Love can reshape our broken systems
Reflections on bell hooks and love as a concrete, transformational force.
During my nearly ten years in government, I never once used the word “love” to describe my work. Looking back, the concept of love felt awkward to me – unprofessional, slippery, even weak.
Now, in bringing The People’s Dreaming Collective to life, love is central.
I am constantly asking myself and others: What would it look like to govern with love? How can we make love an intentional practice in our lives, both personally and professionally? How do we get to a more loving future?
What shifted in me to bring love to the forefront of my work? The answer is complex and personal: the pandemic, burnout, loss, grief, healing, and also bell hooks.
bell hooks is an American author, poet, cultural critic, and trailblazing Black feminist who has written extensively on the power of love as a vehicle for personal and societal transformation.1
bell hooks recasts love as a concrete, compelling, and deeply human force that can reshape broken systems. In her celebrated work All About Love, bell hooks introduces us to love not as a static noun or a romantic feeling, but as a definable set of actions:
“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients – care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust.”
– bell hooks
When I give myself permission to dream about the governing models I want to serve in and be served by, this definition of love feels like a guiding creed. I want a future where every constituent and community is treated with “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust.” I find it both challenging and exciting to try and conjure a vision of this loving future. It is a dramatic departure from my experience of government today.
bell hooks believes that love offers us “the only way out of domination.” In her essay “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” she outlines the dangers of struggling for liberated futures without centering love:
Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed. As long as we refuse to address fully the place of love in struggles for liberation we will not be able to create a culture of conversion where there is a mass turning away from an ethic of domination.
Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination—imperialism, sexism, racism, classism.
– bell hooks
There is nothing awkward or weak about the ethic of love put forward by bell hooks. Her invitation is to see love as an inspired, muscular force that can hold us accountable to rejecting and transforming – rather than repeating – broken systems of domination.
In our moment of compounding, interconnected global crises – the atrocities of war, exploitative inequality, and degradation of our planet – living love as a verb offers the type of world-reshaping opportunity I am called to explore.
How can we govern guided by and accountable to love? The intention of The People’s Dreaming Collective is to envision, practice, and midwife this new reality together.
As we start this journey, I want to hear from you: 2
Has love ever come up during your service in government? Has it come up in other civic spaces?
What questions emerge when you consider living and working with the ethic of love put forward by bell hooks?
Who have been your teachers when it comes to love?
Keep the conversation going by passing these questions along to other dreamers!
This is the first of many love letters we plan to write celebrating the thinkers, teachers, and dreamers who inspire us. We believe naming and acknowledging lineage is an antidote to extraction and a powerful tool for connection. Learn more about this practice at Dismantling The Master’s Tools.
Share feedback by replying to our email, commenting on the post, or writing us directly at hello@peoplesdreamingcollective.com. We look forward to learning from you!