Here’s a little ditty I wrote and posted on r/exmormon reddit a couple months ago in the form of the meme-ish graphic above, and with the title “Does Russell Really Love Me?” I’d been having reoccurring thoughts about how both members and leaders in The Church can commonly be found telling people they don’t know that they love them.

Is it even possible to love someone if you don’t know them? No. You could say it depends on your definition of love and you could say it depends on context, but to that I could say that it doesn’t. It doesn’t depend, because not only can you not love someone if you do not know them, you cannot do anything to them at all which requires personal connection – in the real world, that is. In the completely subjective and imaginary world of ideas and thoughts and feelings however, you can do anything you want, and maybe that’s why it is such an attractive place for human beings to spend so much of their time.

But if it does depend on definition, then I would say the definition of love that I am talking about is one that defines love as actually acting in a way that shows you truly care as much or more for the welfare of who or what you love as you do for yourself. Talking is its own kind of action in a way, but just talking about it is never enough.

And if it does depend on context, then I would say the kind of context I am talking about is when a church leaders gets up in front of a large group of people and says that he loves them. This church leader does not know anything at all about most of the people in the audience – he does not know names, ages, faces, or anything about their life circumstances, except he knows they are members of the same church, of the same in-group as he is, and this gives him a warm feeling toward them, and therefore he declares that he loves them. And when he declares that he loves them, he feels he means it with every fiber of his being.

I will submit that in this context, the leader may in fact love the group if he acts in a way that shows he cares as much or more for the welfare of the group as he does for himself, even though he does not really love the individuals within that group individually. But the problem with this, in my opinion, is that some or all members of the group hear and feel the leader’s declaration of love as if it is a declaration of love for them personally, and not just for the group, leaving them vulnerable to emotional manipulation that can be harmful to their welfare if their leader leads them down the wrong path.

I also think that the leader himself probably really believes that he does in fact love everyone within the group individually and not just the group as a whole, and means his “I love you,” in that way, to each individual, as is evidenced most clearly in the Dallin H. Oaks quote from April 2022 General Conference in the picture above:’

“I love you, my brothers and sisters, I love all of God’s children.”

But what’s the big deal? Why do I care to comment in this way on the fact that leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not to mention many members of The Church (as well as leaders and members of many churches and organizations of every kind), regularly declare an impossible kind of love for people that they do not know? I care because I feel that if every single one of us human beings is continually engaged in the act of sensing elements of our bodies and environment and then symbolizing those elements with labels, if that is the thing that most makes us human, at which we are the best and of which we are the only practitioners we know of, then let’s take pride in who and what we are. Let’s sense and symbolize accurately as often as possible, but particularly if and when we share our personal experience with others, and especially when we are using the personal truth of our private experience to exert influence and control on others who may or may not share our feelings.

People who love in theory but not in practice, but who have convinced themselves and others that they love both in theory and in practice, can be dangerous to society in ways very similar to those who do not love at all.

In the library of human experience, if we’re going to have sections at all, let’s have them and their contents be accurately labeled as often as possible. Let’s have the fiction in the fiction section and the non-fiction in the non-fiction section. Let’s not confuse fiction with history, or religion with science or politics, or biography with autobiography – at least not if we can help it. Why? Because in a system built on symbolic thinking, and in a system built on the ability to communicate via symbolic thinking, the more false symbols there are the more likely it is that the system itself will become false, in which case the system will eventually be cancelled and completely useless. Now there’s a certain point of view from which that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but in the meantime, I’ll appeal to our selfish natures instead – don’t we all want things? And wouldn’t it eventually be impossible to know if we got what we wanted if we cannot trust it to be what we think it is?

Someone might say, who cares if we actually get what we want, as long as we truly think we get what we want, and to that I would say – well, what would I say? I guess if we truly think we have what we want, then that is good enough, isn’t it? Yes – until or unless it’s not…

For the Love of Strangers
Never trust I love yous
From those you do not know.
You must know someone to love them,
For the Bible tells me so.

If someone says “I love you”
And they do not know your name,
They’re loving an idea,
In a goody-good mind game.

“I love you” should be special,
Not for those you’ve never met.
And saying it to strangers,
Means you really want to get.

You want to get salvation
And you want to get ahead,
To do this life one better,
And win a big prize when you’re dead.