The trouble is that words mean different things to different people so they can interpret what we say in ways we don't intend. Love has such a lot of different meanings, but mine was directed towards caritas and agape. Like
@ErikAlberto says, humans are a mixture of dark and light, and I fear that our social nature is also both dark and light as a result. It's rather intriguing this second of Christ's great commandments. The love it talks about is altruistic and seeks the good of others and wishes them as much fulfilment as is possible. If we don't love ourselves with the same sort of altruistic love, it's very hard to love others in this way. So much actual human love is of a different sort and is self-centred and can often be destructive. Even worse is the problem folks have who hate themselves and project it out onto others.
Yes, and I think it is difficult to get people to love themselves as if they were an individual they truly cared for in an altruistic sense and in a long-term manner of care. People are often ambivalent of themselves in these terms mostly caring to satisfy their desires and appetites rather than truly loving themselves in a sense of wanting the absolute best for themselves in non-conditional terms, especially men. If men don't feel needed, wanted, accomplished, respected, and valued depression, self-loathing, and self-destructive behaviors can easily crop up and ensue. Women similarly often want to feel their lovable, appreciated, understood, respected, and cared for and the absence of these things drive down the likelihood of self-love in the Christ sense or genuine appreciation. I think early childhood experiences, trauma, isolation, and abuse also contribute to the emergence of a self that does not love itself in the Christ-centric sense of the word. I think the humans that you're describing of the self-centered orientation isn't love as much as its narcissism or grandiosity gone awry that could be transformed into healthy valuing of one's person, but due to the absence of love, challenge, support, and discipline the gift of grandiosity becomes the dragon of narcissism which isn't really loving yourself but obsessively valuing an image of yourself as a means of coping with an unstable psychology that is prone to extreme lows, anxieties, and depressions. Narcissists fear that they're unlovable, horrible, evil monsters and to deal with this reality they need constant stimulus, attention, and gratification to sooth themselves, this kind of insecurity leads to a destructive personality that in no way should be characterized as love. Though, the grandiosity behind narcissism is not pathological but a gift that brings about human excellence and greatness when harnessed and disciplined behind skill, service, and virtue, our grandiosity is what is God like about man and one of the reasons why we have persisted to this point in developing culture, society, and technology despite suffering, pain, and the cruelty of nature that has caused 99.9% of all species to exist to go extinct. Our grandiosity and our "demonic" nature though attacked are responsible for our existing and thriving as species just as much as the better angles of our nature as Jung said, “In myths the hero is the one who conquers the dragon, not the one who is devoured by it. And yet both have to deal with the same dragon. Also, he is no hero who never met the dragon, or who, if once he saw it, declared afterwards that he saw nothing. Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard, the “treasure hard to attain”. He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself. This experience gives some faith and trust, the pistis in the ability of the self to sustain him, for everything that menaced him from inside he has made his own. He has acquired the right to believe that he will be able to overcome all future threats by the same means. He has arrived at an inner certainty which makes him capable of self-reliance.”
I can't help feeling that the lack of peace in the world comes from a lack, or a distortion, of this sort of love. Where there is real peace, this sort of love is almost tangible, at the group level as well as at an individual level. I know what you mean in your earlier post about the behaviour of groups being more predictable than individuals and therefore maybe it's easier there to amplify or attenuate group attitudes and behaviours. Have you ever read Isaac Asimov;s Foundation science fiction series? I've always been fascinated by his idea of psychohistory which is central to this work - it's a mathematical theory for predicting the behaviours of large masses of people for centuries into the future and determining where the nexus points are - the places and times where small actions can switch to completely alternate futures.
I think so, but I think Jung was right in that we need individuation and integration most in modernity as I expressed, I think that what we're trying to deal with at the Indvidual level is our shadows and inborn grandiosity that uncultivated, undiscipline, and unvalued becomes the dragon of narcissism. I think that more than love in the way you're describing we need a new humanism that can make room for all that is human, good or bad, dark or light, to myself Christianity has helped create this climate of being at war with oneselfs. As a Jungian I think we need integration, because human beings have to cultivate, discipline, and value what we are completely, not privileging, repressing, fighting, or ignoring any of it. A lack of Peace in the world is in part due to our creating conditions that have turned us into little more than animals in an inhospitable captivity. Society is a zoo, and it is poorly designed for dealing with the entire complexity of the human condition. I do think there are other reason peace lacks. I don't think multiculturalism promotes peace, pluralism and acceptance does, but not multiculturalism. As
@Wyote wrote there are many strands that are leading to these states of affairs, a lack of love, integration, individuation, society as inhumane captivity, the ignored sides of human nature, and social trends are all contributing trends. Yeah, we need a new shared culture and beliefs to me, a new religious age that I think Christianity will be a part of and once again transformed to be an even greater humanism than it has been. I do think you're on to something, but there is more to be considered, I really think that it's become more than necessary to really understand what it means to be human and to design a world that is truly human friendly. No, I actually have read very little science fiction only having read some HP Lovecraft. Psychohistory sounds like an interesting idea; I would just stress that the mathematics better be non-linear and stochastic, because for true accuracy of group dynamics you're going to have to account for the weight of the improbable, because as observed in actual human history, improbable things happen often enough for them to be significant across the course of human history, but cultures and certain human groups are fairly predictable in keyways:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPhN09a3G6_-igSBAadkkL4ViX0dUjDLR
But I'm pessimistic about applying theories to the masses. I can't help but feel that much of the unpeace of the world is brought about by lots of people attaching themselves without critical reflection to pre-fabricated and second hand social values as an act of (often unconscious) blind faith rather than a personally chosen path. I'm very much of the mind that such existential inauthenticity is a fault that leads to most of the human-created problems in the world. This is why I think that whatever could lead us out of unpeace must involve individual people making authentic choices for themselves rather than just going with one of the many flows. I don't believe that peace can be achieved by social engineering - I think this just replaces one inauthentic way with another. In a way it's the same argument about why it was necessary to destroy Sauron's ring rather than for one of the good leaders to use it - that sort of power corrupts and turns to unpeace no matter how good the intentions are of the wielder.
I completely agree and we're on the same wavelength here.
But thinking on a tangent, there is another side to this. Much of the energy in our world is brought about by a tension between polarities. There would be no electric power in our houses without an appropriate potential difference between positive and negative charges. Maybe it's the same in our societies, though in a less formally structured way. I wonder if there is actually a trade-off between peace and beneficial change - so if the world were completely peaceful, there would be low energy for beneficial social change. It could well be that we need some tension, some unpeace, to provide the energy for good changes. Of course, as with electrical power, too much leads to chaos and disaster.
Again, here we're on the same wavelength.
