Love Is the Most Fundamental Energy: Happiness Is Built on Strength, and We Are Only Truly Well When All Are Well

Love is the most fundamental energy is a cluster of claims about how human order is possible at all and what a better world is built upon. It is composed of a set of interlocking judgments: love is the most fundamental energy, one that can cross race, color, and even culture, and it is the true source of every great religion’s success; yet love alone is not enough — happiness must be built upon strength, and the world is bettered by wisdom, not by technology and economics alone; what is truly admirable is not an individual’s “brilliance,” but rather seeing the weak cared for and grateful and the strong willing to give and worthy of allegiance; if we share some of what we already have with those who have been unlucky, the world becomes more beautiful; and those who helped you when you were down are remembered like starlight. This cluster of claims restores “love” from an object of sentiment to a structural force that can be recognized, designed, and handed down.

Love Is Not Exchange: Respect, Companionship, Restraint, Unconditional Giving

Love must first be peeled away from “exchange.” A direct challenge goes to the kind of family feeling captured in the saying “raise children to provide for your old age”: once procreation carries a transactional motive, the upbringing that follows can never be a true upbringing.

If you raise children to provide for your old age, then spare me the talk of how great a mother’s love is… If you have children with that kind of transactional motive, how could the upbringing of your future children possibly be a true upbringing… Love is respect, it is companionship, it is restraint, it is unconditional giving.

This framing defines love as four acts stripped of any expectation of return: respect, companionship, restraint, and unconditional giving. Of these, “restraint” is especially decisive — it means that love is neither possession nor the forcing of another into the mold of one’s own expectations, a point that shares its root with the distinction between “shaping” and “freedom” in Growing Up Is Being Pressed Into Society’s Mold: Disenchantment Reveals Freedom. It is precisely because love asks for no return that it can become the “most fundamental” energy described below; the moment exchange is mixed in, it is demoted to a hidden calculation rather than love itself.

Know Love Through Its Small, Ordinary Details: Touch Is the Earliest Emotion

Once love is defined as unconditional giving, its true form is found not in grand declarations but in the small things of daily life. A mother’s love is so often buried under the trivia of day after day that it becomes hard to see directly; the real way to know love is precisely to “know love through its small, ordinary details.”

Touch is a person’s earliest emotion. A reaching hand, the gesture of an embrace — what opens is not only the arms but an affection held back by nothing… “Know love through its small, ordinary details.”

To name “touch” as a person’s earliest emotion is the epistemological extension of this claim: love is not an abstraction first conceived and then practiced, but something first known through the body, through the plainest contact. It exists prior to language and prior to explanation, in keeping with the point in Every Transmission Loses Something: Heart-to-Heart Sealing, the Picture Frame, and Education that some things cannot be conveyed by words and can only be met face to face.

Love Is the Most Fundamental Energy: Crossing Race, Color, and Culture

Having clarified the form of love, the claim raises it to the level of energy. Approached from the angle of religion and psychology: the great religions succeeded because of the psychological mechanisms at work within them, and in today’s society, what can cross every artificial division is precisely love.

The root of the success of the great religions — Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam. The role psychology plays within them. In today’s society. Love can cross race, color, even culture. Love is the most fundamental energy.

“Most fundamental” is the key word of this claim: race, color, and culture are divisions layered on later, while love lies beneath these divisions and can therefore pierce through them. This is consistent with a structure that runs throughout these entries, in which “beneath the phenomenal layer there lies a more fundamental reality layer” — the divisions belong to the phenomenal layer, while love belongs to the more fundamental layer of energy. It is for this same reason that “kindness” is understood as something almost ontological, as set out in Kindness Is the Light Within: The Eyes Go Dark When Belief Is Gone.

Happiness Is Built Upon Strength: By Wisdom, Not by Technology and Economics Alone

Love is the most fundamental energy, but this does not mean that having love is enough. A premise people are unwilling to admit is deliberately punctured here: happiness is built upon strength. Goodwill without strength often lacks the power to make good on itself, and so making the world better cannot fix its gaze on technology and economics alone — it depends still more on wisdom.

Yet people are unwilling to say that happiness is built upon strength… To make the world more beautiful is not merely a matter of technology and economics; what matters more is wisdom.

This judgment gives the whole cluster its realist skeleton: it keeps “love is the most fundamental energy” from sliding into pure sentimentalism. Love needs strength to carry it, or else it is only a wish; and strength needs wisdom to guide it, or else it is only brute force. The distinction “by wisdom, not by technology and economics alone” runs parallel to the position in Raising Your Cognition Is the Only Shortcut: You Cannot Earn Money Beyond Your Cognition that “cognition is the fundamental lever” — what determines where the world goes is not the tools themselves but the cognition and judgment with which they are used.

Only When All Are Well Is It Truly Well: Let the Weak Be Cared For and the Strong Willing to Give

From “happiness is built upon strength” there follows naturally a rethinking of “individual success.” Some people’s “brilliance,” it turns out, does nothing to make the world better, and so the standard of “good” shifts from the individual to the whole — only when all are well is it truly well.

I have found that some people’s brilliance does nothing to make the world better… Only when all are well is it truly well. And how are all well? With healthy values… The truly great and admirable person is the one who lets the weak receive more care while also teaching them to be grateful, and who lets the strong become more willing to give, and worthy of allegiance.

What is offered here is a two-way virtuous structure: at the weak end, they are to “receive care” and “be grateful”; at the strong end, they are to “be willing to give” and “be worthy of allegiance” — care that breeds no dependency, giving that earns no arrogance. The root of this structure traces back to education and values, in full agreement with Education Is the Root of All Roots: Values Are the Soil, Morality the Lubricant of Efficiency, Law the Floor: what decides whether a person takes or gives, resents or gives thanks, is in the end the soil of their values. “Let the strong be worthy of allegiance” also echoes “happiness is built upon strength” — strength must be well guided so that it does not degenerate into the blind worship of the strong criticized in The Cognitive Pain of the Middle Class: Worshipping the Strong, Loathing the Job, Mistaking Jade for a Wooden Carving, and Cliques Huddling Together.

Redistribution Leads to a More Beautiful World: Do They Have a Choice?

When “all are well” comes down to the operational level, it is redistribution. The argument is for sharing some of what we already have with those who have been unlucky, and it directly refutes the claim that “they don’t deserve it” — birth, environment, and education are none of them things the person could choose.

If we really shared some of what we already have with them, wouldn’t the world become more beautiful? Some say they don’t deserve it. Then I want to ask: do they have a choice? Their birth, their environment, their education! Balance is a standard that can never be reached, but only by pursuing balance can we come close to balance.

The force of this argument lies in the rhetorical question “do they have a choice?”: it re-attributes “misfortune” from a moral failing back to an inequality of initial conditions, thereby pulling out the ground from under “they don’t deserve it.” Its closing line — “balance is a standard that can never be reached, but only by pursuing balance can we come close to balance” — admits that the ideal state can never be fully arrived at, yet still sets “the pursuit” itself as the only path toward it, a structure identical to that of Only the Road Is Real: The Process Is the Purpose — the destination cannot be had, but to walk the road is itself to draw near.

Let the Strong Pass Their Love On: Changing the World’s Division of Labor and Distribution

Redistribution is not confined to things; still more it lies in the direction in which “love” flows. The gaze here falls upon the world’s division of labor and distribution, with the hope of letting each person do what they are best at; and for those born with no particular talent, what is envisioned is not elimination but that they receive the love of the strong, and through that pass love on in turn.

I hope to change the problem of the world’s division of labor and distribution, to let each person [do] what they are best at. If some people are born with no particular talent, then they can receive the love of the strong, and they too will pass that love on.

Here appears “passing it on” — love is not a one-way handout but a chain that can continue. The one who has received love becomes the next one to give it, and so the two-way structure of “the strong give, the weak are grateful” closes, along the dimension of time, into a self-perpetuating cycle. This answers, beginning to end, to “raising children to provide for your old age is not love”: true love asks for no return in the present, yet it is precisely because it asks for no return that it can be passed on over a longer stretch of time. It also corrects the old narrative of “suffering bought with richness,” running in the same direction as Growth Need Not Cost You Pain — love can be the nourishment of growth, rather than something that must be paid for with scarcity and hardship.

Those Whose Presence Lit Up Your Being: Who Helped You When You Were Down Is Remembered Like Starlight

The final link in the cluster is a portrait of the psychology of the one who is loved. Those who helped you, who cared for you, in the two most fragile moments — starting a venture and falling on hard times — are remembered in a special way; they are few, yet they light the road ahead like starlight.

Those who helped you when you were starting out, who cared for you when you had fallen on hard times — you will remember them in a special way… Those few people will light the road ahead of you like starlight.

The image of “starlight” answers, aesthetically, to “love is the most fundamental energy”: energy is seen most clearly against the backdrop of darkness (falling on hard times), just as starlight shows itself only at night. This judgment also gives the whole cluster its emotional closure — love is not only abstract energy and institutional arrangement; in the end it settles into particular people remembered, particular memories of being lit up in the hardest hours. What these “few people” mean to a person is isomorphic with The People You Hold Dear Are the Reason to Keep Going: out on the wilderness of meaninglessness, it is concrete people and concrete love that make up the reason to keep walking on.

Sources

Manuscript — “raising children to provide for your old age is not love”; love is respect, companionship, restraint, unconditional giving
Manuscript — “happiness is built upon strength”; the world is bettered by wisdom, not by technology and economics alone
Manuscript — “touch is a person’s earliest emotion”; “know love through its small, ordinary details”
Manuscript — those who helped you when you were down “light the road ahead of you like starlight”
Manuscript — the redistribution argument: “do they have a choice?”; only by pursuing balance can we come close to balance
Manuscript — the source of the great religions’ success and the role of psychology; “love can cross race, color, even culture. Love is the most fundamental energy”
Manuscript — “only when all are well is it truly well”; let the weak be cared for and grateful, the strong willing to give and worthy of allegiance
Manuscript — changing the world’s division of labor and distribution; “they can receive the love of the strong, and they too will pass that love on”

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