On Unconditional Love, Part I

This is an excerpt from John Galt's radio speech in Atlas Shrugged.

"Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

"[However,] your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as a response to his worth, but as a response to his need; not as a reward, but as alms; not as payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices.

"Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment, that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love, the greater the depravity it permits to the loved.

"To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, [your morality] tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don't deserve it, and the less they deserve it the more love you owe them - the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love - the more unfastidious your love, the greater your virtue - and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection."

The term "your morality" of which John Galt speaks is what he proves in the speech to actually be the Morality of Death - that which is embraced, expounded, and insidiously imposed on us by today's social engineers, globalist politicians, union bosses, poverty pimps... in general, the enemies of individual strength and achievement, evil enemies who seek power for themselves and desire to enslave us to their cannibalism of our mind, spirit, self-reliance, and creative productivity.

I, like you, was taught that true love is unconditional. I have spent most of my life feeling tortured, conflicted that I could not comply. My mind kept saying NO! to the irrational demand for "love" at any price, for whatever reason, no matter how unworthy the object, while I attempted to give it anyway because I was "supposed to."

Now I understand why it is not possible for me to love "unconditionally." It's not because I cannot tolerate mistakes or flaws - I certainly make plenty of mistakes and have numerous flaws. But it's uncorrected mistakes and cultivated flaws coupled with the sense of entitlement to the precious gift of my love without regard for its value and without any effort whatsoever to be worthy of such a gift as love.

For years, I have called it the "lie of  tolerance" on the social scale. We are mentally beaten into accepting what was previously and would be otherwise unacceptable in civilized society. And we are told that it now does define "civilized society." We are told to accept that which brings about our physical, mental, and spiritual demise in favor of pleasing someone else who has no standards, no values, no moral code of behavior, no motive of action except to bring about his own destruction - and ours, ultimately.
 
Those of us who espouse the Morality of Life simply cannot abide the Morality of Death that is all around us and espoused by those currently in political and economic power. We cannot accept behavior that contradicts our moral code - standards I cannot compromise, even though I have tried - without killing a piece of our own spirit. I've done that, too.

This applies to our society as well as our personal lives. Which moral code will you choose?

Part II: God
Part III: Selfishness