The Roots of Collapse, Part 7: Love as Sentiment, But Not Structure

A language with only one word for love can’t build a world that lasts.

When I was the Director of Customer Success a few years ago for a healthcare tech startup, I led a team of 26 people spread across the country, from Hawai'i to New York. And I loved my team.

Not romantically. Not inappropriately. I loved them the way you love people whose flourishing matters to you. Whose bad days you feel, whose wins you celebrate, whose growth you invest in even when it costs you something.

I didn’t see them as “employees”. I saw them as humans first, doing jobs that were meant to support their wellbeing. The company benefited when they did well, because that’s how it works. People who feel cared for work hard for the people who care for them. That’s human nature. That’s what belonging and care do for people when they truly experience it.

But here’s the thing. In corporate America, what I just described is considered “unprofessional”.

We’re allowed to say “I value my team”. We are not allowed to say “I love my team”. The word love makes people uncomfortable at work. It sounds soft. It sounds boundary-crossing. It sounds like something that doesn’t belong in a quarterly review.

And that discomfort — that inability to name and normalize love as a structural force and it instead just being a feeling— is one of the deepest roots of why everything is collapsing.

The Poverty of English

English has one word for love.

Just one.

We use it for everything: “I love my mother.” “I love pizza.” “I love this song.” “I love my job.” “I love you.”

As an interpreter, this always struck me as very odd, and frankly, very sad. Other languages refuse this flattening and have many words to express the range of human experience this word tries to encompass.

In Spanish, you quieres a person but te encanta a thing. In Hmong, kuv hlub koj carries a weight of deep, enduring care — and you would never use it for a car or a sandwich. It would sound absurd. In Japanese, ai is deep, selfless, unconditional affection, koi is romantic yearning, and amae is the comfort of being indulged by someone who loves you. In Sanskrit, prema is unconditional divine love, sneha is tender affection, and rati is the delight of pleasure.

After speaking with psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Kehinde Ayeni recently, I learned that Sanskrit has at least 96 words for love, and Yoruba, her mother tongue, has 20. Many languages carry a richness that English lost — or never had. 

But I am not discussing this here for the purpose of poetry. It’s about the scaffolding of cognition.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits that language shapes thought. It shapes perception. And perception in turn, shapes reality. What we can name, we can notice. And what we can phrase, we can feel. But when your language gives you only ONE box for love, everything gets shoved into that one box, and then that is the only thing your brain knows.

In English, that box is shaped like érōs — passion, desire, and craving. It’s romantic, sexual, and possessive.

So we’ve built a world that only recognizes love when it looks like wanting and taking.

This is how language shapes reality. And when we collapse all love into érōs (wanting/taking), we lock the entire culture into the amygdala’s logic.

The Greek Taxonomy

For those of you who know of my background, you know I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian context. Some of that context I had to deconstruct from because it is built on some of the very harm the rest of this article will go on to discuss. But there are some things that I have held on to, specifically my studies of the ancient languages of the Bible, and what those languages taught us about how the people of those cultures saw and thought about the world.

I am a linguist at heart, after all.

One of the things that most fascinated me was that the languages of the peoples of the Bible had other words for love that English does not have. The Ancient Greeks had at least six words for love, each describing a different texture of care, which I have categorized here according to what the healthy and unhealthy archetypes of each of these words looks like:

Érōs — Fiery passion. Romance. Desire.

• Healthy: vitality, creativity, intimacy

• Unhealthy: obsession, possession, addiction

  
  

Storgē — Family love. The bond between parent and child. Kinship.

• Healthy: care, belonging, protection

• Unhealthy: clannishness, nepotism, enabling harm to protect “our own”

Philía — Friendship. Loyalty. Brotherhood. The love of shared values and mutual respect.

• Healthy: solidarity, comradeship, the glue that holds communities together

• Unhealthy: tribalism, exclusion, us-versus-them

Agápē — Unconditional love. Universal. The love that extends to all beings simply because they exist.

• Healthy: compassion, altruism, collective care, empathy

• Unhealthy: martyrdom, self-erasure, the inability to set boundaries

Philautía — self-love.

• Healthy: Self-respect, wholeness, the foundation from which we can love others

• Unhealthy: narcissism, ego-inflation, vanity

Xenía — Love of the stranger. The sacred duty of hospitality.

• Healthy: reciprocity, protection, honoring the outsider

• Unhealthy: blind trust without discernment — or its shadow, xenophobia

Each of these loves has a role. Each has a healthy and unhealthy expression. And each names something that English forces us to flatten into a single, overloaded word. The flattening of love into a single word has left what should be foundational to our shared reality up for political debate. It is tragic.

A Trauma-Adapted Operating System

When a culture collapses all love into érōs, it reflects a collective psyche still ruled by fear and possession.

This is the amygdala in charge. Everything reduced to “mine” or “threat”. Love becomes acquisition, care becomes control, and connection is based on transaction.

But the other loves — solidarity (philía), collective care (agápē), self-respect (philautía), honoring the stranger (xenía) — require a different neural pathway. A different cognitive bridge. They require trust flowing from the prefrontal cortex into the fear circuits. They require the capacity to love what you do not own, cannot control, and sometimes, even what you do not fully understand.

Without words for these loves, we struggle to practice them. And English — the lingua franca of global capitalism, the language of international business, policy and diplomacy — has impoverished the world’s capacity to name and normalize the loves that hold societies together.

This is not a coincidence. The language of empire is a language of extraction. And extraction only knows one love: this is mine.

Love Made Taboo in the Workplace

Consider how strange it is that we’ve made love taboo in the structures where it matters most.

In the workplace, we can say “I appreciate you”. We can say “I value your contributions”. We can say “You’re a great asset to the team”.

But we cannot say “I love my team” without people shifting uncomfortably and raising eyebrows. Without HR wondering if there’s a problem. Without the word itself sounding inappropriate.

Why?

Because English has collapsed love into érōs. And érōs in the workplace is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

But what about philía — the love that says “I am loyal to you, I have your back, I want to see you succeed”? What about agápē — the love that says “Your wellbeing matters to me, not because of what you produce, but because you are a human being in my care”?

These types of love are not only appropriate in the workplace — they are essential. A leader who doesn’t love their people will sacrifice them for metrics. A culture that forbids love at work will burn its people to hit targets. And this is why burnout exists. This is why “human resources” treats humans as mere resources. This is why the corporate world is a machine that consumes people and calls it efficiency.

The absence of structural love is the presence of deliberate structural harm.

The Colonial Roots

There is a reason love is forbidden in the structures of Western capitalism. And that reason has a history.

It’s because the Western economic system was built on treating people as property.

This is not metaphor. This is literally the foundation of our shared reality. Though it is now shifting, the United States has been the engine room of the current global financial system. And the wealth that built the United States — the cotton, the tobacco, the sugar, the railroads, the banks — was extracted through a system that looked at human beings and saw inventory, labor units, and capital. And that logic never left, it just changed clothes over time.

Today, we don’t call people “property”. But we do call them “human capital”. Google “human capital” in quotes and see what comes up. You probably haven’t even paid attention to the fact that that is standard workplace language. But it is everywhere. We don’t say “plantation”; we say “workplace”. We don’t have overseers; we have HR departments. But the underlying architecture remains: you are valuable to the system only insofar as the system can use your labor to sustain itself.

This is why healthcare is tied to employment in the United States. Think about that. In America, your access to medicine — your ability to stay alive — is contingent on your usefulness to an employer. The moment you cannot work, you become something to discard. Not a person to care for. A liability to manage. Your very life is an asset (or liability) on your company’s balance sheet.

In a system like this, love as structure must be taboo. Because you cannot exploit people you love. You cannot keep people enslaved when you see them as kin. You cannot hoard resources — eating filet mignon while deciding $3 a day is enough for everyone else — when agápē lives in your chest.

But America was built by men, by presidents even, who looked their own children in the eye on their plantations — children born of enslaved women, children who carried their blood — and kept them in chains anyway. They built plantations and preached liberty. They wrote “all men are created equal” while owning human beings. They wrote about justice while keeping their own flesh and blood in bondage on pain of death.

This is not a system that failed to include love. This is a system that required the exclusion of love to function.

If the plantation owner had loved — truly loved, with storgē or agápē or even basic philía — he could not have done what he did. To love your “inventory” (the enslaved, now “the team”) is to introduce systemic friction into the extraction process. The entire economy would have collapsed. The system required his heart to be closed. It selected for closed hearts. It rewarded the capacity to look at a human being and see a tool. An asset. An object. Not a person. And that selection pressure never stopped. It just scaled. The system still rewards those who see humans as tools to be used.

So now we have executives who lay off 14,000 people before Christmas to boost a stock price. Politicians who cut school lunches to balance a budget. Systems that treat human suffering as an acceptable externality.

You’re not supposed to love your patients in the clinical setting either. As an interpreter, as a healthcare worker, I always struggled with this. And now I understand why. But I will assert here today, and rightly so, that doctors and nurses who don’t love people shouldn’t be treating anyone at all. But our current healthcare system can’t treat patients like people worth loving, because it is built to prioritize profit at the expense of their very lives.

These actions and ways of operating aren’t aberrations. They are the product of a system designed to exclude love from its calculations. The lie at the heart of it is this: You are only somebody if you have more than someone else. Your worth is measured by the distance between your plate and theirs.

But that’s not worth. That’s not strength. That’s not success. That’s just a soul that has never known love.

And we let those souls build the world.

The Diagnosis

So we arrive at the very stark, very sobering conclusion that most of us already know in our hearts and guts:

The people running the world do not love humanity, and are not capable of it.

I don’t say this as an insult. I say it as a diagnosis.

If the architects of our global systems had agápē — genuine care for the collective — the world would not look like this. We would not have systems designed to extract maximum value from people and the planet until both are exhausted.

If they had xenía — love of the stranger, sacred hospitality — we would not have refugee camps and border walls and policies designed to make the displaced suffer as a deterrent.

If they had healthy philautía — self-love rooted in wholeness rather than emptiness — they would not be endlessly hoarding wealth they could never spend, trying to fill a void that possessions cannot fill.

What they have is érōs for power. Érōs for control. Érōs for more.

And they have built systems in their own image — systems that only know how to want, to take, to possess.

So the collapse we face now is not a failure of intelligence or resources or technology.

The collapse is a failure of love.

The Maternal Correction

Humanity has made a catastrophic error in what it values and how it selects for leaders. We have mistaken dominance for strength. We promote the loudest voices, the most aggressive postures, the most “alpha” personalities. We assume that the one who can dominate must be the one fit to lead.

But if dominance made the best leaders, none of us would be alive.

Because mothers — most mothers, anyway — do not prioritize their own wellbeing at the expense of their children. They wake in the night. They sacrifice sleep, food, comfort, and ambition. They subordinate their needs to the needs of something small and helpless that cannot yet give anything back.

That is storgē. That is agape. That is the love that ensures survival.

Almost every single person reading this is alive because someone, at some point, chose care over self-interest. Someone chose to nurture when they could have neglected. Someone chose love as structure, not just sentiment. I say almost, because some of us have not had this unconditionally in our lives, and we suffered bitterly for it. It made us determined to either love more deeply, or it caused dissociation into cruelty.

And the latter case is the truth of a lot of people in power now. They carry unintegrated trauma because they themselves were not shown the type of unconditional love every human needs to thrive. And instead of deciding to be the solution to that type of tragedy, they have decided to compound it for others. They are trying to fill the love-shaped hole in their heart with extracting and taking, and it can never fill it. And we as a collective, in our blind scrambling for our own survival, are enabling it. And collapse is what happens when we let érōs-dominant psyches — people who only know how to want and take — run systems that require agápē to function.

We handed the world to people who never learned any love but hunger.

And now we are all hungry.

The Seven Roots

Let us name what we have mapped in our Roots of Collapse series:

1. Low Systems Thinking — the inability to see how love connects everything, how care in one node ripples through the whole.

2. High Negative Messaging — the constant fear-signal that drowns out love, keeps us in amygdala-lock, and makes tenderness feel like weakness.

3. High Personal Association — the ego-fragility that prevents philía, that makes every disagreement a betrayal, and every critique an attack.

4. Wholesale Distrust — the collapse of xenía, the transformation of strangers into threats, and the impossibility of coalition.

5. Mission Superiority — the sacrifice of humans for metrics, because leaders do not love the people they lead.

6. Fear-Driven Behavior — the paralysis that prevents action, where agápē would create the courage to move.

7. Love as Sentiment, but Not Structure — the capstone. We feel love in private but refuse to build with it in public. We treat it as soft when it is the hardest, most durable material we have.

The collapse we face now is not a mystery. It is the predictable result of building a civilization on the shadow of érōsalone — on wanting, on taking, on owning — while starving all the loves that would sustain us.

The New Architecture

English evolves. We coin words when we need them.

Compersion — the joy we feel in another’s joy — didn’t exist in English until polyamorous communities needed to name it.

Sonder — the recognition that every passerby has a unique inner life as vivid and complex as your own — was invented because someone felt something that had no name.

Maybe it’s time we stop flattening and start borrowing. Maybe it’s time we import the words from other languages we’ve lost, or never had, and let them teach us how to live.

The new world — if there is to be one — must be built on structural love:

• Philía in teams and organizations, where loyalty is not weakness but the foundation of trust.

• Agápē in policy and governance, where the measure of success is collective flourishing, and not the GDP of “human capital”.

• Xenía in how we treat the displaced, the different, the stranger at the gate, because borders are constructs that only exist in the mind.

• Philautía as the foundational love of self, because we cannot pour from an empty cup, and self-respect is not selfishness.

• Storgē remembered as strength, not softness — the love that gets up in the night, that sacrifices without scorekeeping, that builds the future of human flourishing, because we are one family.

What we cannot name, we cannot live.

What we cannot live, we cannot build.

A Call to Link Arms

The old world is collapsing because its architects knew only one word for love’s shadow — and that word meant mine.

They built systems in the image of their psyche’s poverty. They called it strength. They called it realism. They called it “just business”. But a system without agápē eats its people. A system without philía fragments into war. A system without xenía builds walls until it suffocates inside them. A system without storgē sacrifices its children for quarterly returns.

The net we are weaving — by those of us who see, those of us who have stayed awake through the long dark night — is not made of information alone.

It is made of love.

Love as structure. Love as strategy. Love as the only force that has ever built anything that lasted.

The new world will be built by those who remember the words the empire forgot.

And the time to remember is now.

This essay is the final installment of the “Roots of Collapse” series. Together, these seven roots describe not a random catastrophe, but an architecture of failure — and a map toward something else.

The collapse was never inevitable. Neither is what comes next.

That part is up to us.

Do you know a language that has words for love that don’t exist in English? 

I’d be grateful if you let me know in the comments.

For Further Reading:

For those who want to explore these ideas around love more deeply:

• bell hooks, All About Love — On love as action and our cultural impoverishment around it

• adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy — On building movements rooted in love and interdependence

• Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving — On love as skill and practice in a capitalist world

• C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves — On the Greek taxonomy of love

• George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By — On how language shapes thought

• The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto — On care as the foundation of a new society

• Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World — On how the destruction of Indigenous cultures destroyed the richness of language

• Wikipedia, Greek Words for Love — To read more about the many facets of love in Greek