it's okay to love bad people.

what is more terrible than the discovery that through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being it is much more terrible than death for death does not prevent the Beloved from having lived who we love is commonly thought to reflect who we are and who we want to be love is a creative project that people take on through each other and out of all the people in the world I chose to love you because you have qualities Ambitions and values that I like if I am kind I will also love someone who is

kind if I want to learn how to see Beauty in seemingly ordinary moments I may love someone who paints the shades of blue others forget about this seems to be why we get disappointed when people choose to love morally impoverished individuals when Taylor Swift dated Maddie Healey it felt contradictory to the feminist Soap Box she preached from when someone is close friends with an it makes us wonder what they see in them how are they able to overlook their assholery people were puzzled by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and outspoken liberal feminists close public friendship with conservative

anti-feminist justices notably Justice Antonin Scalia and Brett Kavon but surprisingly shared the closest friendship of all the justices why don't you call us The Odd Couple the 86-year-old spoke about well controversial Trump appointees Brett Kavanagh and Neil Gorsuch at a DC event saying quote my two newest colleagues are very decent very smart individuals our disappointment might make us think that love is a sort of moral perception love will see or pay attention to things in morally significant ways bad love is like having blurry vision yet from another perspective some might think that love is not

tied up with morality it can seem fine to love someone who is not a great person for example we might think that parents have a duty to love their child and prioritize their needs even when they act in morally bad ways we may understand a mentor who deeply cares for a seriously problematic mentee through her work in psychoanalysis as a therapist jod Mesler Davies theorized that children who grew up in abusive households had to hold two realities at once the abusive parent would project a toxic reality of the child as being inconsiderate manipulative stupid these

toxic descriptions would feel totally opposite to how the child saw thems but the only way for the child to gain the parents love was to agree with the parents perverted experience of reality and accept this all bad self-image quote to feel sane I I must forgo love and to feel loved I must render myself insane then when they grow up they project all that Badness they've been forced to identify with onto someone else this is the only way in which they can cope with their parents' toxic projections to see the Badness as existing outside of

themselves but this puts the adult child in a paradox if the object of their projection does act in toxic despicable ways then the adult child deeply hates them because they align with this horrible reality that they experience however if the object of their projection is actually kind and understanding then the adult child has failed to project their Badness outward the Badness remains within themsel Davies writes about this Paradox with her patience quote if I manage to offer my patient an interpretation that feels empathetic and resonates with her own internal sense of our shared experience rather

than feeling warmed and nourished by an empathetic and meaningful comment that she can take in and use the patient feels shamed and humiliated by my empathy because it challenges and contradicts her projections here her own inner sense of goodness and Sanity a sense held in check by the evacuation of all that is bad into me Ricochet back against her and resurrects her own episodic and dissociated sense of internal Badness when the therapist is experienced as nurturing it fills the patient with shame and not warmth So In Loving Her patient it makes the patient act cruel

towards her this causes both parties to Harbor resentment towards each other and then themselves they both want to strangle the other person and then they both hate themselves for having that cruel desire but in a way it is through being cruel bad people together that they can finally like each other Davies writes about her patient saying I hate myself most of the time she tells me almost in a whisper deep inside I'm evil the only time I feel good is when I find the evil parts of other people like with you it makes me feel

less alone for some philosophers a loving relationship can even require us to do bad things someone who tends to be honest May lie to defend their romantic Partners image in Alexis Elders paper why bad people can't be good friends she writes imagine someone whose responsiveness to you is subordinate to and filtered through moral considerations such a person seems to be too cold and inflexible too much of a goodie T shoes to make a very good friend and it is her goodness that gets in the way of her friendliness for her to display the appropriate warmth

and responsiveness that characterize good friendship she would have to set aside her moral filter when it comes to the Friends concerns this reminded me of a tweet I saw a while ago which was like when you hate on someone make fun of a stranger tear them down what are you really accomplishing you're making your friends laugh and that's the best feeling in the world a loving relationship may require us to devalue certain lives to choose the well-being of a certain person over the well-being of many if 10 people are drowning but one of them is

your wife love seems to require that you devalue the other nine lives to save your wife we've reached the central question is it okay to love bad people the definition of bad is not going to be deeply explored in this video I'm just going to use it in a loose Common Sense way because you can't expect too much from a 20 to 30 minute video there's a long long literature that cannot be covered no matter what big video essay wants you to believe the purpose of video essays like this are to Kickstart your thinking not

to complete it this is also not an an advice video everyone comes to love with their own biases personal histories fears and desires these are just my half-baked Thoughts with some various sources thrown in to see if any resonate with you but it's okay if they don't let's start by exploring two philosophical theories of love one that thinks of love as a mental attitude and one that conceives of love as action we need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love so rarely mentioned Now by philosophers can once again be made Central do you

think love is attitude we have towards people or is love defined by the actions we take if you believe in love at first sight in loving a family member you've never met or rarely see then you may fall into the first Camp which believes we don't need to have any sort of active relationship to love someone this is the view of philosophers David J velman and Kieran Setia both velman and Setia argue that love is an appreciation of someone's value and for them everyone has value thus it is rational to love everyone but what is

this value grounded in for velman he adopts Emanuel kant's conception of value which states that all persons have value in themselves simply by existing as rational autonomous beings who can choose their own ends because of this Kant thinks the appropriate way to respond to someone's value is to respect them respect fixates our attention on a person's autonomy and consequently arrests our self-interested motives to use them as a means to our ends hence the behavior that follows in attitude of respect is one of self-restraint which try to not get in their way we respect somebody by

letting them be however while self-restraint seems to be the right response to strangers we respect we often appreciate the value of people we love by actively getting involved in their lives we Finance their Hobbies we help them quit smoking we stop them from re-entering unhealthy relationships or at least we try so for velman love and respect both fixate our attention on someone's value grounded in their rational autonomy but they motivate Us in different ways love is such a deep appreciation of someone's rational autonomy that it shuts up our fear of being emotionally open at least

for a while and motivates us to engage with them for their well-being so love is just respect but to its maximum degree by contrast Kieran Setia thinks that people have value simply in Being Human to love someone is to appreciate someone's Humanity despite velman and setia's different conceptions of value both philosophers claim that because everyone has value everyone is worthy of love love so their answer to the question is it okay to love bad people is a loud and clear yes now before you dismiss this as repackaged hippie beliefs Setia asks us to think about

people in abusive relationships who say that they love their partner do we just dismiss them as crazy and naive or do we trust that something's there in their judgment quote the abused wife should not want to advance her husband's interests as he conceives them most likely she should end the marriage it is easy to imagine oneself saying to her you need to move on forget about him let go and that might be right her husband should not occupy her thoughts but she need not seize to love him and so to wish for him sincerely and

profoundly a better life what is irrational is to love someone in the wrong way possessively perhaps or self-destructively it is not a mistake to love them at all I think you often hear a similar sentiment in solidarity focused spaces like abolitionism black feminism and Indigenous talking circles we want to recognize that serious harm has been done and that perpetrators of harm should be held accountable but also hope that those perpetrators become better people and live better lives quote to take a more fantastic case suppose that I discovered that we came into existence an hour ago

and that our memories are false we have no past relationship is love then irrational I think the answer is still no if you were to learn that your shared past is an illusion would you stop loving the people you took to be your friends and family for Setia and velman there is a clear distinction between our love and our actions you can love someone and plan to never see them again you can love someone and want them out of your life when you read the testimony of parents of murderers several of them say that they

still love their child the father of Peter Sutcliffe better known as the Yorkshire Ripper once said he deserved to be hanged I love that lad I don't love him for what he's done I love him for being who he is when Jeffrey dmer was murdered his parents were devastated and grieved heavily Setia would say this love love for their murderous child is totally rational but that doesn't mean they should defend their child or invite them on the next family vacation they should act in ways that hold their child accountable and bring Justice to their victims

just recently Robert E Creo III who is accused of murdering seven people and injuring dozens more in the Highland Park Parade shooting of 2022 rejected a deal to plead guilty in the front row of the trial was Robert's father who had sponsored his State gun license knowing he was at risk of killing others his father pled guilty to his charges and served some jail time but he did so out of love for his murderous son he wanted to stop potential key evidence about his son's case being disclosed to the public he wanted to ensure that

his son still got a fair right to trial there has been tons of news coverage on this story which is why I want to thank the sponsor of today's video ground news for helping me read through it I'm going to share this wonderful link with y'all at the end but ground news is an app and website that gathers related articles from more than 50,000 sources across the world and political Spectrum in one place so you can compare how different Outlets cover the same story every story comes with context on the source's political bias credibility and

ownership so readers can critically think about how these factors influence their reporting for example when I'm looking at the story about Robert rejecting The Plea I can look at the key points made by 60 news sources across the political Spectrum as well as a bias comparison of course as a prompter of critical thinking you don't just have to accept these summaries you can easily input your own opinions when I have all these sources here I like to compare their headlines for example when I look at this New York Post article the headline makes a point

to say that Robert was in a wheelchair no other article I saw mentioned that detail this reminds us that the news is written by human beings with intentions it's not just some objective thing that floats onto your phone so this makes me ask what is the New York post trying to imply by associating wheelchair with this murderer and even making this detail headline worthy something smells ableist one of my favorite features of ground news though continues to be their blind spot feed which shows you stories that are over or under reported by the left and

right I find this helps people think critically about why certain issues get more attention from one side of the political Spectrum than others I had posted these stories on Instagram once about the alarming lack of media literacy online and I really think ground news is a great way to combat that you can head to ground. news/ Ali sunva or scan my QR code to subscribe today you can sign up now to get 40% off the same Vantage plan I use or try it out for less than $1 a month that's cheap even in this economy

and especially for the media literacy skills you'll be training now where were we I yes loving murderers perhaps this calls for a distinction between equal relationships and unequal ones friends and romantic partners are supposed to take each other as equals whereas other relationships don't necessarily have this quality for example parents can love their children without thinking that their desire to play Riz tag at bedtime should be taken seriously mentors can love their mentee but value their own opinions much more however part of being friends or romantic lovers means taking each other's Lifestyles and values seriously

you're more willing to try new music that your romantic partner recommends versus a stranger even if you don't typically enjoy that genre you may scow at pro-life protesters on the street but take time to discuss political disagreements with a good friend as such friends and romantic lovers have a greater potential to influence us and we might worry about that influence being bad so my son recently discovered foran how do we save him yo babe have you heard this site called forchan Evan told me it's pretty sick so maybe it's bad to date someone who's deeply

misogynistic but we can't blame Andrew Tate's mom for Still Loving Him now you might wonder if everyone has value that we can appreciate why do we only love a small number of people velman and sea say this is because while the grounds for love are Universal our attitudes of Love are partial because we only successfully perceive the value of a select few number of people we are limited in perfect being love moves us to let down our emotional defenses but that makes us vulnerable yuck I don't want to do that for most people drawing from

Iris Murdoch she writes love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is [Music] real uh Ann well uh how about a date well I mean well really no thanks Woody some of you might have watched the previous section and thought wow okay we're just really throwing around the word love like it doesn't mean something very special love is reserved for relationships that we commit time and effort to that we find Mutual growth through of course we can't love everyone and parents absolutely shouldn't love their child who has murdered people you might also

think that being able to separate the attitude of love from how we Act is a privilege in this short article titled the luxury of love bad men it's not afforded to everyone the writer touches on how men are more able to maintain a loving attitude towards someone who has done bad unloving acts because men aren't usually the ones getting hurt by those acts quote to navigate this world as a woman is to encounter not just Predators but Legions of men who insist on being loyal to them these men are not the ones cornering you learing

at you using their position to coorse you they are the ones who choose after such Mal fence by someone they are close to has been Unearthed to say I don't condone these actions but I love the guy if what I've said in this section has resonated more so far then you might be inclined to think of love as an action Bell hooks is known to be a big proponent of this love is as love does view quote we learn about love in childhood love was always and only about good feeling in early adolescence when we

were whipped and told that these punishments were for our own good or I'm doing this because I love you my siblings and I were confused why was harsh punishment gesture of love as children do we pretended to accept this grown-up logic but we knew in our hearts it was not right although lots of children are raised in homes where they are given some degree of care love may not be sustained or even present here B hooks raises love to a higher standard love is different than care different than good feelings you do not actually love

someone if you do not act in the right ways so to the question is it okay to love bad people the answer is either no because if they act immorally then love which involves relational acts cannot work even if you're a good person or sure you can love a bad person but just remember that they don't love you back the motto love is as love does is nice to believe in and it definitely holds some truth there's a reason why Bell hooks All About Love is men's favorite oh no I dropped my feminist literature book

and I think Bell hooks presents a nice ideal of love to strive for but in our current nonideal world love happens in the context of structural inequalities and a lot of the time it's hard to act in ways that does this love Justice some of the feminists in the 70s and ' 80s like Andrea dorkin Audrey Lord and Katherine McKinnon were highlighting how intertwined domination was with sex 4B is a feminist movement in South Korea right now where women are refusing to date marry sleep with or have children with men because patriarchy be working overtime

structural inequalities have just caused many people to be victims of intergenerational trauma and any one with trauma knows how difficult it can be to feel in control of your own body or mind thinking back to psychoanalysis past mistreatment will impact your actions on an unconscious level spoiler alert right now before you go any further I've been watching the show baby reindeer and I felt an immense amount of sadness for Donnie the main character if you've watched the show I think you know which episode I'm talking about before I knew about Donnie's traumatic past though I

thought what a he can't report his stalker to the police because he secretly likes the attention he's a transphobic coward who lied about his entire identity to his trans partner Terry he refuses to show affection to her in public and he failed to stand up for her when she experienced a racist transphobic attack from his own stalker but then we get his backstory Donnie already starts off as a lonely insecure financially struggling Sigma or is it beta I always get Sigma and beta confused to make things exponentially worse he gets routinely groomed drugged druged and

raped and then stalked it's just traumatic events piling on top of one another it makes him scared of intimacy his inability to be present and connect ends his former relationship and of course plummets his self-esteem he Harbors so much shame and anger about what happened that makes him unable to explain the stalking situation to the police the whole time I watched this episode I was thinking yes this is exactly why action-oriented theories of morality are flawed philosophers and common folkal like usually think that we have these pure rational Wills that can make choices completely untethered

from any influence we can calculate what the right course of action is free from any bias in reality though our will if you want to believe in one is constantly being shaped by things that happen to us and things that we perceive in the external world when we're faced with a moment of choice most of the choosing is already determined by how our attention has shaped our will this has consequences for how we think about love because if you think morality and love are intertwined AKA if you think we can or should only love good

people then our definitions of good or bad should not rely on General maxims like five red flags for any relationship instead they should take in the particular details of an individual's life and how they've been affected by structural systems if you're interested in hearing more about a moral theory that focuses on particular details rather than general rules maybe watch this video after these General maxims for love like five red flags no matter what relationship you're in can be inaccurate in non-moral ways as well people with ADHD can be forgetful people with ASD can be more

sensitive to certain stimulation I had a friend with OCD once tell me that she couldn't kiss people because of how disgusting wet saliva felt to her I can already hear Tik Tok love gurus responding to this by going if they're not willing to kiss you on the third date then they're not into you and like that's just not always true it's sometimes and maybe even often true but not always we should not Define good and bad in ways that classify people with neurod Divergence or other mental disorders as unlovable as someone who is uh very

well acquainted with borderline personality disorder people with BPD can seem like very bad people and I'm not going to try to downplay the things someone can say or do when they split definitely can be abusive and toxic but unfortunately the way people overuse psychiatric terms like abusive toxic delusional in everyday conversation has stripped these terms of their real meaning you might have heard people online refer to this as therapy speak Western psychology and therapy has bred a lot of abusers manipulators and gaslighters y'all have turned your sadism into self-care your barbarity into boundaries it just

gave gave you the language to do so y'all would rather pick up DSM FS than do a little self-reflection you have learned to pathologize why you are a bad partner friend child or parent instead of just saying why would I want to help you move you say I don't have the space for that right now instead of saying I don't want to listen to all the going on in your life you say I can't have you trauma dumping on me there's a lot going on for me right now also as this Creator puts it mental

health has become so hyper individualized that taking on any pain or difficulty to help someone you love has become too much emotional labor and I don't even want to get into the Crazy Girlfriend tropes that dehumanize women with personality disorders especially BPD all this to say maybe love isn't quite as love does but love is as love is cultivated over time I guess I kind of lied when I said I wouldn't analyze the term bad I definitely ended up doing that whether it's okay to love bad people or not hinges a lot on what makes

people bad I'm still using scare quotes around bad though because there is no set definition I've been using a repeated disclaimer nothing in this video is advice for you to get back with your ex that ruined your life please please don't I honestly don't even know how to think of love myself and I'm still figuring out what theory seems right to me please let me know what you thought in the comments comments this is a very very interesting topic to me I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on anything I said in this video or

your personal anecdotes Have You Ever Loved Someone who was a bad person how did that turn out for you thank you so much for watching let's keep talking and I hope to hear from you soon bye [Music]