Here,  journalist and organizer Cincinnatus Hibbard shares the first chapter of his forthcoming book, ‘Love is The Answer,’ as part of a two-part series in our pages. —Editor

“ … Love… Love is the answer—the solution … to everything.” The words were wrenched out of me. That inner critic that sat watch on my words was aghast. Suddenly I was ill at ease…

These were serious people I was sitting down with. Worldly people—Adults. And I was being hopelessly naive.

True, they had progressive leanings—but they were operators … heavy weights—such as the machine makes—keen animals, such as the jungle breeds.  I had almost convinced them that I was a killer myself this hour and more. But then—for some damnable reason, I turned up my soft white underbelly and gave up the game by professing love … damn.

I had brought these two professionals together in a glass and steel corporate office so that they could meet each other. As a journalist and an organizer, this is what I do—I bring people together to help solve the problems of our community. And the problems these two brought both had broad social implications and vague affinities with each other. 

Sitting to the left of me, drinking a matcha latte, was a regional figure. Her work and mission was a project to change the culture of consumption among middle-class consumers. Her method was educational—she taught awareness. She wanted people to shift their business from cheap Walmart and fast Amazon to local businesses promoting a slow culture of quality, ecology, and community. But people were stuck in their ways, frozen.

Sitting to the right of me, drinking black tea, was a national figure. He was an expert and consultant to the wealthy. His work and mission was to change the culture of work (and overwork) among executives. His clients were money mad, productive machines chasing empire and breakdown. Like addicts, they wanted to stop—but couldn’t. His methods were therapeutic. He wanted his clients to slow down, take time for family, reconnect with friends, rediscover hobbies, and build legacies of philanthropic giving.

As he spoke, he gave me pause. “Even the rich and the powerful are unhappy in this system,” I thought. “The winners” of “the game.” 

I sat between right and left with my double-shotted dirty chai, and between them we talked around and around the twin poles of the two issues. We talked long, with speed, fluency, urgency of cause, and intellectual aggression—spiraling up, up, into the blue sky like raptors, until, sighting the horizons, their problems seemed the problems of the world.

We spitballed. But all our solutions seemed to make these matters worse. I think we knew in our hearts that our “solutions” derived from the system itself, and partook of its brutality. It has been said that “you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.” And all our solutions amounted to more commands—more complexity, longer lists, more hurry, fear and shame, and burnout productivity—the fuels and the fire accelerating us into the slow motion train wreck of total crisis.

We were paralyzed. We—and the world itself, were now at an impasse… And with that, our over-caffeinated conversation stalled, and entered free fall.

It was at that moment, in the mounting pressure of nothing to say, that I had said it—the inexcusable thing. It just rose up inside of me—“Love is the answer.”

My words were received with shocked silence. And then, there was a sudden unexpected softening—like a long exhalation. Slowly, and somewhat shyly, they agreed. Love was—somehow, some way—the solution. In the great paradox of love, these two heavies had been disarmed by my vulnerability.

We did not attempt to answer why or how love could be the answer to society’s problems (of frenzied over-work and hollow hyper-consumption). Really, we couldn’t. But somehow we knew it in our hearts, and our agreement was enough that day. The meeting ended shortly thereafter, floating away on a lightness of being…

Two Become One

In hindsight, I think things had been building to that moment. Perhaps deep intuition had guided me to bring those heavyweights together to bring it about—a catalyst. Making my statement there had in some sense committed me before my peers to pursue love as “the answer.” Truth be told, I had been thinking a lot about love—love as an alternative to our world, founded in fear. I had been dreaming about it—at the margins of my hectic life. 

Reading into the wisdom traditions, as best as I could tell there are three alternative ends in life—three goals, three drives, and three outcomes. The first is the most familiar, because it is our choice. We seek it. And its pursuit gives rise to our world-system. One can call it “status,” or one can call it “power.” But it is the control of money and people as safety. To lack power in this system is to be in danger. Thus we are driven toward the accumulation of power in pursuit of safety, whipped by fear. As only total control is total safety, power is a zero-sum game. We immediately come into conflict with each other. It gives rise to competition, violence, and exclusion—and thus to sexism, and racism, and nation set against nation. The world as we know it is born in fear.

You have only to define the emotional constructs drifting along the spectrum of fear to describe our lives within this system—anxiety, stress, dread, pessimism, cynicism, phobia (such as xenophobia (racism) and neophobia (conservatism)), panic, PTSD, mania, paranoia, decision paralysis, nightmare, and terrorism.

Now for the two alternatives to fear/power. They are rare in this world—but they do exist—uneasily, because they are antithetical to fear/control, opposing it. Hypothetically, alternative worlds could be built around them. But they are not considered practical or serious. Perhaps because they are so hard to define—they’re vague, nebulous, numinous. 

The alternatives to fear are love, and the mystical experience. Love is the end-all-be-all of lovers, the pursuit of poets, and the naive—the child-like. And, the mystical experience is the one true goal of the spiritual, some religionists, and the mystics—those wild, poetical, lovers of god.

Power/fear, love, and the mystical experience are our choice of three. But perhaps it is only a choice of one—the one that is workable and practical. I myself chose the pursuit of status (fear).

I still pursued love and the mystical experience, but academically—in library cross references  sprawling across continents and millennia. There were partial definitions—fragments of pieces, vague and incomplete. Although I pursued these two alternatives separately, along parallel lines, I began to see that there were overlaps in the two definitions—commonalities, and I dare say affinities…

For example, “otherworldliness” was a quality-characteristic shared both by love and the mystical experience—as was “timelessness”—the suspension of all madly ticking clocks and countdowns. “Love is the answer,” said my heart.

“Euphoria” or heavenly “bliss” was another quality common to love and the mystical experience—as was “healing.” Either act as a kind of medicine to our inflamed, cortisol-drenched bodies.

But most provocative of all was a characteristic central to the definition of both love and the beatific experience—“ego death,” and the emergence of “soul”—experienced as a kind of liberation. That too seemed medicinal—the medicine to treat our ego-dominant world. Indeed, each quality held in common seemed to address the issues of the world with a profound and penetrating directness. “Love is the answer,” said my head.

I pursued this research project with a detached intellectual rigor. So it embarrassed me to admit to myself that these incomplete definitions of love and the mystical experience seemed to yearn toward each other … almost as lovers yearn…

And there the project stood for some time, waiting.

Until my fool utterance—that catalytic spark compelling me to explain to all my peers why love was in fact “the answer.” I came home from the meeting all in a passion. I was going to fit the full fragmentary definitions of love and the mystical experience together, as one…

And as I did, so I discovered … that they completed each other…

It is hard for me to relate the raw and ecstatic emotional power that was released in that epiphany, but it contained within it the simple mechanism of a key sliding into a lock. 

Something opened—the barred gate of our collective impasse. The unified definition was still “love”—but love in its aspect transformed. It was love surrounded by a nimbus, a halo—an aura of spiritual power. Like a sacred heart.

In what I had, love was at long last, definitively, “The Answer.” I could prove it. I looked up from my writing blinking tears of joy. Life had become, in that moment, simple. Decision became simple. Action became simple. Ours was a choice … between love and fear.

Part two runs next week. Learn more at loveistheanswerbook.substack.com.