Why Dumbledore Never Loved Tom Riddle

In Harry Potter, Voldemort is explained as having been born from a love potion and thus incapable of love. Setting aside the one-dimensional and narrow-minded tendency to define love in a uniform manner, let us for a moment assume this truly constitutes a “deficit of love.”

Then one question remains: why was Voldemort, lacking in love, not himself loved? When Dumbledore first met the young Tom Riddle, why did he not actively offer him “love”? The attitude Dumbledore displayed merely reproduced a self-fulfilling prophecy, and so we are compelled to ask: where, then, was love to be found?

J.K.R. seems to have overlooked the fact that in situations where legitimacy cannot be assessed, or where assessing it is meaningless, what appears as the fallacy of “tu quoque” can actually function as a form of logic. There is no inherent good or evil in a system. Can an egalitarian order that supplants an oligarchy truly be defined as “love”? Dogmatic dichotomies yield nothing but contradictions.

Some may wish to defend J.K.R. by placing her on the same level as George Orwell. Yet Orwell, in 1984, went far beyond a simplistic “fascism is bad,” offering a much more complex critique. Unfortunately, no such depth can be found in J.k.R.’s work. Her writing consistently reveals a poverty of narrative and a limitation of thought. And the fact that she has recently expressed conservative views on the spectrum of gender serves as evidence that Rowling lacks both the ability and the will to move beyond dichotomous modes of thinking.