‘without problems or pride’

Love’s tail was bit off in 1943. Ayn Rand published her Fountainhead, and postulated the tenets of individualism—a theory she called objectivism. The battle for love, she made clear through her hero Howard Roark, is never selfless. So her protagonists never help each other find or build their love—they focus on building themselves, their own empires instead.

Rand consistently wrote about the selfishness of love (and everything else, even before 1943). She argued, through repetition not argument, that altruism does not exist. That, human beings supporting each other is an exercise in hopelessness. In politics, for Rand, people ought to give themselves up body-and-soul to anyone more heroic than them (she is known to have raped young men), and that the Native Americans deserved to be stripped of their land as they failed to create a “productive capitalist society.” Such was the shortfall of her vision—and no one suffered its fallacy more than her.

She fell in love, and when things did not fall in place based on a “logical argument” of her supremacy, she slapped and cursed her lover. She felt pain—why was this man only thinking of himself; in finding himself his own sort of lover over her? The man she fell in love with was her ardent disciple and, needless to state, had engineered his life only for himself. Some of the most powerful people in the United States of America, till date, are followers of Randian ethics.

Love, however, at the core of political organisation, has altruism as its core. It is why it gives us wings, but it also makes us give those wings away to, or make wings for, the people we love. Even with warships outside our door, love seeps in and restores faith in being human beings. For it is us who have, through such things as Christianity (“love thy neighbor as thyself”) or Socialism (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”), have taught each other to share the good things in life. When humans have found themselves in the worst end of the social or political pyramid, without education or food, love indeed has kept them hopeful and alive.  

It is why more lovers around the world find more meaning in Pablo Neruda, “…I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you directly without problems or pride…” Love’s tail might have been bitten off, but it has served to be an endless twirl in which the human soul has found drifting peace.