This is an excellent article by Mary Harrington. The main topic is an Atlantic article proposing (cajoling?) amnesty for COVID maximalists. While I may have more to say on that subject later on, I currently want to direct your attention to the final sentence.
"Kindness is everything" actually is one of the adages listed on those lawn signs that are ubiquitous in blue states and cities. And a lot of people dot their Instagram/Twitter bios and Facebook signatures with "Be kind" and instructions of that nature.
Adopting "kindness" as your guiding political principle seems unwise to me. If everything you believe in can be reduced to kindness, you're justified in doing just about anything, to promote it, right? Pretty soon your allegiance to kindness relieves you of the responsibility of actually being kind in your daily interactions. Bombs away.
So keep mum and do something.
2 comments:
Hardwired towards social conformity, most people don’t even begin to comprehend how it compromises their thinking. The amount of ‘herding’ in the modern world is truly staggering because its effects are massive and reach to just about every aspect of human endeavor. That’s to be expected for a social species, and not very troubling by itself, but what troubles me is that it’s gotten noticeably worse during my lifetime and it’s pushing civilization in some dangerous directions. The road to a totalitarianism is much shorter than most people realize.
Seeing those signs still gives me the creeps.
“Kindness is the excuse that social justice warriors use when they want to exercise control over what other people think and say.”
~ Jordan Peterson
As you say, we're a social species and that primes us to do certain things in ways that we don't think about and might not be conscious of. Some of us can separate ourselves from this process enough to analyze it some. Now once you do that there are a couple of directions you can go. You can try to maintain your independence and keep your own head about you, maybe helping others to do the same. Or you can try manipulating these instincts in others as a way to amass power. No small number of people have chosen the latter. Totalitarianism is never as far as we'd like to think.
I agree that those signs are, um, a bad sign.
JBP's not totally wrong. That's not necessarily all kindness is, but it's been part of the definition for some time now.
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