Page 10 - Ruminations

8. The love bomb

A staple of science fiction is the release via aerosol (or, less
dramatically, in the water supply) of a biochemical mimicking
whatever stimulates love, thus ending all sorts of human nastiness,
locally and globally. Considering what this miracle cure is going to
eliminate, one might examine it in the terms of Georg Simmel, the
German sociologist.
He used simple topological diagrams to describe and analyze
personal and intergroup relationships, based on the wall of a single-
celled organism. Individuals and tight aggregations of individuals
strive to maintain their identity through the establishment and
maintenance of that wall, using it literally as defense and symbolically
to define self and other. This boundary-cum-strategy is quite
productive; the history and development of organic life depends upon
it. A key non-intuitive point in this analysis is that an entity can be
more concerned with repelling others similar to it, not those greatly
different. If distinction is not rigorously maintained from the former,
the organism will be more easily swamped by or merged into them.
Thus the ontogeny of personality as well as tribe or ethnicity.
Heretics are despised more than heathens, and the motives of people
in the next village are always colored darkly. In essence, humans make
a negative, exaggerated and often quite irrational case against the other
to keep it away and lessen its threat against their (figurative) integrity.
It has an evolutionary function perpetuated in our unconscious
reactions to people, the basis perhaps of hatred as an abiding attitude.
But the converse is just as true, and just as valuable in
understanding both biology and sociology: the need to approach and
merge with another, breaking down barriers normally impermeable.
And this is accomplished in a way resembling but opposite to wall-
building: creating a case for the other that is positive, exaggerated and
often quite irrational in order to allow and encourage merger with it.
This is the “blindness” of love, understood as a distinct phase of
courtship and mating, controlled by hormones. It is popularly
understood as a loss of self, as submersion in the object of affection;
in other words, a change in topology leading to a new entity, the
couple.
Considering how profoundly love is a mirror-image of hate, and
how volatile their boundary might be, it is not surprising that love-
bomb fantasies never end well.