In the spectacle, the guilty children of the bourgeoisie stare stupidly at their un-callused hands and decide they must atone for the sins of affluence. They buy organic produce when convenient. They take trips to certain regions of the third world, called zoos, to see how the people live. They think it's sad, this exotic culture of poverty, but strangely alluring. How much simpler life must be for these simple folks, who think of nothing but their daily bread! How happy and how thankful they must be for merely being! Of course, these romantic immediatists are dupes. They haven't escaped mediation in the slightest – they're attempting to trade the physical mediations of water coolers and florescent lights for less tangible ideological mediations. To think poor people are profound in their poverty is nothing but a profound ideological error. These errors betray more than a lack of knowledge about local culture and history; they reveal a lack of desire to understand how things are if the reality on the ground diverges from the pictures we're supposed to be seeing. The poor people our good liberals drive by – like so many stupid buffalo – are not merely thinking of their daily bread on god's great earth. They might be thinking of the incredible amount of work they have to do, children they have to feed, clothes they need to wash. They might be thinking of how they're work prevents them from attending the schools their government barely supports. But they're probably thinking about the impending dollarization, of the rise in prices and the drop in comfort, from little to none. Are they thinking of the joy of simplicity? No, they too are dreaming of hot tubs for two and banquets in California. They are dreaming of the mediated life preached from the pulpit of television throughout the world.

The third, broadest, layer of love is humanitarian. I've been lucky to encounter it in the hearts of one or two people in my life to date – a limitless well of concern, empathy, goodwill towards humankind. It's a beautiful, but rare, occurrence. Humanitarian love must tread carefully over the pits of sacrifice and romanticization – it must be an everyday outpouring of emotion, unconnected with ideologies of freedom, revolution, or the poor. Like any kind of love, it must be wholly unmediated, and it must well from within.

The primary difference between the Situationist revolutionary project and all others, present and past, is its treatment of sacrifice. Vaneigem criticizes those who have attempted to walk to path of refusal before him because they lost themselves in radical ideology instead of finding themselves in radical theory. Such a loss of self is a direct consequence of attempting revolution without its most revolutionary element: love. A loveless revolution becomes a revolution of sacrifice; instead of acting to realize the possibility which he loves the best, woman finds the 'best' cause: "the one in which the individual can lose himself body and soul" (Vaneigem 109). This desire to lose oneself results from the ideology of sacrifice – the idea that the revolutionary must sacrifice his body to share some piece of the spirit of the revolution (Vaneigem 107). The desire to lose oneself is also a denial of the desire to live – not a desire for death per se, but in Vaneigem's binary world, sacrifice leans more to the side of the dead than the living. Vaneigem then further attacks sacrifice for its weakness in commitment – it chooses the side of death not out of aesthetic sensibility (as does fascism), but merely because sacrifice denies any passion to live (Vaneigem 109):

Harsh words in deed, but from the point of total revolution, totally justified. What is the difference between the My Lai massacre and Auschwitz, if not in degrees? And yet the same good liberals ignore the former and condemn the latter. Where are the museums and soliloquies that commemorate and agonize over the death quads Central America? Their plans safely shelved in the Presidential Libraries of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, I think.

Vaneigem pinpoints this spirit of moderation as a direct consequence of sacrifice, of an abdication of the will to live for some imaginary higher spirit. He even sees its tendrils in two types of suicide: those from weariness and those from fervor. "Let us have no more suicides from weariness, which come like a final sacrifice crowning all those that have gone before. Better one last laugh, á la Cravan, or one last song á la Ravachol," (Vaneigem 110) is Vaneigem's gentle invitation for to treat death as the true antithesis of life, instead of the natural conclusion to a life barely lived. And those from fervor: "the moment revolution calls for self-sacrifice it ceases to exist. The individual cannot give himself up for a revolution, only for a fetish" (Vaneigem 110). For Vaneigem, this notion is one of the most dangerous and seductive ideas of Power – that the woman of radical refusal should die for her revolution, should sacrifice her youth for the mythic infusion of the revolutionary spirit. For Power, this is one of the most effective means of diffuse any revolutionary current – to encourage revolutionary cannibalism. Why then is such an abdication so common, at a point when the woman of refusal has attained such consciousness ? – when the woman has rejected enough constraints and mediations to understand the importance of the revolutionary project. Vaneigem's answer, rooted in a berating of those who do not link revolution with love and daily life, is that some people possess an "irrational terror of freedom" (Vaneigem 111). That they have been shackled for so long that they have grown to prefer it that way. The alternative to passivity takes effort, perseverance, and a highly developed notion of love – the revolution of love is no stroll in the park. "It is hard to be oneself, so we give up as quickly as possible, seizing whatever pretext offers itself: love of children, of reading, of artichokes, etc, etc" (Vaneigem 111). Here constraints pop back into 'life' for a delightful cameo appearance. The myths of obligations, stereotypes, and busyness drag the desire for life into the quicksand of apathy. "I would love to go to the beach, but I have a meeting with the loan officer this afternoon", or "That's really a terrific idea and I'm with you in spirit, but, you know, it's just not me, you know?" or the ever-present "I just don't have the time". A sad day indeed when we no longer have the time for living.

The desire for sacrifice is often focused by the 'leaders' of revolutionary movements: church fathers and Bolsheviks. Vaneigem finds such a hierarchy, even if only nominal, odious and contrary to the real genesis of revolution: "the real demand of all insurrectionary movements is the transformation of the world and the reinvention of life. This is not a demand formulated by theorists: rather, it is the basis of poetic creation. Revolution is made everyday despite, and in opposition to, the specialists of revolution" (Vaneigem 111). This statement is intended to further liberate the woman of refusal from the ideology of sacrifice: to inform her she owes nothing to those who would be the 'organizers' of her freedom.

Finally, Vaneigem asserts his view of the future of idealized human relationships: "The fact is there will never be any friendship, or love, or hospitality, or solidarity, as long as self-abnegation exists" (Vaneigem 115). Herein lies the explanation of his earlier critiques of friendship and solidarity as having no place in the revolutionary world: the spectacular notions of such are predicated on exchange ("You scratch my back, Ill scratch yours") and sacrifice. True notions of such relationships cannot exist as long as sacrifice (self-abnegation) does, because they are based upon love. Rather than bringing us closer to humanity, as is the revolutionary goal of love and the other relationships Vaneigem lists, their spectacular shadows do the opposite: "The call for self-denial amounts to an attempt to make inhumanity attractive" (Vaneigem 115). Sacrifice merely seduces us into a belief we are changing the world to our preferences, when really it is a settling of our preferences to the world's.

Humanitarian love, overstepping sacrifice, continues the walk to unity, the self's only quinine from the malaria of a fragmentary world. Closing the gulf of isolation escapes harsh reality of separation, from personal relations ruled by exchange that Vaneigem so detests. But, the reflex of identity alone, like radical subjectivity, is subversion unrealized. As long as there are other subjects reified in the world, as long as humans live inhumanely, any finite form provides only the "illusion of unity". Lovers know deeply the isolation that exists everywhere, the waves that approach closer and closer, which will inevitably erode their sand castle. Vaneigem notes: "Isolation á deux cannot overpower the general isolation. Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers find themselves naked in the world, their actions suddenly ridiculous and pointless" (Vaneigem 41). As long as there exists a world, a desperate world of isolation, outside the lovers' constructed universe, the knowledge of that world paralyzes the development of love. Vaneigem then transforms the shortcomings of the illusory definition of love-as-unity into a critique of its use. By affirming the absolute importance of loving in a state of unity while simultaneously signaling the impossibility of such, Vaneigem implies the lovers' only option is to struggle against the "general isolation," the isolation of society. For a mere two people to revolt against the general isolation of a world-historical system, only a matter of time separates madness and desperation. For two people to live without love, the madness is immediate. For those who realists who base their actions on likelihood rather than necessity, on existence rather than essence, on what appears rather than what is, Vaneigem trumpets love's failures to entice us to seek its triumphs. He gives the ultimate incentive to revolt to realist and idealist alike – "No love is possible in an unhappy world" (Vaneigem 41).

The spectacular answer to a general, humanitarian approach is to pull the wool of consumerism over our eyes. Mediated experiences give no indication of the earth or labor required to produce them – it becomes increasingly difficult to discern image from reality. Is that plastic or glass? Synthetic or natural? Factory or hand-made? When we have passed the point when we could tell how exactly something is of the Earth, or how much human labour – human suffering – was needed to produce a mere thing, we have gone too far, and backwards at that. Vaneigem's humanitarian love, his desire to end the unseen suffering of daily life – readily translates into a demand for ethical consumption. We need to restructure our daily lives to understand what it is we are doing, how it is we are living. Am I causing more misery through paper bags or plastic? Will our physical environment last longer if I use the electric heater or the woodstove? Are sweatshop workers in Saipan better off when I buy from their factories or boycott them? The fundamental questions and answers of a global economic system have long been disguised under profit margins and bottom lines. The human aspect is unimportant, ignored. A humanitarian love, a complete, realized, subversive love understands every action of every day in its global context, in its human significance. It begins by asking what the hell is going on in modern society – it begins by exposing the gears of the spectacle to popular inspection. This is the duty of love – to love broadly and without restraint, to feel complicit in the human project enough that one's daily life becomes inseparable from the daily lives of those you do see and those you don't.