Essay Questions

What is the defining impetus behind the author’s decision to write this book?

The book covers a wide range of subjects and pursues several different thematic tracks related to the issue of its grandly comprehensive title. That said, in the Introduction the author explicitly references a distinct stimulus behind the decision to explore the topic. She explains how during her lecture tours in which she discusses the topics that have been the primary focus of her previous books—racism and sexism—she began to notice a significant generational shift on the perspective toward a defining element of social interaction. The younger her audience members were, the more likely they were to be resistant to the concept of love as a viable transformative force in the world. Somehow, over the course of the preceding few decades, the youth of America had come to collectively view love with mistrust and associate it as a character flaw connected to weakness, naivete and victimhood.

How does the author connect this perception of a newly ingrained sense of lovelessness in society with consumer capitalism?

The rejection of the possibility of love as a positive force for transformation is directly related to the fundamental desire to be happy. If love comes to be seen with suspicion of being incapable of providing this sense of happiness, the search for contentment must look elsewhere. In America particularly, but certainly throughout much of the rest of world as well, this elsewhere winds up being possessions. The emptiness that comes from an absence of happiness is looked to be filled through an endless cycle of buying things which bring temporary contentment but are specifically designed for the ironic purpose of failing to fill the vacuum they were expressly purchased to fill. Consumer culture is constructed on the foundation of built-in obsolescence that serves to create a permanent sense of discontent that one constantly attempts to reverse by looking for all the wrong stores.

What “deadly sin” does the author identify as the primary element responsible for destroying the power of love?

While one might possibly assume the answer here is “lust” which perverts the higher nobility of the concept of love by reducing the demonstration of desire from the realm of abstraction to its most concrete level of base primal urges, this is not the case. Neither “pride” nor “envy” turns out to be the destruction force capable of annihilating love as positive force. Instead, the author argue, the deadliest of sins when it comes to the power of love is greed. The argument here is that greed is the oppositional force to love because where love connects, greed disconnects and where love can inspire community, greed is entirely self-centered.