Love Without Pity

“The difference between love and pity is the absence of perceived hope in the latter”

“Compassion is the vice of kings”


Love is a wonderful thing, and setting all arguments aside about the specific definition of love it is generally agreed that love is a desire to be with another, to miss them when they are gone, and to share experiences with them. However, love does have a dangerous variant, being pity. Pity is the destroyer of love and the destroyer of relationships. Pity implies two very grave errors.

The first error is an implicit assumption that something is wrong with the other. The second error is still greater since it involves the complex of the Ego. To pity another person implies that you are superior to them, and you fail to recognize their absolute right to exist as he or she is.

“... for there are love and love. There is the dove, and there is the serpent.”1 Sympathy, obviously, is the more correct frame of mind, for it is a pitiless love involving in reality an identification of oneself with the other; it is therefore an act of true love. “There is no bond that can unite the divided but love”2

Love for me does not involve taking care of someone. Taking care of someone makes me their father or guardian, not lover. Everyone needs help, but at what point does help or sacrifice for another become a crutch that stifles their self-sovereignty? That is the cruelest debasement, a theft of what matters most. It is a rape most vile.

Reference:
1.Liber AL I:57.
2.Liber AL I:41