Sometimes it seems that kindness is not in fashion today. Sometimes she is cynically ridiculed – if not as a manifestation of stupidity and naivety, then as weakness and whim … We forbid ourselves to be kind, even when we want to. But maybe in vain?
Although kindness to others lies at the heart of all traditional spiritual practices, today kindness is not considered the main quality of a person. If you want to make a career or achieve high achievements, she is not your assistant. Living in accordance with our sympathies, we think, will weaken or confuse us; we are convinced that kindness undermines the foundations of success.
But the opposite is true: a life filled with kindness, lived in empathy and understanding of the weaknesses of others, is what we naturally strive for. People secretly do good deeds, but find neither words nor cultural support to express them. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor wrote a short but heartfelt book “On Kindness” and told in it why good feelings and actions should not be shy.
Kindness – why is it bad?
On the one hand, being kind is risky: we become more sensitive to the joys and misfortunes of others, and trying to take the place of another person can cause great discomfort. But if the pleasure of kindness—like all human pleasures—is inherently detrimental, it still remains one of the most fulfilling and rewarding, according to Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor. Without doing good deeds, we deprive ourselves of the joy necessary to feel well-being and happiness.
Today, good relationships are expected, sanctioned and obligatory only between the closest. Kindness is suspected of being either the highest form of selfishness (because it gives a sense of moral superiority and the ability to manipulate others) or a form of weakness (kind people are kind only because they lack the courage to behave differently).
If you think that the meaning of life lies in competition, then kindness certainly looks like an old-fashioned, even nostalgic relic of the times when we could still feel compassion for others. Aside from moral approval, how can kindness help you achieve your goals in a society where your personal achievements have become the leading value? the authors of the book ask.
Paradoxes of kindness
And yet part of our “I” suffers in the absence of good deeds. This paradoxical relationship with kindness perhaps explains the “angry culture” of the internet like nothing else. We ourselves do not allow ourselves to be spiritually generous to the full, but nothing revolts us like the unkind manifestations of other people towards us. We feel a lack of kindness and constantly complain about the cruelty of others, we consistently need kindness and still cannot let it into our lives.
Children are naturally kind, but society corrects their behavior, write Adam Taylor and Barbara Phillips. One of the first traumas that form a child is his understanding of the need for others: he experiencing the trauma of anxiety: “What should I do for my mom to take care of me?” (despite the fact that in reality the mother is just as vulnerable in her love for the infant as the infant is in her dependence on the mother). Thus, natural kindness awakens in him, but this anxiety is often rejected later. We call leaving it self-sufficiency, and in its pathological form it turns into narcissism.
Kindness connects us to others, and this is its joy. But its dark side is that we are immediately aware of our own and others’ weaknesses. In other words, kindness opens up the worlds of other people before us, what we so desire and at the same time are so afraid of …
Adam Philips is a psychotherapist, essayist, and author of over 15 books on psychology.
Barbara Taylor is a historian and professor of humanities at Queen Mary University of London.