We are tend to believe that love is this beautiful thing that is opposing to evil. It should be evil that aims to destroy, not love, right? Wrong. In reality, love, like any emotion, can drive one to do acts of evil, and with evil intentions.
When someone loves us, does that mean he/she is always going to be on our side? Not necessarily so. Unfortunately, the English language word love has a wide cross section of meanings. The word love can refer to a food that happens to taste good in our mouth or our feelings for our one and only child that we cherish.
We know there are different kinds of love. There is romantic love, companionate love, parent-child love and love for a food; but there is another broader categorization of love that many people do not know about: love as an emotional attachment versus love as in caring and acting in the better interests of another. These two categories of love do not go together as much as one may think. You can act in the better interests of a stranger without expecting anything in return, but that does not mean you have an emotional attachment to the stranger. Conversely, you can have an emotional attachment to someone, but that does not mean you will act in his/her better interests. Some will even say that it is our loved ones that we treat the worst while we tend to be on our best behavior around strangers and acquaintances.
Below are some acts of evil that have been done and with love for another person as the motivating force:
–> committing adultery
–> abandoning duties and responsibilities
–> stealing
–> stalking
–> favoritism
–> Anakin Skywalker’s conversion to the dark side, motivated by his love for Padme. The dark side promises Anakin that it could prevent Padme from dying in childbirth. After Anakin converts to the dark side, Padme still dies and Anakin becomes the infamous Darth Vader
When someone says he/she is acting “out of love” or “in the name of love”, we are expected to believe that what he/she is doing must be good, but such a notion is far from reality. In my opinion, acting “out of love” does not drive one to do good any more than acting out of other emotions like anger or fear.
Romantic love in particular can be very shallow or very deep. It may refer to a schoolgirl/schoolboy crush or a deep connection between two people who have been married for 50 years. A man stalking a woman can say that he is stalking the woman because he loves her, and he may be telling the truth. He may indeed have a romantic attraction towards the woman that could fall under one of the many definitions of the word love, but that does not mean that the man cares about the woman’s better interests. In his evil heart, he believes he is entitled to have her, wield control over her and maybe even abuse her.
Love as a rationalization for evil behaviors
Sometimes evildoers will use love to rationalize their evil behaviors. In one Dr. Phil show I saw, an abusive male partner and his female victim were seated. The man had been stalking this woman and making her feel like she was a horrible person. He was telling Dr. Phil how terrible she was. In response, Dr. Phil asked him why he would bother being in a relationship with her if he thought she was so terrible. “Because I love her” he said. Here, the man is using his “love” for this woman to justify his stalking her and abusing her. Not only was he in denial that he was the bad guy, he thought that she was the bad one, but because he is “so loving”, he wanted to be with her anyway. How sickening is that?
Romantic relationships are not the only kind of relationship where love is used to justify evil. Sometimes an adult will touch a child in an inappropriate manner. The child may make it obvious that the touching is unwelcome by flinching in response, but the adult continues with the unsolicited touching anyway. The adult may caress the child along the face and neck, run his/her fingers through the child’s hair, wrap his/her hands and arms around the child’s waist. If the adult is a woman, the adult may do a line of kisses all along the child’s neck, without care about whether all of this kissing is okay with the child. The adult believes that this is okay, because all he/she is doing is expressing his/her love and affection for the child. The adult says that he/she just loves the child so much that he/she cannot help but express his/her immense affection for the child, and we are to believe that this is a beautiful thing.
This so-called expression of love and affection for a child, in physical form, may be a manifestation of pedophilic tendencies on the part of the adult. Children are generally easy targets for unsolicited touching because they are smaller and therefore easy to overpower. They also are taught to be obedient and respectful to adults, and not talk back at them. Though this unsolicited touching is not exactly traumatizing, it can do mental damage to a child because it teaches the child that he/she is not worthy to have his/her own space, and for that space to not be invaded by another person. Of course if a child is about to step in front of a moving vehicle, the adult must grab the child and pull the child out of the way even if the child does not want to be touched. However, putting one’s hands on a child in an unsolicited manner just for the sake of expressing one’s “affection” for the child is not only unnecessary, but arguably abusive.
Sometimes evildoers try to wield control over another person and call it love. Generally, evildoers gravitate towards positions of power. More power means they can get their way. Even when the evildoer does not aim to do harm, the evildoer can still try to do what it takes to get his/her way regardless of the harm may befall someone else. Power over others also gives the evildoer a sense of superiority, which can help the evildoer with his/her own insecurities.
Love is one of the things that evildoers will use to justify their harmful controlling behaviors over others where they may manipulate the victims into accepting the control over their lives as being “for their own good”. Controlling behaviors can be harmful to the victim because they can involve mental abuse, invasion of physical space, manipulation and invasion of the victim’s life. The victim can suffer from diminished psychological health because of the resulting lack of control over his/her own life. When the victim tries to take back control over his/her life, the evildoer may accuse the victim of being the one who likes to always be in control and make the victim feel guilty.
“I am worried about you…I am doing this because I love you so much…” the evildoer may say to the victim. Here, the evildoer is using the concept of love as a rationalization to wield oppressive control over the victim, and establish his/her position of superiority over the victim. If the victim objects, the evildoer may attempt to accuse the victim of being “insolent” and “ungrateful that somebody cares about him/her”. These forms of manipulation are meant to keep the victim in a state of submission so that the evildoer can continue to have his/her way.
I personally do not think it is normal to have such a strong desire to control another person’s life. I think such a desire is pathological. If you really cared about the person, you would respect his/her autonomy and only forcibly intervene if you really had reason to believe that the other person was continually harming him/herself, as is the case with eating disorders, drug abuse and other forms of self harm.
When is love good?
What if we care about someone’s better interests? Could this kind of love drive us to do evil? The answer is yes. For example, if we care about someone who needs a liver transplant, and we go out and kill someone else so that we can harvest his/her liver, then we did act out of love, and we did perhaps act in the better interests of the one we care about who needs a liver transplant, but that does not mean that what we did was not evil. The reason is that acting in the better interests of one person may be to the detriment of another person.
The only kind of love I can think of that would NOT motivate one to do evil is caring and acting in the better interests of ALL. True, someone who cares about the better interests of all may still do something stupid with bad unintended consequences, but at least the intentions would not be evil intentions.