It would be useful to clarify a little these concepts; I use them pretty loosely and plenty of others do too, because it is exceptionally difficult getting to their essence conceptually (well unless supposedly you take a pretty sizable dose of LSD, which Huxley did and he claimed to have apprehended the concept of love very clearly), because they both entail very strong and powerful feelings.
Love feels good, warm, fuzzy. Fear feels bad, cold, icky.Well, that's a start.
But then some interesting things start to happen when you interrogate these concepts.
One can love someone or something that causes fear and pain in many others. Monsters have lovers. And no doubt there are portions of populations who love leaders that maim and kill others. I love my computer and my guitars, but I shudder to think of the forces responsible for such creations. I don't know exactly where the precise components are from, but I do know how iPods are made, and I know that many electronics, including the PS2 I had to have for Christmas when it came out, were made from conflict minerals that can be traced back to the horrific nightmare in the Congo, which is still going. Of course industries have changed their policies in response to these things, but the same basic power structure still exists in the world today. The means of extraction just get moved around.
There's another thing about love. Too much love and there is an eclipsing of the object of love. What do I mean by this? When we love, we tend to want to influence those we love, to make them more like ourselves, but then we come up against limits, a tension where another self exists at a point that is necessarily different from ours, so that, out of love, we back away, showing our respect.
Kant, in his ethical works, delineated love and respect in relationships partially for this reason. In love, one gravitates towards unity, but in pursuing unity, one finds limits in difference, or the fact that there are other feeling and thinking beings that have a different experience of the world. Out of true love, one seeks to reconcile difference by both appealing to a shared humanity and respecting difference in the other by maintaining whatever distance is required by the other. We have these attractive and repulsive forces; we're all held together in a certain way.
Love can also be extended to those persons and things which initially evoke fear. There are many things worthy of love that aren't loved by many. There are also many persons that need love and aren't getting it, which can result in all sorts of negative behaviors which evoke fear, but that can be overcome through love.
Love really does overcome many things, because everyone wants love and everyone wants to belong. Sometimes one can choose what to love and how to love, and sometimes one can't choose at all. Love ties everything together. It holds everything together so that everything sustains itself through its relations with each other. Relational love and the love of a unified idea holds a civilization together, for better or worse. An entity that loves will act to preserve its object of love, and with reciprocation you get life.
Fear on the other hand can be good. Fear can also bring people together (which can be bad), and force one to surmount the object of fear (which can also be bad too). Fear can cause one to preserve oneself and one's loved ones in times of actual danger. The fear of death is a common trait of humanity (and life) to be unified around. Fear too can hold a civilization together, for better or worse.
But too much fear and there is endless division. Fear, when directed towards a person or object, necessarily means an impulse to expulsion, or at least avoidance, which results in division. Fear can spread, meaning division can spread, just as the healing and binding effects of love can spread.
No surprise that love and fear are more complex. All of our concepts seem to branch out and divide the more we gaze into them: endless capillaries of positive and negative relations which extend far beyond our ability to comprehend them as they exist.
How to understand the endless complexities of how we attract and repulse. What is it that holds us together, and breaks us apart? How to understand the movements of energy that make such things possible?
Well, love and fear. The more I think about it the more slippery it gets. One can at least feel.
If one is able, one should carefully choose what one loves and fears. One can't choose what one feels, but one can at least choose whether what one feels is right.
