119: How to Love Without Villains

Speaker 1: How to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch? This is how to make love. Wow.

Speaker 2: Oh gosh.

Speaker 1: Ooh. Oh my God. Yeah. A little to the left and faster. A show that tests the edges of what love is.

laura: Worthiness.

Speaker 1: Empathy. Beauty. Sex positive. The borders, it can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships. And it's hidden costs and shadows.

Speaker 2: In a world where we other, other people, where we build walls, we just tear down walls.

Speaker 1: Fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it.

laura: Hey everybody. Welcome back to How to Make Love. This is Laura. I'm really glad you're here. And today I want to talk about a belief that I've been sort of quietly questioning for a while and it's so basic. It's so foundational to how we think about the world that it's almost invisible. And yet I'm starting to suspect that this belief might be one of the most dangerous cognitive habits or ontological habits that humans have ever invented, which is not hyperbole. This is the belief that the world is divided into right and wrong. Good people, bad people, good things, bad things, righteous, guilty, victim, villain. And that our job is to somehow figure out which is which and code it as such and then use blame or force or punishment or whatever to deal with the folks or the things on the wrong side of the fence.
Because when you start looking really closely at human history, something, at least for me, pretty uncomfortable, begins to emerge, which is that every war, every crusade, every revolution, every purge, every awful thing has been carried out by people who were certain they were right or that they stood on higher moral ground. War requires a psychological condition, moral certainty, moral righteousness. The belief that we're justified, that we're defending something sacred and that the people on the other side are wrong enough that violence becomes acceptable, sometimes even virtuous. And the thing is, this mindset doesn't just appear in war, of course. That's an extreme example, a present day example. But it actually appears everywhere. That's why it's so insidious. It's in politics, it's on social media, it's in activist spaces, it's in marriages, dinner tables, classrooms, the scale or the setting or the words might change, but the pattern is basically the same.
Humans trying to determine who's right or good, who's wrong or bad, and what should happen to the people who are wrong. This comes from a sort of ranking instinct that humans have. We're sort of constantly ranking things, evaluating things and ranking things, good versus bad, smart versus stupid, productive, or lazy, civilized or barbaric, deserving, undeserving, worthy, unworthy. Ranking helps us simplify a really complex world and it makes that complexity a little bit more manageable, but it also creates something else. It creates hierarchy. The moment that someone becomes wrong, they become easier to dismiss or exclude or punish or get rid of. This is the psychological engine behind prisons and war and colonization and purity politics and cancel culture. Every group believes that they are on the side of justice and history becomes a competition, not just of power, but of righteous power. Now here's where I want to be really careful because when people hear criticism of moral judgment, they sometimes assume that the alternative is apathy or indifference or like moral relativism or just not caring about injustice.
And that's not at all what I'm talking about. Moral outrage can be really, really useful and really sacred. When we witness suffering or injustice, something in us says, "This should not be happening." And that instinct often comes from empathy, it comes from compassion, it comes from our values, comes from a deep recognition of human dignity, and outrage can wake us up. But the outrage also has a paradox. It is very good at combustion and it's very bad at construction. Outrage tends to simplify complex systems into villains. And once a villain exists, our energy shifts from solving a problem creatively, being creative about whatever the conditions are and whatever the problem is, to proving that the bad guy is bad and deserves some sort of punishment. But punishment is not the same thing as justice. Justice asks what restores dignity? What prevents future harm? What repairs have been broken or can we take?
And punishment mostly just asks who should suffer. Right and wrong thinking works beautifully in some domains. Math, chess, traffic laws. In those systems, there are clear rules, but human behavior does not emerge from simple rule systems. It emerges from trauma, economic conditions, cultural conditioning, scarcity, fear, power structures, hunger, biology. When we reduce complex human needs and systems into these moral verdicts, we stop learning. And instead of asking, why did this happen? How is this happening? We ask, who's to blame? And punishment becomes the substitute for understanding. And I want to be clear, again, I'm not speaking about quote unquote bad guys in this episode. I'm speaking about all of us. Punishment can be extreme like anti-trans laws or the prison system or war, but it can also look like shutting out your partner because they upset you. It can look like restricting their access to you because you are hurt.
It can look like silence. It can look like omission. It can look like a lot of ways that we've really normalized and don't even think of as dangerous. But I want to say, I want to implore us to consider that they actually are. They create villains and victims and righteousness and separation and an inability to sit with discomfort or honor difference or navigate complexity. So what might a different mindset look like? Not abandoning our ethics, but evolving them. Instead of asking, is this good or bad? We might ask, is this life giving or life diminishing? Does this create more or less dignity, more or less domination? Does this expand or shrink freedom? Does this concentrate power or share it? These questions are directional. They're not meant to be binaries. They don't define people as good or evil. They evaluate patterns. Because when you start looking closely, what we're really dealing with in human systems are patterns, patterns of domination, patterns of fear, patterns of scarcity thinking, patterns of trauma, repeating itself.
And when you see patterns instead of villains, instead of people who need to be blamed, the questions change, not who's evil, who's wrong, who's to blame, how do we punish them? But what conditions are producing this? And what's my role in that? And what could my role be in helping heal them? Let me give you a simple everyday example. Imagine someone's partner comes home late. Certainly, this is not a personal example in any way.This has never happened. I've never done any of these things, but let's just say someone's partner comes home late and they were supposed to be home at six and they show up at 7:15 and there's no text and there's no explanation. The right, wrong mindset immediately kicks in. They were inconsiderate. They don't respect my time. This is wrong. They should have been home on time. Why can't they just be on time?
Why are they always late? When they walk in the door, the accusation just comes out eventually. You're always late or you clearly don't care about me or my time. And now the other person gets defensive and they say, "That's not true. I've had a really, really messy day." And suddenly the conversation is no longer about what happened. It's about who is right, whose defense is stronger and more compelling. Now, imagine a different orientation. Instead of a verdict, there's inquiry. When the partner walks in, the response is, "Hey, when you didn't come home and I didn't hear from you, I started worrying that something was wrong. And then I started feeling kind of unimportant and like, tell me what happened tonight." Same situation, completely different system. Those aren't the perfect words per se. They're just an example of a different conversation, which is now about the experience and the context and the repair.
It's not about moral judgment and it's not about plame and it's not about certainty that you are right. That same shift can scale. It applies to families. It applies to workplaces, to organizations, to communities. And yeah, I think it could even apply to nations. When we operate in verdict mode and certainty mode and righteousness mode, the only tool left is force. But when we operate in inquiry mode, sometimes new possibilities appear. Understanding, repair, compassion, structural change, not always, but there's a pathway to those places. When we're operating in righteousness mode, certainty mode, right wrong mode, it's really, really hard to get to understanding, repair, compassion, and so on. Y'all, I really believe in my heart of hearts that if humanity is going to survive the century that we're in, I believe with my whole heart that we've got to update some of our deepest assumptions and orientations.
The places that are easiest for us to go to when we're in positions of pain or confusion or overwhelm. Let me give you some examples of things that we could believe instead of this disposition to be certain, to be right, to be all knowing, to be morally superior. We could choose to believe that people are shaped more by conditions than they are by their character. We could believe that punishment is not the same thing as justice. We could believe that humans become whatever their environments make or do not make possible. We could believe that curiosity is far more transformative than judgment. We could believe that judgment shuts down learning and growth. We could believe that certainty is actually not something to revere as we have for so long, but that is actually a closing and a restricting of our mind and a making smaller of our mind.
We could believe that curiosity makes our minds and hearts much more inclusive and bigger instead of certainty. These are all examples. And so I think here's the question that I'm sitting with. What if the future of humanity doesn't depend on figuring out who's right, which is how so many of us are spending our time, even in little ways in our own lives. Are we right? Did we do the right thing? Was that right or wrong, good, or bad? Was my partner right or wrong? Let me defend how I am right, all of that stuff. But what if the future of humanity didn't depend on any of that? What if it depends on something else entirely? Like what if the most loving thing we could do is stop trying to decide who deserves their humanity and instead ask what creates dignity? What creates freedom? What creates aliveness?
Whether it's in our family or in our country or in our organization. Love is not a feeling. That is the premise of this podcast. Love is a method of inquiry. It's a way of living. It's a way of being. And it's a commitment to understanding how we got here. Because the moment we tried to stop understanding each other, the moment we believe that someone or something is right and someone or something is wrong, then truly the only place left we have to go is this paradigm of domination and certainty and moral righteousness and blame and punishment. That's the mindset that built the world that we're currently trying to survive. The tendency to move toward domination, even in our mental arguments with our partners and our kids, even in a belief that something's right or wrong, even in a tendency to believe someone's a victim and someone's a villain, even in a tendency to want blame or blamelessness, all of that leads us right back to where we are now, to the inability for people to sit down and be at peace together.
And I don't think our planet or humanity can survive staying where we are now, where everyone is taking violent sides. We will destroy and we are destroying one another with that tendency. So remember that this isn't an episode for those other people. This episode was created for you. It's the desire to want to send this episode to your boss or your husband or your old friend kind of passive aggressively as if they are the ones who need to shift. They are the ones that need to listen to this episode. Doing that, having that tendency is to reify this whole dilemma. None of us are blameless. All of our brains have been conditioned toward a desire to be right, to be certain, to be good, and to be blameless. We have to untrain that shit. It is like a magnet. It's going to suck us back in every single time.
We have to, friends. There's just no other way that we can literally survive, that our earth is going to survive. And there's certainly no path to liberation, let alone survival, if we're addicted to blame and certainty. Maybe the future of love isn't deciding who deserves it, which is what we're doing when we dole out these rewards for quote unquote good behavior, or when we approve of someone because we determine that they share our opinions, or when we punish people with our aggression for driving too close to our bumper, or when we are cold, instead of saying that we're hurt, or when we operate as polite instead of being real, or when we don't respond to a text to prove a point, or when we keep score, when we roll our eyes, or when we guilt people by saying, "After everything I've done for you, or when we correct instead of listen, or when we use our values as moral weapons, or when we say someone is too sensitive, instead of taking accountability for our words, or when we say, I'm just trying to help, when what we're really trying to do is control." All of us demonstrate this mentality in hundreds of ways every single day.
Can you see all of that is in all of us, that it's in me, that it's in you, and that it's really choking us. So here's your homework. I'm going to ask you to work on eradicating the notion of blame from your head and your heart. I'm going to ask you to work on getting rid of this notion of right and wrong thinking, especially when it comes to humans. And I'm going to ask you to work on unlearning coding things and coding people as good or bad. If you just even one experiment, like micro step of this, just notice, just notice how often in a single day your brain wants to determine that something is good, bad, right, wrong. Just observe it and watch how deeply ingrained it is in all of us. Watch how deeply ingrained it is in each of us to desire to be certain, to be sure, to be right, to be good, to be blameless.
You can still maintain your values. You can still fight for humanity, for liberation. You can still stand for what matters to you without turning anyone else into a problem. So if this lands anywhere in your head or your heart, try not to debate it. Try to simply move into practice. Practicing it in the very next moment you want to be right or certain or morally superior. All right, y'all. As always, you know where to reach me. Feel free to reach out on Speakpipe or email if you'd like to discuss or chew on something from this episode. There's a way I can support you. You can also find me on Patreon. For those of you who really like bite-sized weekly reflection tools that both build off of these episodes, but also extended indifferent terrain. Okay, my friends, I know there is a ton happening in our world, and I know this is a big conversation.
And my hope for you until we meet again is that you can begin to value curiosity a little bit more and certainty a little bit less. Sending lots and lots of love, my friends. Bye for now.