Terry Sarten: Love is a pavlova; like has lost its flavour

TICKED OFF: Pushing a button is a gesture not a commitment.

If love has become a pavlova, a confectionary to be served up on any occasion, large or small, as empty emotional calories, while hate has taken on the strong taste of bitter recriminations ... so the word "like" appears to have completely lost its flavour.

The world of commerce has so successfully sold love as a transaction that it is now a shallow shell of its former glory.

We are encouraged to consume love — to love the car in the glossy ad; love the shoes on the catwalk; love the status wristwatch. Of course, an inanimate object cannot and will never love us back.

Likewise, to "like" something — a setting, an opinion, especially a person — is no longer what it was.

The internet asks us to tick a "like" button for almost anything and to feel that somehow this signifies value when, in fact, all that has happened is you have made a gesture rather than made some commitment, such as friendship.

Some languages have distinctive ratings of affection. For example, German separates the words for love and like into different boxes, making it possible to be clear that you like someone, a friend or acquaintance without loading the context with other meanings.

Stating love requires another approach. This linguistic lollypop keeps words and heart from merging into a mess.

Then there's Hate. The capital H seems necessary to highlight the strength of this emotion. Lists of most Hated often include parking tickets, bad drivers (other people not us, of course) spiders, hot weather/cold weather ... the list can be as long as you have time to write.

But Hate can be overdone, especially when it is about people. How many people can you truly say with hand on heart that you Hate?

There may be some you avoid but Hating is pretty strong stuff that should be used with care. Like love, if over-used it can dilute the meaning, making it a disposable label that can be attached with little thought to anything we may not agree with as a lazy tick of an emotional box.

There is concern that disparaging the right with Hate words is actually playing into their own game. Tossing the term Nazi or Fascist at white power types gives them more room to parade the argument that they are being robbed of their right to free speech by the very people who fear for its survival.

We can Hate bigotry for its poorly disguised use of Hate speech but often this simply encourages them to be bolder. Calling those on the ultra-right names only excites them into seeing themselves as persecuted and losing their freedom of speech.

All around the world, the hard-right are refining their language so that the jackboot sounds of terror are muffled by the rhetoric of nationalism and the drumbeat of patriotism. It is harder to argue against Hate when it is concealed inside pride.

We can challenge the bigotry with reason and logic but studies have shown this does little to shift entrenched views.

One of the few things that does undermine prejudice at an individual level at least, is exposure to "other" ethnicities, beliefs, cultures when — surprise, surprise — people find we all have much in common, because, as geneticist Adam Rutherford says, we are all African originally. The only homo sapiens on the planet 100,000 years ago were in Africa.

Hatred thrives on differences, on defining groups as foreign and other. By adopting the meme of Hate in our challenge to bigotry we may, in fact, be riding in the same bus thinking the destination will be different.

*Terry Sarten (aka Tel) is a writer, musician and social worker — feedback welcome: tgs@inspire.net.nz