If love cannot exist without hate, it’s better to not love at all

A social media post about an Impala (deer) sacrificing it’s own life to save the lives of it’s fawns from a cheetah attack had gone viral some time back. The post had gone on to describe how the mother deer was looking at it’s fawns longingly and lovingly and was defiant at the same time as two cheetahs were attacking it simultaneously and that the photographer had become mentally disturbed after taking the award winning photograph. Though the post and it’s contents were debunked and rubbished by the photographer, the post had received millions of likes and shares by then.

Well, love does sell well, isn’t it?

The story did fool me when I saw it but then I saw through the loopholes in the narrative soon enough. Females of any animal species are assertive from the time they are born. In mammals, they consume more of their mother’s milk and in other animals they eat more of the food their parents bring. This is because they are preparing themselves to procreate and need to be healthy to have healthy offspring. In the picture the mother Impala seems to be standing without trying to escape at all. Animals protect their offspring by goading the attackers away from them. This would also give them to chance to save themselves and females would try to save themselves as much as they can so that they can have more offspring. Most probably this was a male Impala from the way it was refusing to back down. So the photograph and the story in the post are as different as chalk and cheese.

But there’s more. Animals mate, have offspring, raise them, protect them and teach them survival skills but never love them. Nature’s rule mandates that no unhealthy and injured offspring of any living being is able to survive. Animals have the ability to understand which of their offspring are healthy and which are not. The unhealthy ones should die which is why there are no genetic diseases in nature. Animals are known to abandon, starve to death and even eat such offspring in their infancy. They simply nurture their offspring without any emotions. The offspring have to or are forced to leave their parents once the nurturing period is over.

To put it simply, there is nothing called love in nature.

So where does it come from? Apparently Lucifer was demonized and banished from the House of Gods for disobeying them and giving intelligence and imparting knowledge to us. Could be true or a fantasy story but if it ever happened, it wouldn’t be because Lucifer made us wiser. Must be because we were taught to love. A right eye has a left eye, a right hand has a left hand, a day has a night and love has hate. Can’t say if we learnt to love or hate first. What we have managed to do is to reduce all our higher intelligence and knowledge into hatred for our own kind. More than every other reason, hatred must be reason why the Gods unleashed the cataclysmic floods to destroy us (story of Noah’s Ark) and didn’t want any humans to survive.

Because there is no love in nature there is no hatred as well. Animals develop survival strategies through constant evolution because of nature’s predator-prey relationship to keep the population of all animals under control. Animals fight over territory domination, mating rights, protecting their offspring, etc but there is no hatred involved. Animals teach their offspring to survive in nature and not to hate a fellow or another being. Even when a male lion kills the cubs of a pride after taking control from another male lion it is only for mating rights which also helps to keep control over lion’s population.

In a movie, the male protagonist who is a police officer investigating a series of murders says there is nothing more extraordinary than a human being killing a fellow human being. This is true because only we can kill a fellow human in the rage of love or hate. When a spurned lover throws acid on the face of the woman he claims to love, does he have love or hate for her? The journey from love->obsession->hatred happens unknowingly. While he will continue living in the thought that he did it out of love, he may never realize that rejection had flipped his love to hate.

It’s a miracle that we have survived for thousands of years in spite of living with so much hate. From hatred within families to hatred for people from different geographies to the Church’s hatred for free thinking women to antisemitism to the current Islamophobia, humanity has been immersed in hate for a very long time.

So where’s the love?

Gobbled up by ‘I, me, myself’. Animals think in the same manner but only for their survival so that they can procreate and maintain their dominance in nature. Our population has grown so enormous, there is no need to worry about survival anymore. Love is all for myself now. When some among us spreads hatred, the majority of us sits quietly thinking “I am not doing anything so let me mind my own business”. When hatred comes knocking on our doors some day it will be too late to escape from being drowned by it.

While we lose sleep over a virus, the hatred that we have created has become a black hole that is consuming us. Not a pandemic, not a natural disaster and not a mass extinction event is required to wipe us out. Hatred is enough. While we are all told to love and not to hate, love and hate are two sides of the same coin. If love cannot exist without hate, we will have to relinquish love to get rid of hate. And no, there is no shame in being like animals.