All the important things in life have to do with courage and love. To face one's own mortality. To have a beautiful romantic relationship. To be one with the moment and let it speak to your innermost. To dare to say 'no' to what doesn't speak to one's heart. To make great art. All of those require courage and love.
Intelligence, provided that it sits on top of this foundation, is a great addition. But by itself, it tries to compensate for any lack of virtue. An intelligent 1 coward will come up with intelligent excuses for why he avoids certain situations, or he will try to control them with his mind, obsessively plan for the future, which of course doesn't work. Likewise, an intelligent person without love will rationalize his cynicism, his loneliness, his lack of joy, his lack of passion.
This is the crucial problem with the mind by itself. It makes for a great servant but a poor master, and unfortunately, people who are bestowed with a cunning mind have a tendency to make their entire life revolve around it, they become very lopsided and die by their cunningness.
Courage and love are more important faculties than intelligence because the former have to do with one's being, whereas the latter informs one's knowledge. Being is more fundamental than knowing, which is why women are more attracted to men who can stand up for themselves, even if they are heartless and dim-witted, than to spineless but intelligent men. They know in their heart that it is much harder to develop one's character than one's intelligence, and that the former is more valuable.
Another reason why being is more fundamental than knowing is the obvious fact that one has to be in order to know anything, or the fact that understanding requires knowledge grounded in conscious experience, because without the latter, the former simply becomes abstract, decontextualized, impotent to make us see and live differently. It often takes pain for us to understand something important, because pain forces us to act differently, such as when we lay our hand on a hot stove, or when we find that we have been untrue to ourselves by trying to please others.
The important decisions in life likewise have more to do with our ability to stand for our own truth and be in service of love, than in any form of intelligence, in the ability for instance to evaluate difficult tradeoffs between different options. Life decisions pretty much always boil down to doing the thing you know is right and important, versus running away from it out of fear. This is true when it comes to relationships, careers, finance, family, health, and where one lives.
The irony is that those who are good at thinking and planning are often very poor at executing, which involves a great deal of acting despite what one may fear, and working on things which are worthwhile to begin with, which basically always to do with love. To give an example, meaningful work is a form of devotion to something higher than yourself, of which the merely clever people know very little about, which is why people whose life revolves around their intellect tend to lead such trivial lives, spending so much of their time on their narrow interests, unable to see the bigger picture in anything they do. Hence the myriads of specialists who talk about politics so that they never have the mention the roots of all of our problems, civilization and the self-informed self (the unconscious ego) that builds it, or who spend more time looking at financial markets than being with their wife, or who fill their time with the chatter of their own mind because they cannot stand silence.
A way to see the primality of courage and love is that they roughly map to the duality of masculinity and femininity, the two complementary sides of creation. 2 Men tend to be more projective in how they live their life, wanting to explore and master their environment and themselves, which requires a great deal of courage. Women on the other hand do not feel compelled to go on this hero's journey, not that they aren't interested in exploration or developping their skills of course, but it isn't as much of an existential concern for them. They do not need to work to be worthy of love because they are love, they already come from a place of maturity and presence, which is why teenage girls can already be quite mature in a way that teenage boys aren't at all.
It is senseless for the power of a man to not be grounded in love, because otherwise it only leads to the cruel meaningless struggle of the will against itself, the incessant wars of nations against one another, or the religious crusades of the past, or the masters dominating their slaves, or the machine-world subjugating all of humanity and nature in its endless pursuit of growth.
Only the unity and presence afforded by love can allow a man's efforts to be about more than just his self. The will, by itself, becomes egoic, which is why Nietzsche's view of the will to power hasn't brought about more conscious men and women, but rather painted a rather cynical view of life, the kind that the Nazis reached for in their desperate attempts to construct meaning in a world without God. 3
The etymology of 'courage' in fact reflects this. The Latin root cor gives us the French word 'coeur', which is the word for 'heart', and gives us English words like 'cordial' (literally meaning "of the heart") and 'accord' ("to be of one heart").
Conversely, love cannot maintain itself without power, which is why the ideologies that promote "peace and love" are so utterly naive about the society we find ourselves in, one which is maintained on loose strings through the machine-world enabling the exploitation of poorer people, the destruction of nature, and leading to wars over scarce resources and political tension.
Middle-class "pacifists" talk about the importance of loving one's neighbor when they live in a neighborhood where everyone is too wealthy to really need to steal or commit any crime in the first place, meanwhile lower class people have to deal with the brutal reality of neighborhoods of people living in precarious situations, with many of them foreigners of the country they live in, meaning they often feel no sense of duty to make it a better place. 4
The modern world hasn't eradicated violence, slavery or colonialism, it has simply displaced a lot of it out of sight, and made much of it far too subtle for us to see it. Instead of colonizing indigenous tribes, the system invades our conscious interior. Instead of having slaves around us, we have slaves working away in China, India or elsewhere. And instead of physical violence, the system domesticates people into submission, crushing the spirits and curiosity of young children, and making them compliant (and dependant) to live in an insane atomized world.
This is why Christ is portrayed in far more disturbing imagery in the Book of Revelation than elsewhere, because when evil has taken over the world at large, the solution is not to turn the other cheek and love one's neighbors, it's instead to come as a sword and be willing to die for the Truth.
And this is why the technological system undermines both courage and love, because people who are willing to die for something are far too dangerous for its operations. It needs people who are impotent and afraid for their safety so that they have no choice but to work for the system, rather than to stand for what is true. No amount of intelligence will help you face your own death, which is why it is a secondary virtue compared to courage and love.
1 Or more precisely clever, see here for the distinctin between cleverness and intelligence
2 This part, like basically all of my writing, is heavily informed by Darren Allen. See for instance his essays on his Substack about gender, and his Book of Love.
3 Granted, just because a philosophy is adopted by monsters doesn't make it bad. More often than not, people pick up the parts that they like and leave the rest, like people have done with Christ in the past, or are doing in the modern West with the Buddha, or any spiritual teacher or radical artist we can think of. But I think the point remains for me that Nietzsche's attempt to build meaning without understanding the way that the will, by itself, becomes egoic and perpetuates an absurd cycle of conflict runs into a dead end, and that this mistake was most examplified by the Nazis, a group of people obsessed with power (over others and even reality) as a way of finding meaning.
4 If you feel the need to call me a racist, then know that I am the son of immigrant parents. Not that this makes me unable to be racist of course.
Go back to the list of blog posts
Courage Love Gender Technosystem Essayworthy
2026-03-19