I saw this post on Facebook:

Maybe if I can be as loving and understanding as possible, if I can cultivate it like a superpower, Fox News and its cult will realize that the only thing keeping their movement together is hate, and maybe that moment of ^clarity will open the floodgates of love.

Maga is a case of love manipulated.

Humans naturally love. Even demented narcissism is a form of love. It’s the misdirection of it. It’s love, but the frequency and amplitude are all askew.

_{Am I ascribing wave-like properties to love? It is a kind of energy.}

Movements use propaganda and other methods of control to redirect the human capacity for love. Through misdirection, obfuscation, complication, and gaslighting, vulnerable humans are duped into directing a love that, when focused inward towards our hearts, becomes exponentially more powerful when it reflects outward. But we are fooled. The very power that we possess is turned against us.

Predators come along and warn that this love might be under threat. They point to all the things that threaten this love. They externalize this love into fetishes, semiotic quanta of “love,” and convince you that OTHERS are coming to steal that love. Terrified of losing that love, we become angry. With psyches traumatized by an incessant drumbeat threatening scarcity and extinction, the anger is directed outward. Anger becomes hate. Who wouldn’t be disposed to HATE that which threatens her or his very source of LOVE?

Master manipulators of the messianic cult of personality have shown how love can be co-opted, misdirected, and perverted to the point that it is no longer love… It’s just weaponized fear.

Under the spell, we drift further and further away from that spark that took to flickering sometime after we decided to multiply our cells. (Side tangent — this is why I feel like the whole abortion issue is a red herring — my un-scientific and purely speculative and intuitive belief is that at some point after the zygote forms, and the cells start dividing, the spark of divinity sends a little filament of consciousness that complexifies with each cell division until eventually a being emerges from the source of everything. If that being is meant to be, if that manifestation of source energy is meant to permeate our collective consciousness, then it will. “Will” being the operative word.)

Yoda famously said, “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” Each step is a concentric ring away from the pure love we possess.

Maga as case study

Maga is my “case study,” my opportunity to see this bear out in a strange and troubling movement. But the INFP-Mediator in me knows that what I see in others may be a fear in my own heart. Even if I’m not afflicted, it’s a reminder of the vulnerability of a love not mindfully nurtured.

If I allow for the fact that I have a perspective (and don’t we all?), I must allow others to see me from their perspective. Once I do that, I must allow them to feel as strongly about their point of view as I do about mine. That then leads me to the logical conclusion that if they see me as delusional as I see them, how can *I* be so secure in my beliefs? How do I reconcile? This is where faith, hope, and love enter. I have to lovingly expose my core to the gauntlet of reason; I have to feel the emotions they produce with enough sensitivity to measure and experience while maintaining a logical mindfulness to reflect and reevaluate. But I must efficiently program my unconscious to do the heavy lifting to create waves for my ego to surf in the day-to-day.

This is the great work of love. This is the work that I am here for.

Those of you who read these words, I genuinely thank you. You are watching me do this work in real time.

One of my favorite spiritual teachers, Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), said, “I can do nothing for you but work on myself…you can do nothing for me but work on yourself!”

I believe in dialectics: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

The wealthiest person in the world said that the fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy. I couldn’t think of a more antithetical statement against all I hold dear. But it tracks. The mothers of his own children have to appeal to him through social networks just to get him to pay attention to his own proginy (when, of course, he’s not using them as human shields). He posts on social media at all hours, never seems to sleep and rides a wave of ketamine and god knows what else. He will flame out for lack of love. When the wealthiest human in the world wields so much power and looks on empathy with disdain, when this shell of a man sees empathy as a bug, not a feature… we have our work cut out for us.

So all I can do is model the empathy that I know in the depths of my heart we so desperately need.

This is how love wins. We listen. We model. We heal.