There is this highly feminine trope that rules our society that if only everyone was kind, most of the suffering in society would be fixed.
The problem with this is of course that it’s not true, and it’s amazing that the majority of women in the west continue to feel this when, in fact, it should be obvious to them that nobody will settle for kindness because they won’t settle for kindness.
Will they mate off with a man who is merely “kind” and nothing else? Of course not. Will they stay with a husband who is merely “kind” and nothing else? Nope, divorce follows almost immediately.
Because of course there are many other things that, say, a man or a husband need to do:
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Perform household tasks (which implies available non-work time)
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Pay the bills (which implies a salary sufficient to pay them and sufficient to do so while leaving available non-work time)
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Be fit and groomed (which implies, again, disposable cash for gym memberships, healthy food, groomit items, etc.)
- Show some “ambition” and “achievement” (degrees, promotions, etc.)
And of course these are fundamentally competitive items. Everyone in the company does not get promoted. If you get promoted, it means someone else did not. Income is fundamentally a zero-sum game; there is a fixed amount of currency in the system at any one time, and your ownership of any amount of it implies that someone else does not also own it.
To do the things that make you acceptable, you must beat other people to the punch—outperform them competitively in one of a variety of ways—leaving them relatively less acceptable in the process.
Those are the table stakes, the cost of entry, to being alive.
There seems to be this presumption baked into the kindness ideology that it would all be better if everyone was kind because then we could just pat them on the head and forget about them (the pat being “kind,” and them sitting idly by for the rest of their lives in a kind of placid, stagnant, ignorable kidness as well).
Nobody settles for kindness. Not women, not men, not anyone. People want a house. They want to eat. They want to paint the shed. They want to see Florence before they die. This is not a matter of kindness. This is a matter of competition.
And because it’s competition amongst 8 billion people and some of them are very motivated and not all that kind, it’s often brutal, zero-sum competition.
So the next time someone starts railing on about kindness, tell them to shut the fuck up, because they wouldn’t settle for it. They just wouldn’t. They’re demanding it from you and everyone in addition to everything else they unexaminedly want, and at the same time demanding that everyone else settle for kindness alone from them.
Not playing that game. And I bother to write this because for the first 3.5 decades of my life I was fooled by this entirely, in my naive lefty idealism, and it is one of my greatest life’s regrets—and one of the ways in which I feel most betrayed by parents, teachers, and others.
There are times, like today, when it makes me so furious I could spit.
Nobody ever sat me down and said, “When someone demands kindness, be very suspicious, because demanding kindness is merely a strategy to advance relative to the most naive competition in a zero-sum game, whether the demanders understand this or not; don’t be that naive competition that’s easiest to dispose of.”