What is the Root of All Evil?

I believe it is love. The love for specific others and for yourself make you love less the rest of the people, make you undermine their worth and create distorted images that can match your view of reality. It's a reality in which shared love fails to mean love. Look at marriages and long-term relationships, for instance. You cannot love your partner and someone else at the same time without being unfaithful to, ultimately, both of them. This is one very special type of love, you might say. It's romantic love, which in most cases demands emotional exclusivity in order to exist. Other types of love are different and will not be diminished through sharing.

I will have to disagree with this thought. You cannot love your friends, for instance, and their enemies at the same time, although you personally find them quite pleasing. Loving the enemies of your friends will mean, in the simplest terms, ceasing to love your friends. We place the people we love on high pedestals and whenever someone threatens to shake those pedestals, we retaliate. We love our children, so we are not going to love those who compete with our children. We love ourselves and, thus, it seems normal not to nurture the same feelings towards people who hurt us, willingly or not, who make us doubt ourselves and our values, who are menacingly striving for the very same thing that we desire as well.

Briefly put, we become mean and willing to perform evil actions when we protect ourselves or our loved ones from the rest. The root of all evil is in the love for particulars, whom we end up appropriating and transforming into parts of our selves. This isn't at all bad news. It shows that human nature, in itself, is not evil. Ultimately, what other known feeling could be more noble and seductive than love? In this specific story, it seems that the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. In order to redeem ourselves from our loving mistakes, we should not aim at loving less, but more. Counter-intuitive much? Only when we have managed to find that sparkle which is worth being admired and fostered in every human being, will we have uncovered the most fertile ground for unconditional, unparticular love, which is probably the highest kind of human emotion.