Love Never Harms

Having exhausted myself drawing the lines between the lifestyle of the CL and the dominant culture, I'd like to focus for a time on the places where there is agreement, or at least where there should be agreement. The place we find the most agreement is over the idea that children should never come to needless harm inflicted on them by selfish people of any sort--be them child molesters, anti-pedo vigilante crusaders (who would put children in jeopardy to destroy personal enemies), or just plain old abusive parents. Anyone who harms another human being for selfish reasons, whether they be child or adult, is unfit to parade around under any banner of morality or love.

Harm put upon anyone is never the outcome of love. If harm is ever put upon a child, that action is done out of either hatred, selfishness, and/or necessity, but never out of love. A loving person does not harm the person they love directly or indirectly out of love by itself--such action is always primarily motivated by another drive. A loving person may find it necessary to subject their children to harm for their own benefit (ie. discipline...etc), but the part of them that loves the child should feel a sense of remorse even as they know the harm they are instituting is ultimately for the child's benefit (the learning experience).

In this way, it was the sense of necessity that harmed the child, not love--the sense of love felt the sting of remorse for the child's suffering when they came to harm. So anyone, in the event a child being harmed, who has that sense of necessity without the sting of remorse does not love the child. They are instead sociopaths either without a conscience or with a warped one.

What the vigilante or child molester may reason out to be love and what that extension of oneself really is are two entirely different things. The vigilante, the child molester, the abusive parent--they all may have what they see as "good intentions" and they all could be said to be acting on them. After all, they too are "taking responsibility" for the welfare of others, taking it into their own hands, just I believe individuals ought to. That's why I champion personal choice, volunteerism, and charity as much as I do. But because what they perceive to be their love is actually motivated selfishly, by hatred, or by inaccurate ideas about what is necessary for children, these ulterior motives cloud their ability to truly be a force of good in the world, for kids or for anyone.

Vigilantes--though they may seem to be taking an active lead in pursuing society's enemies while all others wouldn't bother--are primarily motivated selfishly. The vigilante doesn't care about children, as their focus is on turning alleged perpetrators into victims--they do not want to see anyone become stronger, they simply want to create more victims. They care more about gratifying their desire to take an active lead in cutting people down--anyone who would stand in their way, no matter who must be harmed in the process. This is not an act of love, or passion to improve the lives of others--this is a selfish act to circumvent or "pervert" justice to destroy others in order to reap the reward (as Perverted Justice does, handsomely).

Likewise, child molesters themselves can not argue that they do what they do out of love, even if they believe to themselves that the child "necessitates" the harm, because their prime motivation--if they were honest with themselves--is their own selfish gratification. Parents who abuse their children under the delusion that their ritualistic beatings or assaults on their own kids count as discipline also can not make the claim that they do what they out of love. In the moment when their hands or belts come in contact with the child's flesh--if they were honest with themselves--they couldn't deny feeling gratified. It is a stress-reliever. They take their own anger out on human beings percieved to be weaker that reside in their own home, and there's no question that such an action is the very antithesis of love.

How easy it is to get sidetracked by one's personal demons enough to cultivate a distorted love. 

Society believes actions that are beneficial to children ought to be performed selflessly--for the child's benefit, and so do I. However, I'm not naive enough to believe that true selflessness exists outside of pure altruistic knee-jerk situations of heroism (which are rare). For the everyday person, the only "benefit" one gains from loving a child--extending a bit of charity, some act of volunteerism, or perhaps just by raising a child if one is a parent or a guardian--is the "good feeling" that comes from knowing that one's selflessness has done good for another human being. It's arguably the only benefit you can gain from charitable work on your own accord that doesn't harm the child you want to be there for, or the society you want to make better, and ultimately, that lack of harm is what love is.