It started when somebody, probably trying to make /b/ feel lonely, posted "hey /b/, what's it like to be loved by someone"
And yet, a couple interesting points were brought up. The opinion on /b/ seems to be that real love is forgotten in today's society, and people are simply mistaking lust for love. According to 4chan, "love is dead." And yet a couple posters noted the "neo-hippie" trend among politically active youth, e.g.:
>Anonymous 04/22/07(Sun)01:17:57 No.25127134
>
>>>25126686
>that doesn't even matter to me. It's enough for me that >people are happy.
>
> I was at an anti-war protest in Seattle the other day. I >saw a girl holding a sign that said "free hugs." I saw the >supposedly apathetic "ipod generation" marching in the >footsteps of the past generation, following the ideals their >parents had once held and abandoned. Signs that said "make >love, not war." Students sitting in circles in the field, a 17 >year old kid sitting on a truck strumming guitar. And I saw the >potential for a glorious future
>
> Perhaps it was reaction to the loosening of society in the >past, but we've become increasingly uptight. "Love" in the >2000s is a series of plots and counter-plots. I don't think >this is how things are meant to be, and I don't think we can >keep starving ourselves in this way.
>
> Let the "uptight 0's" give way to the wild 1s!
What's /love/'s take on this? Is /love/ dead? Are hippies resurgent? What the hell DOES love mean in western society today?
fuck I messed up that post. in the last sentence, the second occurence of the word love shouldn't have /'s on it because it isn't referring to the board, kthx
in my opinion:
we still have love, its just that nowadays if a married couple go through a bad patch they get a divorce which wasnt done in the past so much. true love is nurtured through both bad and good times - so having to get through problems together helps the couple bond together stronger. so instead i think now people try to have "universal love" or whatever you want to call it - loving everybody in the world in that hippy kind of way, rather than finding one person to focus all that love on.
my opinion:
love never was to begin with. just chemical reactions in the brain that sort of thing. The whole idea of a magical love or a soulmate are just human constructs. love as the romantic entity the media and society portrays does not exist.
>>1
While it's kind of amazing that /b/ was able to have a more "serious" discussion, that guy is kinda wrong, the neo-hippie-types he's talking about might not be the best thing for rediscovering love. Their train of thought leads to too much looseness- see those communes where everyone gets it on with everyone. Love on the non-family (if anything, that's become more open) scale does need to be less rigid, but there has to be another, less extreme way to find its meaning.
The Greeks were the closest when they had multiple words for 'love' - a distinction between brotherly love, universal love, 'lust,' etc. Modern society does seem to mostly focus on lust nowadays, it's true. But real love is not completely forgotten. The neo-hippie trend isn't towards 'real love,' though. It's more towards 'universal love' which is completely different.
I agree, real love has not been completely forgotten, the self sacrificing type (even without getting anything in return). And hippies are not going to "usher in" such a thing, unless they are less loose then thier parents generation (good job they did huh?) and do not form thier opinions as solely an anti-war response.
I'm sick and tired of ignorant individuals trying to reduce the whole of human spirit and existance to some kind of byproduct of a fleshbag robot. Those opinions source the apathy that plagues this world and keeps us all from acheiving our full potential.
If it is all just chemical reactions in the brain, then is hate a construct too? Then is it okay if we all just get up and kill each other? I mean, if we have no more a soul than a bag of potato chips, then we are all inherently useless.
The truth is that humans do not have the full understanding of what makes them tick. All they have are clumsy attempts of explaining why things work based on theories of why observed phenomena occur. All is not observable -> all is not readily "explainable".
The only construct that exists around love is how it is viewed and how a society deals with it.
Okay, my bag of troll food is empty for tonight...
Let me just throw in my two cents.
/b/ is full of social rejects, more or less? I have a theory that its users (and myself) could possibly believe in sincere "love", at some point, and were rejected because of that, at some point. And you know the rest of the story, we're all emotionless monsters now. (or act like it)
I'm not trying to be a psychologist or anything. Just wanted to bring it up.
>>8
I wouldn't say /b/tards are all social rejects. Perhaps more likely then the average person, but it'd be an incredible overstatement to say they're all rejects - They just seem to enjoy acting like rejects and morons, when they're really not. At least, what I've noticed.
I'd personally say that love is largely the same thing it was 10 years ago, 100 years ago, a thousand years ago... The only difference in my eyes is that while once, we'd just sweep any problems under the rug and forget about them, today we're far more open (and admittedly abit divorce-happy, as already noted). Social standards have changed, things people once only thought about are now acted out; largely thanks to the massive counterculture movement we had in the late 60's/early 70's (Read: Hippies spreading love, their sense of emotional freedom and lack of social inhibition around). When the Hippies eventually merged into mainstream society, their free-spiritedness and dislike for what were once the social norms stuck around and was spread about everyone. In the 50's, if a woman didn't like her marriage, she kept quiet, smiled, and handed her husband his briefcase every morning anyway. Today, she files for divorce and grabs her ex-husband by the balls for alimony, Or works while the husband raises the kids, etc etc.
I suppose in other words, all we've done is strip away the romanticism that we hid all of love's problems behind, put every single flaw in full view, and started to cut away at gender roles. My take on it, anyway - Pardon the rambling.
i miss love...
>>7
Yes, hate is ALSO a bunch of chemical reactions. It's people like you that push science backwards with your "we can't explain it" bullshit. Just because you fear the fact that your existance might be insignificant and nothing more than the product of neurons firing in the brain, doesn't make it any less true.
and as for your question of " is it right to kill people?" well the point of my post is that love and morality and all that are constructs. Morales are created by people, it doesn't exist in the world. it's a perception, a human construct to organize the world. You cry ignorance when you're full of it. Go back to your blind faith and mysticism. I base my beliefs on the observable, the testable. On science and logic.
I think the most important thing this generation can do is learn from the past. The hippies didn't work. They had critical mass, but they couldn't even get marijuana unbanned because they were too busy living and loving in the moment.
If you don't like the way love works, don't do it that way. Figure things out for yourself. The thing is, because the Internet is such a distraction nobody is really thinking about this. I've interacted in person with a couple types of people, and they generally boil down to: