From Fear To Love And From Love To Fear

Dear Insane Minds,

A few weeks ago I gave a loving lecture at the University of Barcelona. During question time, a girl in the audience asked me about fear. He reflected, in particular, on the idea that the opposite place to love is fear and not hatred.

The approach is undoubtedly interesting: putting fear (fears) in the equations and observing how the panorama changes is always a good exercise.

However:

Fear swarms over love on many levels. It can be an impediment to love (or for pairing, which are different things) and it can be an incentive for love (or for pairing).

We also run after strange loves out of terror of being alone and alone, of feeling abandoned, of not having someone to pick us up if we fall on the street or not having a shoulder to lean on. We also generate very perverse love dependencies out of fear or we maintain harmful relationships for the same reason.

Of course we can argue that all this is not love, but it may be useful, in that case, to limit what we mean when we talk about love.

Why am I thinking so much about it? Because I am very concerned with the discourse of “yes, you can” , of possibilism, of if you want to, you can, of trying harder.

I am concerned about that of freeing yourself, of the flow, of letting yourself go … of not being afraid.

I always go back to the philosopher Levinás, and I paraphrase him like this to the gross, like this more or less: freedom is generating the conditions for freedom.

Fear is a way of protecting ourselves. For example, we are afraid of bugs that we know are poisonous, we are afraid of heights because we can break our brains or we are afraid of fire because it burns us.

Without that fear we would all be dead, Minds. For centuries and centuries.

When we think of love, we can think of it as an abstract entity or we can make it concrete and, specifically, love is an exercise in risk. Not so much love as falling in love, which is the form of love that we referred to in the lecture that opens this column and which is perhaps the form that most of us now have in mind as we read.

Falling in love is a risky exercise, because it is romanticized in pernicious ways, because we have been taught to care for it over ourselves.

The whole environment legitimizes almost everything in the name of falling in love and the patio, in general, is fatal.

Thus, fear warns us when we are getting into areas where we feel vulnerable or in areas where something does not quite work very clearly. Fear is a warning that something is wrong, and it is important to take care of it.

Sometimes what is going wrong is within you, sometimes it is in others and sometimes it is in the world.

Thus, a world where fear was not necessary would be wonderful. A loving world where fear was not necessary would be the most.

But for this, it is not necessary to eliminate fear, but rather the conditions of fear.

And that has to do with gender, with individualism, with violence and with a lot of things that are very big and very complicated.

Because not everything depends on us, dear Insanas. Not everything is possible if you want it, not everything is in our hands.

Happy week, Minds!