Worldview Fragment: All you need is love

Worldview fragment: one or more related ideas/viewpoints that can (and often do) serve as a component or flavor in a complete worldview held by some specific individual. The "fragment" term is not intended to be a subtle insult, but to accurately reflect the reality that the fragment is 1) not necessarily an actual, comprehensive worldview, and 2) could likely coexist with a variety of other fragments within some individual's worldview. A puzzle piece isn't worthless because it's a puzzle piece.

The worldview fragment I have named "all you need is love" could be precisely summed up as "affection, compassion, appreciation, and goodwill are sufficient to achieve lasting utopia". Who could argue with this? What past recipient of such kind feelings would doubt their effectiveness? How many people have been transformed thereby?

Let me state immediately that love is a huge part of Christianity, too, although as I (I'm an analytical male, by the way) understand it, Christian love is less about feelings than about action: love is expressed by doing what is best for the object. I have the impression that love is the lifeblood, the heart-and-soul of Christian life. As the Bible reiterates, love is the most important and desireable quality or virtue one should pursue, but love in this sense is much more than a feeling. The array of possible meanings denoted by love can make communication tricky, which is why I grasped about for four alternative words to use in the definition in the previous paragraph. For convenience I will use the acronym ACAG to reference those words, affection, compassion, appreciation, goodwill.

All that having been said, the worldview fragment "all you need is love", as defined above, is incorrect:

• One difficulty is that ACAG are simply not constants. When someone who is close, whether emotionally or even just physically, lashes out for the flimsiest reason(s), ACAG tend to evaporate. In those moments, self-control and a determination to preserve the relationship's peace--not ACAG--must act as substitutes.
• Other problems can arise when ACAG are directed more strongly at one party than another, because a bias or preference is the natural result. If an argument or other need for mediation occurs, neutrality won't be present out of ACAG (if both claim to be the "victim", isn't it hard not to side with whichever party "deserves" more consideration or has "earned" more sympathy?). An obvious retort is that ACAG must be directed at all people equally to be any good, but the honest shall readily confess to feeling more benevolent toward the victim of an unprovoked attack than toward the aggressor, to purposely take an extreme example.
• Wise folks have observed the close connection between the emotions of love and hate. (The opposite of love is not hate but indifference.) Love and hate have similar physical manifestations, can turn into each other with alarming ease, etc. Lovers turning into angry maniacs is one of the most prevalent ways of creating drama in any medium. In a love triangle, "love" may be the sole cause of the hostility ("betrayed by my best friend and my girl!"). The point is that the two A's of ACAG, affection and appreciation, when left unrestrained, can transmute into the most awful of passions.
• On what could be thought of as the other end of the spectrum, mere ACAG are not much help in the endless examples of the minute details of existence. Newlyweds will discover this quite soon after the wedding, if not during the wedding's planning stage. For instance, what US state will one live in? Someone can't be in two distinct places simultaneously, no matter how much ACAG someone has. Take a smaller example. What color should a wall be? Assuming that a combination of colors on the same wall is not a possibility (probably due to being too garish), the wall can only be one or the other, regardless of how much ACAG someone has. Tragically speaking, if "all you need is love", more marriages would last longer.
  

ACAG are great, in Christians or anyone else. However, Christianity is more than ACAG and the associated Christmas carols. It has to be, if it claims to be a workable solution to the Human Condition, and if it claims to have a (feasible) heaven. A Christian whose Christianity does not go beyond ACAG should really drop his or her pretense to the label--if ACAG was all Jesus had to carry out to save the world, why did He bother with that business about repentance and the cross?