All You Need Is Love

The song was playing at the stand where I went to buy my tea. It got me thinking. Let us examine Mr. Lennon's claim, shall we?

All you need is love. Well, if we assume that a need is that which is necessary to maintain the organism, then I don't know how long one could be sustained on love alone. Nine minutes in an all-love, no-oxygen environment and you're dead. You may be loved, but assuming you need to continue to be alive in order to appreciate the fact, the love is rendered moot.

Okay, so all you need is love. And oxygen. And food, and water, and shelter. Because without these things you will very soon be popping your clogs.

(Yes, I looked that up. You can too.)

Now things are getting messy. In order to fulfill these biological needs, there's a lot of non-love activity involved. In order to get food, you either have to work to raise or gather it yourself or, more likely in this specialized post-industrial society, you work at some other task and somebody pays you for your work and you take your pay to a fourth party who has been commissioned by corporations to warehouse the food created by other other parties and then to exchange your payment--which has to be guaranteed by a government, so now there's *that*--for the food. Water and housing aren't much simpler.

Of course, all you really *need* to live in order to love and be loved are a few handfuls of berries and seeds and insects per day. But I'm thinking that if you're content to subsist at that level of material existence, you're not going to be getting much love from people who are members of a post-industrial society. Assuming that's the kind of love you need, and we'll assume that that's the kind of love Mr. Lennon is talking about, because that's the society he was a member of, drug-filled spiritual quests to India aside.

So now in order to love, you need to eat, and in order to eat, you need to work. In order to work, you need to do all kinds of other things. For a lot of jobs you need to get an education, so now you need to go to college in order to love. For those jobs that don't require a college degree, you might still need to undergo years of training. And in order to maintain most jobs, you need to cultivate a specific kind of appearance, work on one's social skills...so now we get to the fact that if all you need is love, in order to get that love, you have to wear a tie.

You're still with me? Good. I know it's been a bit of a jog to get here, but the logic is sound.

To Mr. Lennon in the year 1967, it might well have seemed that all one needed was love. But getting past that level of ebullient optimism, we see that there are layers and layers of economic necessity (and then layers of luxury that, once entrenched, are perceived as necessities, such that we think we "need" cars and flat-screen televisions and breast implants) in order to maintain the capacity for love. Recall that Mr. Lennon previously quoted Barret Strong to claims that "Your lovin' give me such a thrill / But your lovin' don't pay my bills;" his subsequent reversal of this position doesn't acknowledge the necessity of paying the bills in order to love. And this is to say nothing of the other realities that go into making one loveable and capable of being loved. Can one be content with love alone while dispensing with such other needs as job satisfaction, personal security, actualization through the meeting of self-created goals, variety, et cetera? Certainly love can contribute to the meeting of these other needs, and can even compensate for some deficiencies, but it can't satisfy all other psychic needs, all of the time. It can't really be all you need. Because nobody is liable to love you when you're depressed about how nobody cares about your work, or when you're panicking because you think the terrorists are going to come and get you.

And thus we end up with the causal relationship whereby in order to love, we have to have the war in Iraq. Personally, I'm not willing to make those links--my own needs for security and my own interpretation of the causal relationship between my personal security and the war in Iraq being very different from those of the lion's share of my countrymen--but I can assure you that there are plenty of people who do feel such a need, as stupid as it is.

And thus we end up with the actuality in which the need for love implicated myriad other needs, and the need for love actually generates wars and corporate capitalism and other dumb shit like that. Love equals the purchase of a diamond equals the endorsement of forced labor in Africa, so love equals the endorsement of forced labor in Africa, so John Lennon's original proposition could be retitled as "All You Need is Forced Labor in Africa." Not quite as cheery, but as true, given the assumptions we tend to make in post-industrial societies, some of which are based on actual organic needs but many of which are based on an incredibly luxuriant interpretation of what those needs actually are.

In any case, I am afraid, Mr. Lennon, that your position is an over-simplification of the matter at hand, ignoring the political and economic complexities of a person's "need." Perhaps at some point--like infancy--love includes and provides for these things, but by the point one is an adult, love is far more fraught and complicated