Be kind, or fuck off
In my previous post, I mentioned that “hard truths” always make me suspicious. Quite often I see them and their variants (“difficult decisions”, “tough choices”) used as a tool to dismiss the concerns of others.
They connect agreement with strength, and disagreement with weakness, but they do more than this. These phrases serve as a reassurance to the speaker, an emotional (and not rational) buttress of their position. They are self-congratulatory and self-soothing. They make it easier to engage in self-justification; they are a mental trick to avoid engaging with ideas that might cause you problems. Because these phrases are oft used to dismiss concerns about cruelty and, if you took those concerns to heart, they might undermine your confidence that you are a good person.
When this core belief is challenged, our default seems to be to look for reasons to defend it; to look for information not to better understand ourselves, but to serve as fuel for the engines of self-justification that are our minds.
Over time, our positions can grow into great towers of rationalisations, so high that it can be impossible to see what we based our beliefs on in the first place, and how far we have moved.
And when we use arguments to push away our doubts, when they’re deployed to protect our identity, we can say some really stupid shit.
Comply or die
After the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, a lot of people tried to justify the killings—because their “side” were responsible—with something that would be anathema to them if the shoe was on the other foot. The clearest example comes from Representative Troy Nehls, who said:
To all the bad people out there, the people that are obstructing, fighting with federal law enforcement, my warning to you is this: if you comply, you will not die. That’s it. Just comply. If you comply, you will not die.
However, Nehls is inconsistent. Here he is talking about Ashli Babbitt, another person who, to use his phrasing, did not comply, and then died:
I spent some time and I focus, I focus a lot of my time on the shooting of, uh, and the killing, of Ashli Babbitt. I document this very well, I was probably one of the first—I think Paul, uh, you said it as well—I believe Ashli Babbitt was murdered that day.
The key difference appears to me to be that, to Nehls, Babbitt was “one of us” (or at least it is useful to him to portray an association), but Good and Pretti were each “one of them.” Nehls never makes this explicit. Instead, he contradicts himself, and his arguments are weak—when considered as arguments.
That’s not what they’re there for. His “if you comply, you will not die” comment is there to reassure Nehls or those on Nehls’ “side” that they’re not bad people, even if they act in ways that would seem to indicate otherwise. Actually facing up to his own position (“failure to follow the instructions of law enforcement is a capital offence punishable by summary execution… so long as it doesn’t happen to one of us.”) would undermine his belief that he is a good person, so he—like a lot of people—chooses to avoid it.
And so, he embraces cruelty… when it’s not coming for him.
“Good” isn’t good
You might think that you could argue people out of these positions, by demonstrating that they are not good. But your “good” and their “good” are completely different, because “good” isn’t good.
Thousands of people who have committed no crime (being unlawfully present is a civil infraction, like speeding or jaywalking) have been detained by ICE. Many are detained indefinitely; others have been “deported” to countries they have never been to and have no connection with.
By any reasonable assessment, this is not something a good person would support, for it is unjust, cruel, and capricious. But people aren’t usually reasonable. “Good” is convenient in its nebulousness. A man may appeal to some principle (“protecting our borders”) to excuse these actions, but his main goal is likely not to convince others. It is to reassure himself.
It’s worth pointing out that the fucking Nazis thought they were good. They thought that exterminating human beings who were Jewish or disabled or communist was the right thing to do. They were, of course, extremely wrong, but they justified their actions to themselves, and kept going. People can excuse any amount of cruelty as “good.”
Think of the outrage that Nehls supported with his glib message. How many heard that, and nodded their heads? If a person would accept such an obviously weak argument as reassurance, is it likely they have made a habit of challenging their beliefs? And, if not, why would you think your argument could ever be strong enough to change their minds?
Arguing with such people won’t get you far, so don’t argue, at least not in the sense where you might appear to be undermining them.
Help them undermine themselves.
Just asking questions
People may be cruel, but seldom want to think that of themselves. If support for cruelty is the problem, respond with kindness.
It’s easy to defend injustice if that defence is supported by a tower of rationales. “Goodness” sits near the top of that tower. “Kindness” is more tightly defined, and the contrast between the injustice and kindness easier to see.
But don’t tell them. Ask them what the kind thing to do was.
Be specific. It’s easy to defend “mass deportation,” for it is bloodless and vague. Pepper spraying a 72-year-old woman directly in the face is specific enough to unsettle. Ask them: “You’re a law enforcement officer, and an old woman is filming you while yelling at you to leave the neighbourhood. What is the kind thing to do?”
I am not so foolish as to believe you will convince many with this approach, but it’s got to be more effective than verbal sparring.
It might be easy in such a conversation for the person to jump away from kindness, to appeal to other things (“We need to secure our border,” “We can’t have illegals taking resources from hard-working Americans,” etc.)—and then to respond to that point, and you both start building back up those towers. But kindness is the value you should focus on, because being a kind person is almost certainly something they want to appear.
Moreover, kindness is something that is intuitively good to most people, and hard to reconcile with support for cruelty. If this were not the case, men who wish to do cruel things would not be attacking kindness itself.
Empathy is bad because it gets in the way of us being bad
Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad coined the term “suicidal empathy” to describe what he calls “the descent to [sic] madness [caused by] the inability to implement optimal decisions when our emotional system is tricked.” Elon Musk praised Saad on Joe Rogan’s podcast, applying the term to an entire civilisation.
Many took this as Musk denouncing empathy. Some have defended Musk by saying that, if you look at the context of his words, you’ll see he’s not, and that it’s “both obvious and good advice.” To quote famous mathematician Ian Malcom:
When Musk says:
The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.
…the “they” refers to non-white immigrants, and he’s bringing up “suicidal empathy” in support of his racist views. Elon Musk denies believing in the racist (and antisemitic) conspiracy theory “the Great Replacement,” but publicly supports its constituent beliefs.
Musk is attacking empathy, because he is saying that empathy should not be extended to people he dislikes, and we should instead have empathy for “civilisation as a whole.” [1] But to imply that empathy only has value when it leads to your preferred outcomes, and in particular to fixate on empathy as the problem (and not the choices that led to those outcomes), is to both attack it and recognise how dangerous it is to any attempt at cruelty.
For Christians to attack empathy is especially maddening, as there is literally a parable about how we can’t get out of showing mercy by asking “Who is my neighbour?”
What does this “empathy response” get in the way of? Racial discrimination, the horrors of mass deportation, and Islamophobia. It is another way of saying we must be “tough,” by attacking kindness as a weakness. It justifies opposition to kindness and decency by calling it wisdom. It is yet another way of dismissing the value of other human beings.
Who is weak?
When talking about immigrants, or trans people, or progressives, those on the right make pains to engender fear in their audience. It’s perfectly legitimate to be concerned for the safety of you, your friends, and your family, but bigots work to manipulate that into fear of the other, by falsely claiming that these out-groups or political opponents are a threat to that safety.
Immigrants are “invaders” who are “coming for your jobs.” They are “eating the dogs, […] eating the cats, [and] eating the pets.” They “refuse to assimilate” [2] and “don’t have American values.” [3] Trans people have an “agenda;” children are “being transitioned in schools,” and trans women are “attacking women’s sports.” Progressives are “Communists,” Zohran Mamdani in particular is a “jihadist.”
In the most charitable of interpretations, one or two of these statements are gross misrepresentations to the point of falsehood, but the rest are flat-out lies without the flimsiest of bases in fact.
The goal of this, and the attacks on empathy, are to permit bigots to act out their cruelty on others. It’s an old tactic; you can see obvious examples in how Nazis portrayed Jewish people in the run-up to the Holocaust. But if one needs to make people afraid to get them to support what one wants, surely that support can only come about through weakness?
Humans have always feared what they don’t understand, and bigots try to stoke that fear. [4] But this implies that an effort to understand is an act of bravery. There is evil in the world, and threats to our safety, but to have empathy for others is to more fully realise them as human. Being kind does not mean ignoring the sins of others, or whatever threats they (actually) represent. Seeing a murderer as human does not require you to give them the opportunity to kill again, nor does it preclude punishment. But one can work through one’s own fears to see where they are unjustified.
Because what bigots want you to forget is that kindness is not weakness. It requires strength to maintain. It can be extremely difficult, especially in some environments, to remain kind, but it’s not called “moral fortitude” because there’s four of them.
Cruelty, on the other hand, doesn’t require strength. If we give into our fears, if we allow ourselves to fool ourselves into thinking cruelty is “good,” then we have let it breed in our weakness. We can go along with our in-group, and not challenge its direction.
Or we can stand firm, be brave, and choose kindness, even if it is unpopular… in fact, especially when it is unpopular.
One man who extolled the virtue of kindness was Fred Rogers. He praised this quote from Henry James:
There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.
…or to quote another Mister Rogers:
Doesn’t matter what the press says. Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — “No, you move.”
1. Except you cannot have empathy for a civilisation, because civilisations don’t have thoughts or emotions.
2. By “assimilation,” what racists actually mean is the immigrant must support exactly the same values they have, which—though a minority view—are “American values.” Disagreement is “anti-American,” even if the immigrant believes the same things as tens of millions of Americans.
It’s a trick, of course. Being the “good” member of an out-group is no guarantee of safety. Look at the Trump-supporting legal permanent residents who have been denied reentry anyway. Look at the spouses of Trump supporters who have been detained and threatened with deportation. Look at the spouses of activity-duty military, who have been detained and deported.
No immigrant is safe from these ghouls because, to them, there is no “good” immigrant.
It is an echo of an idea featured in Himmler’s speech in Poznań.
3. I don’t hear “they’re coming for our women” much anymore which, as an immigrant who married an American citizen, means I am no longer as represented in their hatred as I once was.
4. One example that keeps popping up is bigots, who claim to be Christian, cherry-picking horrendous-sounding things from the Quran and saying “see what these people believe?” But if horrendous-sounding things in ancient texts is a sign of the depravity of modern adherents to that text’s religion, I have some bad news for those bigots.
The Bible includes the endorsement of genocide and slavery. Those Confederate preachers who claimed slavery as a Christian institution were not speaking without any textual evidence.
These bigots might then claim that these preachers were wrong, that the preachers’ beliefs were not “Christian,” but that only highlights the double standard used to advance their bigotry.
Note: I am not saying that all Christians are bigots. My position is that some bigots call themselves Christian, and they call their bigotry Christian to give that bigotry an imprimatur of holiness, so they can cast challenges to that bigotry as sinfulness.