, that blind trust, I found myself overcome with a powerful wave of deeply meaningful love. Tears of joy ran down my cheek. That moment became the turning point in my life. My emotional tank filled up enough to be more giving. I started to smile more often as I finally found deep reason to smile.
Is that right for you? Maybe not. Where do you go to find love?
4. Let love melt each other’s pain
I can tell you as a matter of universal principle, that you find more love the more you are generous and giving to others in need. When you can take a glimpse past your own pain and see the pain in others, and then try something to alleviate that pain. Even if that’s only a caring smile. Or only a warm hug. Or some small assurance that they do indeed matter to you.
You shall give, and then more of what you require shall be given to you. You shall listen more, and then be more fully heard. You shall better understand others, and then others will better understand you.
Or you shall squander your potential for love and meaningful living. And stay trapped in misery. Is that you?
Anankelogy, the new social science for understanding your needs, shows how you can grow your potential for love by making three overlooked distinctions. Each one upends conventional thinking that repeatedly gets us in trouble.
5. Distinguish between resolving needs and relieving pain
First: To grow your potential to love one another—to honor their needs as your own—distinguish between resolving needs and relieving pain.
The more you ease your pain, the less you respond to the need prompting that pain. Pain is not the problem as much as the threats your pain reports. The more you suppress or ignore your pain, the more those threats persist to cause you more pain later. You then waste more precious energy trying to hold down your natural warning system.
There is no such thing as pain apart from unresolved needs. Sure, sometimes it’s prudent to ease the pressure so you can restore some focus. But the more you react to your pain, the more pain you get. Resolving needs removes cause for pain. Helping or supporting others to resolve their needs removes far more pain than reasoning alone.
Too often, we provoke one another’s pain amidst some conflict. We vainly expect the other side to honor our affected needs while ignoring any negative impact we have on their needs. We provoke mutual defensiveness, which clouds our reasoning. We then rationalize our destructive biases. We diminish our potential for liberating love in the name of self-interest.
6. Distinguish between staying open and staying closed
Second: To grow your potential to love one another—to honor their needs as your own—distinguish between open mutuality and guarded adversarialism amidst conflict.
The more defensive you get, the more likely you provoke the other side’s defensiveness. The more you resist their unchosen needs, the more compelled they are to dig in their heels. Whatever you reactively resist you tend to reflexively reinforce. You then easily get more of what you claim to oppose, and find this comfortingly familiar. You can then easily blame others for the pain you originally cause.
Or you can absorb the displeasure when feeling confronted. You don’t have to agree that you’re totally wrong as you allow these critics to illuminate your blind spots. You can skip the debate the more you vulnerably relate to the deeper points they try to make.
You model how they best respond to your critiques of their position. You can do this by following the simple format of the praise sandwich. Your first affirm their unchosen needs, a positive. You then kindly report how they impact your needs, which is the unpleasant negative sandwiched between two positives.
You finally clarify how they can respect your needs as you indicate how you aim to continue to respect their needs. You turn the challenge of a conflict into an opportunity for mutual support and interpersonal and personal growth.
7. Distinguish between unchosen needs and chosen responses
Third: To grow your potential to love one another—to honor their needs as your own—distinguish between unchosen needs and chosen responses.
The more you expect others to change what their lives require to fit what you prefer, the more you alienate yourself from reality. Anankelogy recognizes natural needs—like water and meaningful friendship and personal freedom—as objective facts. As unchosen needs.
You don't choose your needs; your needs choose you. These exist prior to your awareness of them, before you feel them, ahead of any chosen response to them. The less such needs resolve, the less you objectively can function.
While no one sits above the law, no law sits above these unchosen natural needs. Your innate need to breathe oxygen is above the law. Your innate need for social connection is above the law. Your innate need to freely do things for yourself exists above the law. No law nor authority can change such needs. Laws or policies don’t resolve needs, we do.
We cannot fully resolve our needs if relying solely upon impersonal laws and unwritten norms. As general standards for general situations, it is against the grain of law to fully resolve specific needs. We cannot solve our specific problems from the level of generalizing that created them. We cannot live up to our full potential for love while too alienated from each other to relate honestly toward each other’s overlooked specific needs.
8. Recognize how anyone can love
Need-response exists to grow your potential for honoring each other’s needs as your own. But anyone can cultivate this potential. Anyone can take initiative to resolve more needs in each other. Anyone can love. It doesn’t require intellect as much as responsiveness. Just about everyone can be more responsive to each other’s needs.
Nobody can deny love as the highest standard for how we treat each other. The more you rely on the minimal standards of the law, the less you honor the needs of others. The less you honor the needs of others, the less others will likely honor your needs beyond minimal standards.
The more you honor the needs of others, the more inclined others of any level of capacity will more likely honor your needs. And go beyond requirements of law.
Nobody is smart enough to know exactly what everyone needs at each moment. Almost anyone can ask. Almost anyone can try to offer something others may need. Almost anyone can humbly learn from each other.
We can resolve only so much of our needs solely on our own without any help. We can resolve far more needs with support from each other. We can resolve almost every need with the power of love. Or we shall continue to sink deeper into this agonizing abyss of despair from our normalized lack of love.
9. You shall love!
You shall love, or you shall suffer. You shall honor the unchosen needs of others as your healthiest self would have them honor your unchosen needs. Or you shall most certainly provoke the demise of each other. You shall love, or you shall die.
It’s now your time. Not to entertain false expectations of what others cannot change about their needs. It’s now your time. Not to indulge in outrage when things don’t go your way. It’s now your time. Not to insist upon social reforms or better policies or social change, but to respond more personably to what we specifically need of each other. It’s now your time, not to further any hate but to spread love.
Not when you can find the time, not when it’s convenient for you, not waiting for others to give to you first. But in this very moment, when opportunity still exists to honor others as you would have them honor you. You SHALL love. Now!
Your responsiveness to this inspiring call to love, love, love
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