Why Love Makes Us Brave

BY SOFO ARCHON

This is a transcript of a spontaneous talk given in February 2025.

Love is often viewed as weak and passive when, in reality, it can be extremely courageous.

When we love someone, we deeply care for them, and we are willing to do pretty much anything to help protect them when they need our help—even to sacrifice our well-being or very survival.

An example of love being courageous includes a mother who enters a burning building to rescue her child, risking her own life with no second thought. Another example is people in Nazi Germany who hid Jews in their houses, saving others’ lives while risking their own—risking torture and death. Yet another example that comes to mind is the Chipko movement that took place in some villages in India, where women—mothers, daughters, and grandmothers—went to their local forests and wrapped their arms around trees to protect them from being cut down by loggers.

You see, when we love someone, we see ourselves in them, or we see them as an extension of ourselves. A mother sees herself in her child. An environmentalist sees nature as an extension of themselves. When we feel connected to someone, we empathize with them and share in their pain. When they are hurt, we, in a sense, feel hurt too. So we want to stop seeing them suffering and instead see them well. We want to see them thrive.

Therefore, if we want to see people caring about the world—about other people or Earth—we need to inspire love toward it. But what we usually do when we want to make people change is judge them, accuse them, blame them, shame them, and guilt-trip them. However, that does not do much to change them, because they start feeling attacked. They become defensive. They start building higher walls around their hearts, instead of opening up their hearts. They start feeling even more disconnected from the world. They numb themselves further to the pain of the world, which is what causes the harm in the first place.

Yes, there are times when they might change to some extent, but only because of fear that others might shame them, or that they might be punished—not because they truly care about the world. So whenever they find a window to harm the world for their personal gain—or what they think is their personal gain—they won’t hesitate to do it, and they will do it without remorse. But if we could inspire love within people, they would start caring for the world genuinely, because they would feel connected to it and hence responsible for what happens to it.

When people connect with the world through their hearts, true, deep change happens because love makes them courageous—it makes them brave. Ordinary people start doing extraordinary things. This is when people stand up and raise their voices; this is when people come together and make systemic change. So if we want to see that kind of lasting change happen, we need to stop blaming, accusing, shaming, and guilt-tripping others.

Now, I’m not saying that we should not hold people accountable or that there are no circumstances where we need to fight against certain people. But unless people start loving the world and genuinely caring for it—instead of acting in ways just to avoid being shamed or punished—no deep, fundamental, lasting change is ever going to happen.

We can inspire love for the world by sharing stories about what is happening in the world—about the pain that exists in the world, but also by sharing stories about the beauty of the world. Once people reconnect with that beauty—once they start feeling awe for the world and recognizing the loss of beauty and life caused by human activity—they’re going to start caring about it. They will start doing everything in their power to see suffering and destruction end, or at least help minimize it.