Why Kindness Doesn’t Change The World

Everything we do changes the world, of course, and I remain a strong advocate for kindness. Nonetheless, we need to face the fact that the children’s book version of “be kind and change the world” hasn’t worked. Wars and crime proceed as they have since the Bronze Age, and long years of promoting “be kind” hasn’t changed the situation.

And so we need to find out why kindness hasn’t worked beyond the personal and family level. If we don’t, our efforts to cultivate it will be empty dogmas that have no effect in the real world. 

The First Problem

We all know that kindness matters in our private lives: we’ve all been touched with it, and we’ve touched others with it. It matters, and in fact it’s essential to a healthy life. Beyond that point, however, kindness simply vanishes from view, whether in whole or in part. 

Our problem is not that we haven’t cared about kindness, it’s rather that we haven’t taken it seriously enough. And here I’ll riff on St. Paul:

Western man has settled for a form of kindness, while denying the power thereof.

Western man’s kindness has been contained. It’s fine for children’s books, but not for adult deliberations.

The Practical Problem

The practical problem with kindness is that it doesn’t work with sociopaths; they are impervious to it. They’ll smile, attempt their best sympathetic face, then stick a knife in your back (usually metaphorically) as soon as the moment is right. And so kindness is of no value – of negative value – when dealing with sociopaths.

Individual sociopaths aren’t an overwhelming problem, as most of us learn how to spot them. The more serious problems are sociopaths in hierarchies and even the structures of those hierarchies.

Every dominance hierarchy, every enforcement hierarchy, from geopolitics to local elections, skews strongly sociopathic. In those environments, kindness is for chumps. And that brings us to an important conclusion:

Rulership is not a kindness-permeable structure.

There are many decent humans employed by governments, but they’re decent in spite of the influences of rulership. And they’d be better without them.

The fact is that rulership, including the blind enforcement of law, is sociopathic. That statement is really no different than “power tends to corrupt,” but it’s so pointed that it can be troubling.

Nevertheless it’s true, and it drives us to another question: Why are we sacrificing our lives and treasure to a system that is fundamentally antithetic to kindness… inherently oppositional to the thing we claim is of maximum importance?

I’d say that’s worth some thought.

Focused Blindness

There is, of course, the appearance of kindness in politics. Some politicians go on for decades about “helping the poor,” after all. But they never consider – never allow to be considered – the unseen victims of their policies. While “helping the poor,” they utterly ignore the costs to everyone else.

The ruling hierarchies blot out the millions of families who become (because of their policies) unable to send their children to a decent school. They evict from discussion the shopkeepers who can’t afford to take their children to see their grandparents. They are blind to kindness toward parents who work non-stop but still can’t get ahead or spend time with their children.

These are real victims, and they surround us. And yet, their sufferings are invisible to the supposed providers of kindness. Only certain kinds of suffering are to be seen and mourned… which are the types they get paid for.

There are other types of focused blindness and other carefully-selected targets for theatrical kindness, but this isn’t a treatise and I’ll stop here. Suffice it to say that any “kindness” running through politics is sucker bait, or near enough to it. Again, the structure is not kindness-permeable.

If We Want Kindness…

If we want kindness in the world (and I think we should), we need to be serious enough to acknowledge the truth of our situation. If we can’t do that we’re merely play acting.

Kindness works on the personal and family levels… on the decentralized and voluntary levels of human life. But no matter how hard we try to squeeze kindness into what is fundamentally a sociopathic structure, it won’t work… because the structure is simply not kindness-permeable.

And so, if we really believe in kindness, we need to expand all things decentralized and voluntary… to expand the reach of things through which kindness is able to flow. If we do this, kindness will change the world, but not until.

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