The Metacrisis: It Was Always About Love

Why everything that breaks us and everything that saves us comes down to love

“In the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.”

— Baba Dioum

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There’s no debate that love is fundamental to the human experience. In modern philosophy, figures like Erich Fromm have argued that love is an art. That it requires knowledge, effort and decision, rather than just an emotion one “falls” into. We’ve seen and experienced love in many different forms: as self-compassion, as strength of a parent who shows up day after day, as courage of whistleblowers, as rage of an activist, or even in the resilience and tenderness of someone simply choosing to show up for another. Wherever love appears, it changes something. It dares us to care, especially when it’s the hardest to.

That’s why I think love is at the centre of how we face the crisis. As Cornel West beautifully put it, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Love at scale is justice. It’s what makes us fight for fairness, challenge abusive power, and show up for communities we’ll never meet. From the civil rights movement to climate protests to underground journalism, love is what drives people to act, even when it’s unpopular, unrewarded, or dangerous. Without love, there is no protest, no movement, no change. It’s the very thing that pushes people to step into discomfort and say, I see the harm, and I won’t look away.

The choice to speak out, even when the cost is devastating, is love in one of its bravest forms. It’s a stubborn and aching belief that others deserve the truth too.

From left to right: Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, Frances Haugen, Christopher Wylie, Chelsea Manning

Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 because he believe the public deserved to know the truth about the Vietnam War. The leak revealed that the government had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress. It fuelled public outrage which contributed to ending the war, as well as sparked the landmark case on press freedom. “I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public.”

Edward Snowden exposed mass surveillance by the NSA, knowing that he might not return home again. The leak revealed entire countries were under surveillance, not just those posed as potential threats. It showed how little oversight existed over government surveillance. This went on to ignite a global debate on privacy, security and digital rights we’re seeing today. “I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist, leaked thousands of documents revealing the platform’s harm to mental health and democracy. That the company knowingly put profit over public safety when they knew its algorithm amplified hate speech, misinformation and political extremism, especially in developing countries. In places like Ethiopia, Myanmar and India, Facebook has fuelled real-world violence including ethnic cleansing and hate crimes. “Facebook has realised that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, and they’ll make less money.”

Christopher Wylie exposed how Cambridge Analytica harvested up to 87 million users, without consent, to manipulate voter behaviour in at least 68 countries, influencing over 200 elections worldwide including the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election (supporting Trump), the Brexit referendum, Kenya’s divisive 2013 and 2017 elections. “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”

Chelsea Manning leaked over 750,000 classified military and diplomatic documents in 2010 including the infamous “Collateral Murder” video showing a 2007 U.S. helicopter airstrike in Baghdad that killed over a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists. The pilots mistook cameras as weapons and laughed as they shot civilians, including those who tried to help the wounded. The leaks exposed the human cost of war, the hypocrisy of diplomacy and the danger of unchecked military power. “I want people to see the truth…. regardless of who they are. Because without information, you cannot make informed decisions.”

This is what moral courage looks like in action. It’s the refusal to look away when presented with hard facts about something that isn’t right. It’s the willingness to take the fall so others might rise.

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

— Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor, points out that the absence of emotional connection and care is a more potent negation of love than active hatred

But if love is so central to being human, why does it feel like the world is running low on it? Even as we celebrate love in culture and swear by its value, many people feel a profound lack of love in their own lives. While we face an epidemic of loneliness, depression and disconnection, I wonder how much of our current predicament comes down to our perceived deficit of love?

Metacrisis of Lovelessness

At a glance, love might seem like a soft or irrelevant idea in the face of such colossal problems like climate change, ecological collapse, extreme inequality, rampant misinformation, political and economical instability. But many of us are coming to the realisation that we are actually dealing with a crisis of relationship, which is essentially, a crisis of love. Or rather, of its absence.

Think of the ecological collapse; it wasn’t merely bad policies that got us to the brink of climate catastrophe and mass extinction. We got here because we’ve been operating from a worldview that sees the Earth as a thing to extract from, not something to cherish. A mindset that treats forests, rivers, and animals as resources, not kin. Indigenous cultures have long spoken of land and nature as family, as something you belong to, not something you dominate. But in modern systems, love for nature is often framed as naive, even though it’s precisely what’s needed to protect it. Without love for the Earth, conservation efforts continue to fall short. With love, protecting our planet becomes a moral imperative.

In social and political turmoil, there’s an apparent rise in hate. Hate crimes, hate speech, daily feed of polarisation. And at the core of all this hate is a failure to empathise, to see others as equally human — again, a failure of love. I might sound idealistic to talk of love in geopolitics, but if our society is grounded in loving kindness and compassion, we would not tolerate the dehumanisation of any group. But more often than we’d like to admit, we slip into “us vs. them” narratives, viewing other people as obstacles or enemies rather than fellow Earthlings with whom we must find ways to coexist.

It is this lovelessness in our worldview that fuels endless conflict. These conflicts sap energy and resources, and the damage is compounded by the lack of enforcement in holding companies and key people accountable. We fail to come together to solve problems because we lack a sense of universal love and solidarity. Instead, we let our fear and greed rule decision-making, and everyday people like me, just trying to live our lives, have been left feeling dulled by it all. Numb to the damage happening around us, and largely unaware of how entangled we are in these same systems. We are stuck in a loop where short-term gains (aka economic ‘growth’ and shareholders’ profits) keep beating out the long-term wellbeing of all, leaving behind broken systems, exhausted communities and an Earth pushed to its brink (Read: Nate Hagens’s piece on “How growing consumption is pushing Earth beyond its carrying capacity” as well as

Rachel Donald

’s piece on “This is Why the World is in Crisis”).

It isn’t an overreach to say that the metacrisis is about an absence of love. A breakdown in relationships; relationship to ourselves (self-loathing, lack of self-compassion), relationship to each other (distrust, contempt, inequality), and relationship to nature (exploitation, indifference) are all out of balance. Climate action becomes obvious if people feel love for future generations and other species; inequality becomes intolerable if the wealthy care for the suffering of the poor; misinformation and hate speech lose their appeal in a culture that prioritises truth and empathy.

How To Address Such Vast Problems?

Paradoxically, healing the world begins with healing ourselves. It can start in a very small and intimate place: the human heart. We should never underestimate the power of self-love. It has less to do with ego and selfishness, and everything to do with how you recognise your own dignity and how you address your needs so that you become a stable source of love for others. Because when you’re starving for love, you will take it, hoard it, beg for it, and weaponise it. But if you’ve met yourself in your darkest hour and still chose to stay, to listen, to care, then your love becomes your power.

And maybe the bigger issue here isn’t just how bad things are, but more to do with how we’ve forgotten what real love actually looks like. I think that’s the big part of the problem. We say love all the time, but half the time we’re pointing at something else entirely. Real love isn’t always sweet and poetic. Sometimes it’s about holding someone accountable. Sometimes it’s saying no. Sometimes it’s sitting in silence and not walking away. It sees you and still chooses to stay. Because most of us didn’t grow up with a solid example of that kind of love, we mistake intensity for intimacy. We think someone obsessing over us is proof of care. We think sacrifice equals devotion. We fall for love that hurts us and call it fate. Toxic love is manipulative like that, saying things like “I’m doing this because I care”, while crossing every boundary you set. And when you’re starving, you’ll take anything that looks like love. I’ve lived it, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt smaller or more lost in myself (Read: my piece written last year on “What’s Happening With Love?”. It feels grounding to circle back to the theme I care about the most. The more I dive into the metacrisis, the more I’m convinced that it has everything to do with our deep forgetting of how to love and be loved).

Stand For the Right Things in Your Life

I wrote last week about “The High Cost of Hidden Emotions”, where I explored how unspoken pain distorts how we live and relate. So if pain isolates, love is what reconnects. Healing begins with the decision to love; ourselves, our mess, and every other things in-between that shaped us.

But I do want to point out the irony here that love cannot be the destination. It can only ever be experienced as a consequence. Like growing a garden, you don’t “chase” flowers. You water, plant, nourish, protect, and the flowers come because of that.

You will find love in the silence between people who really see each other, and in the boldness of someone standing up for those they’ll never meet. Love looks like an activist marching for someone else’s right to breathe with dignity. A stranger who steps in when they see danger. A teacher who sees the quiet kid and celebrates their quiet victories. A parent who learn to apologise. A partner who makes space for your lows. A writer who stays up writing into the void, hoping their words might help someone feel less alone. A person who feeds the strays each morning.

And our love doesn’t stop with humans. It includes the oceans, the bees, the forests that still breathe despite what we’ve done. A deep felt love for the living world. When we reconnect with this kind of love, we begin to repair what we’ve broken: our relationship with the planet through awe and responsibility, our relationship with others through justice and compassion, and our relationship with ourselves through gentleness and growth.

So maybe after all this, love was never the squishy, soft thing that’s often portrayed. It was the strength we were missing all along.

Because everything we’re facing, all of it, was always about love.

Facing the Systems That Currently Harm Us

If we say we love people, animals and the planet, we must be willing to face the systems that harm them and fully look at the suffering happening around us.

One of the clearest places to start is the documentary Dominion (2018). It’s not an easy watch. It exposes the industrial-scale cruelty of animal agriculture in Australia but the systems it shows exist all over the world. If you choose to watch it, you’ll likely feel heartbroken, overwhelmed, and powerless. That’s normal. That’s what love feels like when you are presented with hard facts. But remind yourself that the courage to look is already an act of love. It’s a powerful beginning of being more aware, and being more informed.

Hard to imagine but these documentaries came from a place of love. Created by people who chose to investigate, document, and share what most of the world prefers to ignore for comfort. It’s a difficult and courageous expression of care for humanity, justice, and truth. Each one reveals systems of harm that continue because they remain hidden and “ignored”. Watching them will give you discomfort and grief, but staying with those feelings is part of the work.

1. The True Cost (2015) — this film exposes the dark underbelly of fast fashion: human exploitation, factory collapses, child labour, and ecological devastation tied to cheap clothing. Big brands outsource production to places with weak labour laws. We can help by choosing ethical brands, buying less and demanding corporate transparency. “It’s a caution on the “incessant consumption of mediocre stuff” and incentive to view shopping as something more than a hobby, adding that buying is “a moral act and there is a chain reaction of consequences.”

2. The Act of Killing (2012) — a haunting look at the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide told by the perpetrators themselves. The government-backed mass killings of communists, ethnic Chinese and intellectuals are still largely denied. The film makes horribly clear that history is written by the winners. The whole film is an attempt to understand the imagination of a regime of impunity and what happens to our humanity when we build our normality on terror and lies.

3. Dirty Energy (2012) — the documentary captures how thousands of families were abandoned while BP oil executives walked away with bonuses. It dives into the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill showing how corporate negligence devastated Gulf Coast communities. “We need to lead with our generous hearts and never be afraid to speak truth to power, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. Our strength is measured by our discourse and our charity toward our brothers and sisters, even when we disagree. I will share this on YouTube non-monetized because it wasn't made for money but out of love.”, Bryan D. Hopkins, producer and director.

4. The Game Changers (2018) — the film exposes how the meat industry has manipulated science, media, and masculinity, all while millions suffer preventable health issues. While often promoted as a diet film, it also unpacks toxic masculinity, health misinformation, and the meat industry’s powerful lobbying efforts. Watch it to rethink your plate, but also the culture that sold it to you. Support plant-based options, education and transparency in food marketing.

5. This Changes Everything (2015) — “What if confronting the climate crisis is the best chance we’ll ever get to build a better world?” The documentary shows communities losing their homes, health, and history due to relentless extraction and how the system cheers and calls it “progress”. Based on Naomi Klein’s book, it outlines how climate change isn’t just an environmental issue, it’s a failure of capitalism. “Could it be that we are not the masters, after all? That we are just guests here on Earth, and that we can get evicted for bad behaviour?”