When Che Guevara was asked by a reporter in New York what was the motivation for the revolutionary, he gave a surprising answer.

Probably not the one this reporter expected.

She was fishing for some radical reply that would spice up her story and generate hatred for this Marxist madman. But Guevara simply said…

…the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.

I was listening this morning to a very old video clip of a BBC interview with Bertrand Russell.

Russell is asked if this interview were placed in a time capsule and then viewed 1,000 years in the future, what would be the message he would most want to convey.

Russell said this…

Russell was also quite the revolutionary in his own day, albiet, unlike Guevara, a pacifist one.

Nevertheless, it seems that there is something to this idea of love as the motivational force for the revolutionary.

Love for people.

Love for planet.

And love of the fact that we are all created and connected by a universal force that some call god, or divine intelligence, or whatever, but it is there and it is calling us to love.

I can see no other possible explanation for love’s very existence.

In that sense love is the ultimate good. And the ultimate good is the best representation that we can mortally muster of that universal force.

So much is done in our world for motivations that are diametrically opposed to love. They are done for selfish gain or interest, greed, lustful cruelty, or for religious, or nationalistic reasons.

We talk of love for country as if it were the highest form of sacrificial love. I disagree, highly. I believe this form of intense patriotic love is what separate us. It’s what threatens us.

And when I use that word, us, I am talking the big US…not the small one.

You see, love of country presupposes that the small us is the only us worth loving. The revolutionary misfit has a love much grander than that. It is love for all people, everywhere. We care just as much about them in Uganda and Uruguay as we do for those in the urban areas over which we daily tread.

Do you really love people? You should since you belong to that species yourself.

Do you love planet? Well, you ought to, since it is the only celestial home we have at the moment.

If you do truly love those three things and if that rare form of revolutionary love is your primary motivational force for impact…

then you certainly qualify as a revolutionary…

and as a misfit.

This post is an excerpt from The Revolutionary Misfit Manifesto.