The Essential Principle of Kindness
It's time to return to basics if we want to live in peace.
Some days it baffles me how far behaviors on all sides of the culture war have strayed from basic human decency. So I’ve decided to begin addressing some basic principles to live by, what they mean, and how we ended up here instead.
While this idea started out as a series, as an afterthought, beginning with kindness has taken this exploration deep into several of the areas I had hoped to address. This single post may, in fact, be the entire series. We shall see.
Pull up a chair and grab yourself a cup of tea.
The first principle: Kindness
Kindness is a deliberate spirit of heart and mind that predicates itself on respect. Kindness aims to charitably contribute goodwill to the social glue that holds community together and makes peace and cooperation possible.
To be kind is distinct from being nice. Although they may bear a close resemblance to one another, kindness has more than just style: it has genuine substance. A person practicing kindness knows that he is free, and behaves this way by choice because it aligns with his personal dignity as well as his respect for that of others.
To be nice, on the other hand, does not require sincerity. Whereas kindness is congruent with its aims inside and out, niceness is often a sugar coating intended to conceal some other motive. One person can treat another nicely without any sincere concern for him — only the hopes of expediting her desire to get what she wants. Oftentimes niceness is saccharine, conflict-avoidant, passive-aggressive, or manipulative.
Niceness can also be a fawning stance one adopts in to appease a perceived aggressor: that is, walking on eggshells. When a person feels threatened and behaves nicely in the hopes of escaping someone she might actually want to punch, her nervous system is in an instinctual survival mode. This state is reactive, not proactive; as such, in it, emotions cannot be regulated, only dissociated from. To a less visceral degree, although no physical danger may be present, these same feelings can govern online engagement as well. The threat of social ostracization has a powerful impact on the survival instinct of creatures as social as we. When a person fawns to escape threat, while he may be on his nicest behavior, genuine feelings of kindness are absent.
The average person cannot choose to operate from kindness without knowing she is safe and free to do so. This sense of freedom is as internal as it is external. Of course her social and physical environment must be relatively free of any credible threats that cue the fight-flight response. But it is also up to her to assess threat as accurately as possible, and regulate her emotions accordingly. Sometimes we are too quick to read danger into a situation and jump into a fight, flight, or freeze mode, perhaps all below our conscious awareness. This is usually a learned behavior, whether from trauma or from the family or cultural environment one developed in. A kind person can assess what might be at stake and choose to act kindly anyway. This does not mean she is free of fear altogether. She may have legitimate reason to be concerned for how others may react. For instance, an employer may be kind when she tells her employee he is being fired, knowing full well that he could get upset. But she takes it upon herself to accept the reality of what is and is not within her control. She assures herself that regardless of how he reacts, she can choose to remain centered and stick to her principles.
An advanced person, who we might call emotionally mature, self-actualized, or enlightened, has evolved a spectacular ability to maintain self-possessed kindness in all circumstances. When we consider famous saints and sages throughout history — Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Viktor Frankl — we see kindness in the face of all manner of depravity. These exemplars directed their kindness at the very heart and soul of those who would persecute them. To be kind in these cases was not to agree with their persecutors. It was to maintain their core devotion to their principles, come what may. The principles these noble beings espoused may have been revolutionary and inflamed those whose character-disordered wielding of power, corrupt and devoid of dignity, relied upon the exploitation of others. However, the saints’ attitude toward those rotten personalities was still merciful at its core, for the souls of such demon-haunted monsters suffer in their rebellion from the divine. Bearing light in the face of darkness offers tormentors a way out of the spiritual suffering inherent in their cruelty toward others.
Perhaps the ability and willingness to practice genuine, principled kindness instead of motive-driven niceness evolves over time —or arguably, depending on one’s spiritual beliefs, over many lifetimes. It begins as a set of attitudes and behaviors one feels able offer in the lowest-stakes situations, and grows in concordance with the maturing person’s capacities to regulate his emotions; identify and align himself with core values; prioritize the preservation of his dignity via devotion to those values above any expedient appeal of short-term material or social gains; and, ultimately, surrender his life to a higher purpose or power, with some faith or existential meaning as his guide. We grow our capacity to be kind across a broader range of situations in proportion to our willingness to sacrifice all other outcomes besides alignment with our divinity.
“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”
-Dalai Lama XIV
How did we stray from kindness?
Let’s now explore the myriad dishonest temptations that the metaphorical devil has dangled before us to lead us astray, breeding a culture with ever more broadly applicable rationales for absconding kindness, and ultimately paving the path toward hell.
“Us versus them” and in-group loyalty
In this mode of thinking, kindness as a universal principle becomes replaced with its imitator, in-group loyalty. This is fueled by our need for belonging; susceptibility to pride; survival instincts in a resource-limited world; and evolutionarily adaptive (energy-saving) tendency to take mental shortcuts such as overgeneralization, labeling, and all-or-nothing thinking. When we surrender in our vulnerability to this temptation, we sacrifice dedication to the greater good for dedication to a particular group (“us”) and excuse ourselves of the moral responsibility to understand or care for those we perceive as outside the boundaries of that group (“them”). We subconsciously look for cues that signal which “team” another person is on. Those cues can be found in language use, apparel, demeanor, skin color, sex, and other aesthetic signals. Once we have assessed another person’s group membership, we have decided whether or not they are worthy of our consideration.
“He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that.”
-John Stuart Mill
This all too human heuristic leads to intellectual atrophy and moral corruption more quickly than we are capable of recognizing. Tribalism takes priority over altruism. Whether consciously or not, we have excused ourselves from any obligation to understand those we perceive as different.
The rationale goes: “us” = good, “them” = bad. Therefore, protecting “us” from “them” = good and noble = being on the right side of history = doing what God/country/tribe/ancestors/descendants would want me to do. Unfortunately, even if this absurdly simplistic arithmetic were accurate, the position is intellectually weak. In bypassing the opportunity to better understand those perceived as different, the opportunity to strengthen one’s own position is also forfeited; therefore, the capacity to influence others, and convert any of “them” to “us,” is miniscule. These tribalists straw-man their opponents’ beliefs, rather than steel-manning. When said opponents do not see their perspective accurately represented before it is refuted — when, worse, they see their perspective seemingly deliberately distorted in a way that lacks nuance, compassion, or understanding — bridges between the two sides are only burnt, never built.
A far wiser, but rarer, approach, would require spending energy in an effort to understand “them” as they see themselves. It is dignified and intellectually resilient to “steel-man” the ideas of one’s opponents; that is, to represent them in the most charitable and accurate light possible, before demonstrating where the errors in their attitudes lie. However, many people fail to recognize or seize the opportunity to do this. Not only does it require mental effort; it also risks two frightening possibilities. One risk is that one’s in-group might view him as a traitor and turn against him. The other is that, by opening his mind to outside perspectives, his own mind might change. Thus, the heart and the head are both fragmented.
These fears expose the real frailties of his tribalist heuristics: that his group’s loyalty to him is not rooted in genuine love, but is fragile, carefully hingeing upon his allegiance to tribal mores; and that his beliefs are superficial, unable to stand up to scrutiny. On some level, most tribalists survive by repressing these fears with various psychological defenses, such as denial and rationalization. Indulging in these defenses opens the door to an escalating feedback loop that renders the tribalist vulnerable to more and more absurd — and potentially dangerous — heuristics and moral failings.
Which brings us to…
Mistakes and rationales that justify absconding the moral obligation to be kind
Failures of discernment: beliefs are not facts; facts are not feelings; feelings are not actions
The fundamental failure of understanding is the failure to distinguish between facts, thoughts, feelings, and actions, and to apply discernment to all.
Failure to distinguish facts from sensory perceptions
A fact is an objective, observable truth that can be verified or refuted by the scientific process, or derived from first principles.
A perception is subjective sensory information. For example, the sky often appears to be blue, and is commonly agreed to be such. Sometimes, it appears as red, orange, yellow, pink, purple, white, gray, or black. To a color-blind person, the sky may not appear to have a color at all. Factually speaking, what we see as sky is composed of a combination of the earth’s atmosphere and the space beyond. On a cloudy day, we may only see a mile into the sky above us; on a clear night, we can spot stars hundreds of light years away. The sky is by no means, therefore, a singular object. It would be inaccurate to say that the gases composing what is most visible to us have inherent colors. Rather, they refract light following laws of physics that then result in colors visible to the human eye, as well as wavelengths beyond our sensory perceptions. So, is it a fact that the sky is blue? No. But, is it a valid perception? Sure. In most commonplace human interactions, the difference is inconsequential. However, there are times that the distinction is necessary.
Similarly, I might feel cold. That is a valid sensory perception only I can know. Being aware that I am cold, I am free to do things about it, such as move my body, add layers, or change my environment. I can also use this information to communicate my desires to other people, such as asking if it would be okay for us to turn up the heat. We may disagree on the most desirable room temperature, but it would be absurd for either of us to argue that whether the room is hot or cold is a factual matter. Most adults understand this is a highly variable, subjective perception. Furthermore, my subjective feeling of cold is not inherently an indicator that I have hypothermia in need of medical attention. A medical situation requires not only symptoms, but verification of the etiology and treatment of those symptoms. The current scale on which our culture has adapted mistaking facts for feelings as a normative behavior is about as absurd as the insistence that a person who feels cold is medically hypothermic.
Failure to distinguish facts from beliefs
A belief is an understanding with any degree of accuracy and could potentially be driven by a wide range of motives. Generally speaking, a belief is our best guess about something. We may have found evidence to confirm it, and this may be driven by confirmation bias to varying degrees.
I might believe I left my keys in my purse, then confirm or deny this once I have checked my purse to be sure. There would be little to no emotional charge behind my belief. However, if there were a strong likelihood that I might have dropped my keys somewhere within a wide stretch of sandy beach, then my belief that they are in my purse would be more akin to wishful thinking. Fearing the dread of having lost them and having to spend the rest of my day searching would be a compelling motivation to exaggerate in my own mind the likelihood that they are in my purse until I can no longer deny that I will have to look elsewhere. At that point, however, continuing to believe they are where I want them to be, rather than accepting the reality of where they most likely are and therefore beginning the arduous sandy treasure hunt, would be irrational and self-defeating.
I might also believe the earth is flat; my motives for believing something widely refuted by scientific consensus (including observable facts) would be questionable.
People have beliefs of all kinds. They can be innocuous or pernicious; accurate, mistaken, or miscalculated. They may be personally meaningful, unfalsifiable, metaphorical, spiritual or religious in nature. They can also be dogmatic and indoctrinated. They can be held loosely or rigidly. They can be more or less open to influence, correction, modification, or evolution.
Beliefs in and of themselves cannot be good or evil, but they can lead us in one direction or the other. A belief that some people are superior to others may be distasteful, and violate the aesthetic sensibilities of the virtuously inclined, but it only causes harm in proportion to the ways in which it is acted upon. This leads us to…
Failure to distinguish feelings from actions
A wise man once said to his children, “you can be mad, but not mean.” Mad is a feeling; mean is a quality of behavior. A person who feels mad can choose, not only to be nice, but, as described earlier, to be kind. Sometimes, this might mean that she steps away from the person she feels angry toward until she is calm enough to treat him with respect. This is a values-driven choice, the sort that builds a virtuous life.
Similarly, a person can feel afraid, yet take the very step that scares him. He can feel tired, yet prepare dinner for his children. He can feel sad, yet will himself to dance to an upbeat song. While acting contrary to our feelings can be maladaptive in some instances, it can also be wildly empowering.
It is perplexing that “therapy culture” has simultaneously moved the needle in opposite directions. On one hand, the most basic principles of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Nonviolent Communication, to name a few approaches, all teach the age-old wisdom that feelings are not facts, and help people live meaningful lives in pursuit of values-congruent goals.
On the other hand, though usually drive by adequately noble intentions to express compassion and facilitate healing, mental health professionals also make the mistake of coddling our clients. Sometimes we are overly nurturing and indulgent when what they need is challenge, confrontation, and encouragement. We act as though our job is to protect them from the world, when what they need is a temporary shelter in which to recuperate, pull themselves together, and emerge stronger. We keep our clients weak and dependent, inhibiting them from developing psychological maturity.
There are limits to which we can take responsibility for our clients’ fragility. Sometimes they mistake our reflective listening for our own opinion. I am certainly not the only therapist who has heard a client say, “I took your advice and did Thing X,” when I had advised no such thing. The misunderstanding arises from confluence. Clients hear us reflecting their own thought process back to them and mistakenly assume that we agree with their narratives and attributions. The reality may be that we see our roles as using reflective listening to support clients engaging in a larger process of sorting themselves out — which is not the same as starting with a conclusion in mind. Or perhaps we are still establishing rapport, gathering information, and coming to understand how our clients got to where they are. We may also be working with an initial estimation that what they are telling us is relatively factual, while open to the possibility of discovering evidence to the contrary. There are myriad ways these wires can cross. All that being said, I am still of the belief that once a misunderstanding is discovered, we have a responsibility to correct it.
The outcome of therapy should be that clients achieve a sense that they are capable of living healthy, empowered, meaningful lives. Sometimes this does mean it is appropriate to help clients protect themselves from threats; we may help them leave abusive relationships and employers, for instance. However, the end goal is never to make the world conform to our wishes. It is to gain the strength to handle the world as it is.
“It's easier to put on a pair of shoes than to wrap the earth in leather.”
-Chögyam Trungpa
“Impact matters more than intention”
I recall with nostalgia a time most decent people could agree that both intention and impact mattered. This was a useful concept during my training in Nonviolent Communication and couples counseling. Creating space to understand both people’s experiences automatically reduces defensiveness, the first offense. We can begin to untangle a black/white, either/or, I’m right/you’re wrong argument by acknowledging that perhaps both people’s experiences matter and may hold some degree of truth, or at least warrant a genuine attempt to understand them. And this is usually the best thing for everyone’s mental health.
Here is a fairly straightforward example. John steps on Julie’s foot. The impact is that her foot is hurt; perhaps only for a brief moment, perhaps to a degree that warrants medical attention. Regardless of John’s intention, Julie’s physical pain is real, and deserves care.
However, John’s intention does matter. There is a tremendous difference between stepping on someone’s foot accidentally versus purposefully. One is an innocent mistake easily made by a good person; the other is a cruel act of physical abuse. Unless, at the opposite extreme, John did step on Julie’s foot intentionally, but only because it seemed the only way at the time to stop her from what was clearly an attempt on her part to assault him or someone else. Context and intention matter greatly.
If John stepped on Julie’s foot accidentally, the remedy is simple: he apologizes, explains he hadn’t meant to do so, and moves to help address her pain and injury in whatever manner the situation calls for, whether that be an ice pack or a ride to the nearest emergency room.
If, on the other hand, John stepped on Julie’s foot purposely with the intention to hurt her — and not driven by any legitimate need to protect himself or someone else from worse harm — Julie is right to feel indignant and to take steps necessary to protect herself. This may be as simple as removing herself from his presence never to see him again, or as complex as pressing charges, issuing a restraining order, and filing for divorce. She should also take care of herself, first attending to her medical needs, then perhaps also addressing her psychological needs, perhaps seeking therapy to help her leave or recover from the abusive relationship.
In the case of an innocent mistake, the first priority should be addressing Julie’s immediate physical needs; the second, her feelings; and the third, John’s need for recognition and forgiveness. In the case of abuse, the first two matter, while the third concern is not relevant.
Too often, in couples, we see head-butting as each person defends their experience. Julie demands that John attend to her pain and apologize, while John demands prematurely that Julie recognize his innocence. He should first focus on the impact, offering a sincere apology as well as physical help with a focus on her needs. Only once this is remedied is Julie in a position to forgive him for the mistake and move on in their relationship free of any grudge. It would be unfair, to say the least, for Julie to insist that he hurt her on purpose when she has no legitimate reason to believe that to be the case. It would also be manipulative for her to hold on to this alleged wrong and save her right to hold it against him as a weapon to be deployed at a later date.
If either party fails to behave kindly too many times, it is understandable for the other to begin to question their motives and the depth of their love. Even if John stepped on Julie’s foot by mistake, if over time several such instances occur without apology, she may feel resentful and unloved. Likewise, if every time John makes an innocent mistake Julie holds on to the story and weaponizes it to attack him in a future argument, he will lose his trust in the sincerity of her love for him as well. Healthy relationships require a spirit of goodwill, kindly extending one another the benefit of the doubt until it becomes abundantly apparent that doing so only leads to exploitation.
But now, somehow, we increasingly see people vigorously defending the notion that only impact that matters, never intention. This is a tragic loss for mental health, relationships, perhaps even the very fabric of society itself.
The person labeled “impacted” is fully supported in believing whatever she may choose to believe about the situation, however factual or not, even to the point of near-psychotic paranoia. She is often enabled to become insatiable in her demands if she so chooses, limited only by the constraints of her own reason and character. She can maintain an external locus of control, assuming that how she feels is determined entirely by outside circumstances — by what happens to her, rather than how she chooses to interpret and respond. She may therefore easily remain blind to her own role, responsibilities, and, ironically, to the ways in which she too has an impact on other people. While the “impacted” may feel vindicated in the short term, ultimately her mental health deteriorates. No one benefits from maintaining an exclusively external locus of control, from acting on impulse, from reinforcing an attitude of mistrust toward others, from interpreting the world in an uncharitable and unforgiving light, from justifying holding grudges and throwing fits. These behaviors do not strengthen character, do not build genuine self-respect and self-esteem, do not cultivate healthy relationships, do not empower the individual to take meaningful actions that lead to a rich and fulfilling life. At their worst extreme, they comprise personality disorders. Those who naively back up the “impacted” may unwittingly be enabling and empowering someone quite cruel at heart.
Meanwhile, the “impactor” may be subject to any degree of punishment, however innocent his motives. When no one will consider his experience, he may feel frustrated, resentful, indignant, and ultimately empowered in adopting a more polarized attitude. This may push him to seek membership in a different group altogether, perhaps one that equally denies any dignity or charity toward the “other side,” and indulges itself in the same unsavory habits. Alternately, he may cave into a state of learned helplessness. He may be persuaded he is truly in the wrong, perhaps irredeemably so, collapsing into shame and depression, perhaps rendering himself more and more vulnerable to emotional abuse. Or he may be socially pressured to cave into preference falsification, publicly stating what he believes is expected of him while concealing his true beliefs. He may engage in fawning behaviors, appeasing and people-pleasing, ultimately wearing at the authenticity of his relationships as well as his own sense of integrity and self-actualization.
“All feelings are welcome everywhere”
Though appealing on its surface, this cultural trend may do more harm than good. And this may be another failing of the profession of psychotherapy. Just because it’s healthy to get in touch with one’s feelings and develop tools for expressing them does not mean it is always the wisest course of action to be public about feelings.
As a culture, we have forgotten the importance of privacy and the value of context-based code-switching. We let our feelings hang out all over the place and then get upset when people don’t respond empathetically, regardless of the context. This is a misunderstanding of the concept of self-care. It places responsibility for our feelings in the hands of others. Yet again we see an example of having an external locus of control.
Taking care of yourself does not always mean being open about your feelings. Sometimes it means giving yourself adequate privacy to process them in the ways best suited to you, such as creating art, listening to music, taking a bath, or exercising. Sometimes it means selectively choosing those friends, family members, and/or mental health professionals who have demonstrated you can trust them to give you the kind of support you need. But spilling everything to people who have not demonstrated the willingness or ability to respond in the ways you are hoping for does nothing to alleviate your psychological distress. If anything, it can worsen it, leading to disappointment, frustration, and embarrassment.
Social media robs us of context and dulls our ability to adjust our behavior accordingly, all while isolating us in our own self-reinforcing echo chambers, promoting reactivity and impulsivity, and demonstrating examples of others who contribute to a culture of letting it all hang out. Sometimes, it incentivizes us to broadcast our private lives in the hope of receiving attention, support, encouragement, or praise. This is misleading, however, because likes, comments, shares, and retweets yield only ephemeral pleasure and are ultimately nothing like the fulfillment we derive from connecting with those we truly trust in person or over video or audio.
It is wise to have boundaries about what feelings get expressed with whom, about what topics, in what contexts, and in what manners. If nothing else, it is wise to do so for ourselves on a personal level as an act of self-care. More broadly speaking, it benefits the culture as well when people can expect fairly predictable standards for what goes where. Structure is comforting. Different modes of operating are necessary in different areas of life. To focus on a cerebral project, a physical workout, or a social event, we need to be able to compartmentalize and step away from our emotions to an effective and conducive degree. That does not mean full-on repression and dissociation; it means having good psychological active range of motion: strength, flexibility, and the ability to access desired states and abilities at appropriate times.
Where this leads
So our culture has allowed the fallacies to fester that feelings are facts, and that they always implicate corresponding actions. We combine this with a culture that dictates that all feelings are welcome in all settings, and should always be celebrated and embraced, and that anyone who questions or places limits on this is callous and morally depraved. This pattern lends itself all too easily to a world in which anyone is free, not only to feel anything at any time in any setting, but also to assume that their feelings correspond accurately to the facts of the situation — perhaps even that the feelings tell us what the facts must be. Then, it follows, when someone feels strongly about something — or has learned that they will be socially rewarded for acting as if they do — it is right for them to act accordingly. Sometimes, this means unquestioningly acting out rage through psychological violence, if not physical.
When “us” and “them” categories have been firmly established, in-group loyalties are cemented, while the out-group has been deemed undeserving of consideration, its motives always considered malicious. Once the out-group is thus demonized, it is viewed through a negative filter and denied the benefit of the doubt. Intentions are assumed to be corrupt, while alleged impacts are assumed to be correct.
The in-group can therefore never be satisfied, because its feelings and reactions are always unquestioningly validated, and its members have not discovered the role they play in regulating their own emotions, while the out-group is always perceived as antagonizing. And since feelings are facts are actions, the out-group’s perceived emotional hostility equates to an actual threat as perceived by the in-group. This self-reinforcing feedback loop escalates into greater and greater polarization, and more and more radical actions. Righteous indignation. Mockery. Hubris. Tantrums. Anything goes.
Kindness is an absolute necessity
The only solution to this escalation of madness is a shifting of values that re-prioritizes kindness above all else.
We must dare to take personal responsibility for our actions and to evaluate them according to their adherence to a spirit of kindness. Without it, we descend into chaos and violence.
Kindness is the only way forward.
