My 5-year-old granddaughter was painting a heart one day. I asked her, “What is that?”
“It’s a heart!” she replied confidently.
“Sure, but what does it represent?”
“Love!”
Of course she said that. She already understands something most of us grasp instinctively: love is foundational. Travel anywhere in the world and you find it at the center of human life, most often symbolized by a heart.
When I was in Peru, the chef at the place I was staying drew hearts next to my name. My Spanish isn’t strong, but the shape was unmistakable. I knew exactly what was being communicated.
Yet as a matter of public policy, we almost never talk about love.
That is not to say emotions are absent from policy. Emotions drive nearly everything. But the dominant ones that I have observed in nearly 40 years of public policy are fear and hatred.
Programs are designed around them. Laws are passed because of them. Fundraising appeals and news cycles are built on them. Social media thrives on rage which, of course, feed off of fear and hatred.
Fear and hatred have become the emotional operating system of politics, and politics shapes the backbone of society.
If politics is the backbone, then it falls to us to reshape it — away from fear and hatred and toward something rooted in love.
To do that, notice where fear and hatred become wedded to a desired policy or political outcome. Notice the language people reach for when defending their preferred policies: “If we don’t increase funding for this or that, we will need more prisons.” “If we don’t expand government healthcare, thousands will die.” “If we don’t mandate vaccines, disease will spread.”
These arguments may contain partial truths. What they share is the same emotional structure: act now, or else. Vote for me, or the wrong policy — or no policy — will be enacted. People will suffer. People will die. The implied alternative is not careful deliberation, voluntary cooperation, or the building of human connection. It is neglect, suffering, blame, and death.
So when someone suggests that love should be treated as a serious component of public policy, it can sound naïve. But love is not an optional sentiment or a soft alternative to hard decisions. At its core, love is the unselfish concern for the wellbeing of others, felt internally at a deep level and expressed in how we actually treat people. It is a personal disposition, not a performance staged when a legislature meets or an election is held. It prefers — and leans into — our own ability to act out of the genuine good of another person over our own convenience, status, or control.
This matters in policy because the state is an instrument of force. Every law, regulation, and program ultimately rests on compulsion or the threat of it. When that force is justified by fear of what people might do, by dislike of who they are, or by the political need to appear decisive, the policy begins to corrode the human regard it claims to protect.
Protection of the vulnerable, maintenance of order, and accountability for harm remain legitimate aims. But when those aims are pursued in ways that steadily weaken or replace our individual capacity for unselfish concern, the policy has already drifted from anything resembling love.
Love asks for presence, restraint, and a preference for voluntary, individual action. It often requires the choice to sacrifice, of our own accord. It resists the habit of treating citizens as permanent threats or permanent clients.
Politicians will claim their policies are rooted in love. The useful test is simple and hard to evade: Does this policy cause us to treat one another with more care, dignity, and mutual regard. Or less? Does it expand the space for unselfish concern between people, or does it delegate that concern to someone else? And does the policy function mainly as a tool to manage fear? Said plainly: does the policy cause love to be more or less present in our lives?
Any policy whose primary energy is fear or hatred should be treated as an affront to our humanity. Once we begin rejecting those foundations, we start building something closer to the beings we are capable of becoming.
What if our newscasts were filled with stories of people acting out of love instead of stories about us collectively waiting for politicians to act on behalf of the poor and the needy? What if politicians weighed the impact of a program on our capacity for love the way they consider the monetary cost? What if we, as individuals, insisted on protecting the conditions for love with the same seriousness we bring to life, liberty, and property?
This is what I mean by leveling up humanity. It is the difference between the world we currently reinforce and the one we could choose.
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