For the Sake of Justice, Support Love’s Flow
April 10, 2026
In a recent conversation with a group of people about my passion for and interest in “energy systems science,” I briefly mentioned Richard Barrett, who has done a lot of work on organizational values over the years. In a recent Substack post, he talked about a vital “flow” that is lacking from many organizations – love.
This is something we bring up a lot in our work with partners. Love is one facet of our collaborative change lens (see image below), and vital for collaborative efforts to ensure long-term human and socio-ecological thriving.
The late Chilean systems biologist Humberto Maturana has written how critical love is to human systems. In fact, he has gone so far as to say that it is the only emotion that significantly increases human intelligence. Clinical psychologist Barbara Frederickson at the University of North Carolina has also looked at how love can do everything from increase our peripheral vision to reduce our biases when it comes to people who appear different from us on the surface of things.
But back to Barrett’s post – at one point he states:
“Most systems were not designed for the level of complexity they now face. Love, as capacity, was never built explicitly into their architecture. This work begins not with slogans, but with attention. With noticing where presence withdraws under pressure. With asking what becomes unsayable — and why.”
Here he is alluding to the second of four pillars of energy systems science – “resilient structures” – which supports the first pillar – “regenerative flows.” These structures can be tangible and intangible, including structures of agreements and cultural norms, policies and procedures, physical design and layout of a space, and institutional structures for distributing resources.
Clearly, what we are seeing and feeling in this country and around the globe is evidence of structures that have not let love, in all of its forms (see image above from Roman Krznaric’s book, The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live) getting to certain people and places. And because everything is connected, this impacts other people and places (there really is no “other,” or outside).
As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in 1963:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
This was recently conveyed to me in a different way by partners we support in Oklahoma around cultural renewal in the state. One person said, “People need to understand that what happens here in Oklahoma is not just about Oklahoma.” I have heard similar sentiments expressed by those with whom we work in the Mississippi Delta and in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
Looking at the state of our world, I am moved to ask this:
If love truly does make us more intelligent (and we at IISC think and feel that it does), not to mention more safe, secure and satisfied, what will it take to make the work of creating structures that support its flow that much more important?
2 Comments
Love as an overlooked structural component is a compelling insight for reimagining sustainable energy and social systems worldwide.
Curtis,
I just got hold of your outstanding article—and, I suspect, the broader body of work behind it.
It provides an excellent introduction to a far more organic way of thinking, one that appears much more coherent and relevant to our socio-ecological realities than the linear, hierarchical systems our species has empowered and deployed for centuries.
For decades, I have been attempting to genealogically deconstruct and demystify the abstract concepts and ideologies that have shaped our cognitive and perceptual functions, and in doing so have progressively overwritten much of our collective sapience. They have prescribed an increasingly anthropocentric orientation toward ourselves, others, and the living world.
The result, as I see it, is the emergence of a systematically desolated self (ego): a form of intelligence that finds itself increasingly isolated from the commons and the collective, deprived of the social-emotional capacities that make meaningful participation in larger living systems possible.
To fully contextualize and comprehend this kind of network thinking, it seems to me that we must recover our Social-Emotional Intelligence and rehabilitate our ecopsychological sensitivities. Without such capacities, network frameworks risk remaining intellectual abstractions rather than becoming lived, relational realities.
Thank you for contributing to a conversation that feels both timely and necessary.