🕳 The Collapse of the Other: On the Antithesis of Love

If love is the radical construal of the other as sacred—as irreducible potential—then its opposite is not hate. It is reduction.

To reduce someone is to deny their becoming. It is to collapse their meaning into something manageable, usable, categorical. It is not always cruel. Sometimes it is efficient. Often, it is unconscious. But it is always a betrayal of the sacred.

The Logic of Reduction

We reduce others when we:

• Name them by a single trait: the addict, the refugee, the boomer.

• Assign them a fixed function: the mother, the boss, the villain.

• Render them as data: a demographic, a KPI, a conversion rate.

Each of these is a construal—but not a loving one. They are ways of collapsing the vast system of meaning potential in another person into a singular, usable instance. They transform the other into an object of prediction or control.

In such a world, the Other becomes infrastructure.

Ontological Violence

This collapse is more than social. It is ontological. It rewrites what is possible.

To reduce a person is not just to misrepresent them. It is to narrow the field of meanings that can be actualised in relation to them. It is a subtle form of world-building—one that constrains rather than opens.

This is the opposite of what love does.

Where love widens the semantic field, reduction tightens it. Where love says, You are not yet meant, reduction says, I already know what you are.

Reduction is not a lack of love. It is a reversal of love’s meaning-making.

When Collapse Becomes Culture

When cultures become systems of reduction, we find ourselves surrounded by roles rather than people. We meet not Others, but projections. Categories. Clichés.

And the more efficient we become at categorising, the harder it becomes to love.

Love takes time. It requires uncertainty. It demands a slowing down of construal, a willingness to let potential speak. In a world driven by speed, output, and optimisation, love becomes subversive.

Because love refuses to collapse.

Toward a Restorative Ethics

To resist reduction is not simply a moral gesture. It is a metaphysical one. It is to reclaim the ontological dignity of the Other.

It means speaking not to the role, but to the person. It means asking, not what someone is, but who they are becoming. It means refusing to let a single act, trait, or category define the system of their meaning.

It is to say:

“I will not reduce you.

I will not pretend I have seen all there is to see.

I will not act as if your story has ended.”

To love, then, is not simply to feel.

It is to choose how to construe.

And when the dominant habits of construal are reductive, love becomes resistance.