Love as revolutionary force
On the necessity of connectedness in a divided world
Introduction
There are moments when the world seems to fall apart. Not with an explosion, but with a slow contraction: a cooling of the gaze, a hardening of words and a growing inability to see — truly see — that the other is human too.
In such times, love is reduced to a private feeling. Something soft, harmless even. Something that belongs in poetry, but not in politics. Something for the night, but not for the daylight of systems, conflict and structures.
But what if love belongs precisely there — where it hurts? What if love is not a naïve luxury, but an act of resistance? A revolution of connection in a world that reduces everything to utility, ownership or identity?
For a long time, I searched for answers outside myself. In theories, systems and explanations. Yet life kept bringing me back to the beginning: that fragile awareness that nothing has meaning unless it is held within relationship. It's love that draws me out of my head and back into my body; love that opens me where I wanted to close; love that makes me human — not despite my pain, but through it.
I'm not speaking only of romantic love, but of the love that remains when everything else trembles. The love that refuses to reduce the other to an enemy or an extension of the self. The love that demands truth, embodiment and courage. A love that does not seek to be right, but to be near. That does not pursue self-interest, but participation in the whole.
In this essay, I wish to explore love as a revolutionary force — not as the gentle counterpart of violence, but as the essence of transformation itself, the force truly capable of changing people, systems and societies. For in a divided world, love is not an escape. Love is a choice.
A practice.
A risk.
An act.
The dismantling of connection
In a world where everything must be measurable, where efficiency has been declared sacred and profit seems to be the highest moral good, love quickly becomes suspect. Love resists control; it cannot be optimized, standardized or captured in a spreadsheet. It disrupts, it slows things down. It demands attunement in places where the system functions only through control.
And so, love is — subtly but effectively — neutralized. Not through open violence, but through language, through structure and through a culture that confuses feeling with weakness and relationship with dependency. In the workplace, we call it professional distance. In politics, we call it security or national interest. In the economy, love translates at best into the customer experience.
And in healthcare? There, love risks being buried beneath protocols, systems and production units. I see it in my own work: how colleagues who truly connect with clients sometimes have to justify the time that cost them; how empathy comes under pressure when care is treated as a market; how genuine involvement is reinterpreted as insufficient professionalism.
At the same time, I also see how people heal through connection — not despite it. The systemic fear of love is no coincidence. Love sets limits to exploitation. Love makes visible what would otherwise remain anonymous. Love unmasks. It confronts systems with what they have forgotten: that the human being is not a means, but an end. Not a number but a face, not a function but a story. That is why love is revolutionary.
Because it refuses to reduce.
Because it does not conform to the logic of profit, control or category.
Because it opens a space in which the human can breathe again.
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Love as an ethical act in a polarizing world
The world seems more divided than ever. Left or right. Awake or obedient. Rich or poor. Pro or anti. Everywhere we are urged to choose a side — to claim an identity as armour against confusion. In such a world, love becomes complicated. Not because it disappears, but because it refuses simplification. Love does not ask us to take sides; it asks us to stay close. It does not seek agreement, but relationship. And that makes it dangerous for anyone who protects their truth at any cost.
Where hatred polarizes, love complicates. Where fear reduces, love creates space. Where systems define people as target groups or problems, love says: you are human — beyond your behavior, beyond your mask, beyond my need to understand you.
Love is not sentiment; it is ethics. It is the choice to keep looking, even when it hurts. It is the refusal to reduce the other to a caricature. It is the ability to stay with discomfort without losing oneself. It is moral courage.
I had to learn this — and I am still learning. To remain beside someone who wounded me, not out of dependence, but in recognition of the humanity that lies beneath. To not hate the other, even when they broke my trust and more than that. Not because I forgive, but because I see and because I feel that hatred makes me smaller, while love opens me. Not toward the other, but toward myself.
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In a polarizing world, love is not harmony. It is confrontation — but of a different order. Not with the other or the system as enemy, but with our own impulse to close off and with the conditioning that whispers: take care of yourself first; the rest can wait.
Love is radical because it reverses that order. It says: take care of the other and in doing so discover yourself. Be available to difference and grow through it into a larger whole of connectedness.
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Love beyond the Self – connectedness as a spiritual foundation
Love is not only a moral attitude or a psychological force; it is also a spiritual principle. It carries within it something that transcends the boundaries of the ego. Where self-centeredness ends, something larger begins — something that connects us to one another, to life itself and to the whole.
In many spiritual traditions, love is seen as the foundation of existence — not as an emotion, but as the very fabric of being. In Christian mysticism, love is what opens the soul to God. In Buddhist thought, it appears as compassion: the capacity to truly hold another’s suffering within one’s heart. In Jewish and Islamic philosophy, love is bound to justice and responsibility — the carrying of the other within one’s own being. And in modern spirituality, love is often understood as a frequency, a vibration and an energy of connection that precedes all life.
In my own search for truth and healing, I have come to recognise this dimension more and more clearly. Love is not an addition to my life, but the foundation on which it rests. When I am truly open — to another, to the world, to myself — I feel that life itself is love. Not as something sweet or sentimental, but as a radical field of force that draws me out of my closedness. In those moments, the contours of the ego fade and what remains is connection — the experience that I am not a separate object, but part of a larger, living whole.
This experience is difficult to prove, yet profoundly tangible. It reveals itself in silence, in wonder, in surrender and in synchronicity. It also reveals itself in pain, in loss, in those moments when all foothold disappears and nothing remains but the current of life itself. When everything falls away, what truly sustains us becomes visible.
In this light, love is revolutionary not only on a social or ethical level, but on an existential one. It transforms our way of being. It shifts our focus from self-preservation to devotion, from control to trust and from separation to participation. Love allows us to come home — not in another person, but in the realization that there is no other. Only a multiplicity of forms carried by one and the same source.
In that sense, love is not the opposite of hate, but of separateness. Where love is present, the idea of an autonomous self dissolves. What remains is resonance, receptivity, co-creation. It is this dimension of love that makes every deep transformation possible — personal, societal and spiritual alike.
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Conclusion: love as an act of remembering
In a world that spins ever faster — where algorithms shape our behavior and systems reduce people to numbers — love can seem outdated, something belonging to the margins. Yet for those who truly look, love is not sentiment but remembrance: a remembering of what we most deeply are, before conditioning, before pain, before the mask installs.
Love reminds us of our origin — connectedness. Not as an ideological ideal, but as a ground of being. It does not ask for perfection, only presence. Not for agreement, but for closeness. Love makes it possible to remain human amid chaos, loss and alienation. It reminds us of the other as mirror, of community as a cradle rather than a threat, of life as something meant to be shared rather than controlled.
Through love, we return to what we have lost along the way: our capacity for attunement, forgiveness and truth. That is not weakness, but an act of strength. It is not about making the world appear rosier than it is, but about carrying it in all its complexity. Love is not an escape from reality, but a radical assent to its fullness — including the suffering, the loss and the fractures that make healing possible.
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When we choose love, we do not choose comfort. We choose responsibility. The willingness to keep seeing, feeling and listening, even when it becomes difficult. We choose a kind of courage that is quiet and tender, yet all the more powerful because of it. For love, in its deepest sense, is not a feeling but a practice — a discipline, a choice we must keep making, even when the world demands the opposite.
In this way, love becomes both an act of resistance and an act of remembrance: resistance against everything that turns us into separate parts and remembrance of the fact that we only truly live when we are connected — to one another, to ourselves, and to the greater whole that carries us.
