The Balance Beyond Love and Hate: Imagining a Third Emotion

In the realm of human emotions, I could only think of two of the most powerful and intense of all: Love and Hate. The intensity of these two emotions has shaped civilizations and brought up the very world we live in today. For example, by the act of love, Mother Teresa dedicated her life to helping the poorest of the poor in Kolkata, India. Through her selfless service, she provided care for the sick, orphaned, and dying. Missionaries of Charity is an organization that operates in over 130 countries. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights Movement helped dismantle racial segregation and discrimination, promoting equality and justice for humanity. Mahatma Gandhi’s Nonviolent Resistance which got India’s independence was led by the philosophy of love and nonviolence. For the hate, I think only Holocaust should be enough to compare with all three of the previous examples for love, where approximately 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators and the remains of the damage that occurred can still be seen to this day.

It makes me wonder if humans were able to possess a third emotion which consisted of the perfect balance between love and hate. Not so much courageous and agreeable as love but also not so insane and aggressive as hate, enabling humans to oversee their emotions and control them to make fair decisions. How would that world look like? Peaceful for sure! But also, the knowledge we would have preserved from our enriched past which has been destroyed by the human enigma of war.

The balance of emotion would have empowered us to assess situations without being delusional between either love or hate (sometimes both). We could pause and foresee the consequences and make fair decisions.

As we can all agree this is nothing but just an imagination among today’s chronicles of wars and conflicts. It surely urges me to consider how we might cultivate this balance within ourselves and our communities.

In the end, probably we are capable of this third balanced approach but maybe it is so hard that society has ignored it. I hope our race be capable of such power one day and wisdom will prevail.