Surely you should be nice. Only a completely evil person, showing visible signs of his pact with Satan would say otherwise.
Oh hush, you. That's just my complexion.
We are told constantly that it's important to be nice in general. Our default setting, or possibly our only setting should be "nice", even if it means causing ourselves a good deal of discomfort.
Yet, how does being indiscriminately nice affect the receiving party? Well, it turns out that being indiscriminately nice to someone is about as helpful to them as shoving a hot poker underneath their toenails.
When you are indiscriminately nice to someone, regardless of their behavior, you are stealing from them one of their most important tools of self-improvement. Contrary to Progressive theory, people cannot simply wish* themselves to improvement. They must receive the correct input from their family, friends, and peers. This means that they get hurt when they make a misstep. For humans, the most productive way to do this is via a visible loss of status. In other words, by being mean to them. This set of inputs, when used correctly, will automatically help improve the individual in question, and is necessary for turning incompetents into useful, respected members of the tribe. When this is removed entirely from the equation, the incompetents have no way to improve.
It gets worse. A Progressive might claim that while the incompetents in question are not being molded into effective individuals, they are at least happy. Bullshit! Just because you are being nice to someone does not mean your displeasure is not palpable. The incompetent will eventually pick up on your displeasure with his actions, and his actual loss of status (not simply what he's been privy to), and fall into depression because of it. Further, because you are de-facto expressing your displeasure by being nice, he comes to assign that as a negative input, meaning that any time someone is genuinely nice to him, he will suspect they are displeased with him, and that he has lost status. Because this process is gradual, not instantaneous, and because the input is nonvariable, and does not reflect any actual utility or incompetence, it does not even help him to improve, and simply makes him exceptionally depressed, and convinced of his irrevocable uselessness!
For the dispensing party, being indiscriminately nice poisons their attitude toward the receiver, as they are not able to vent their displeasure and must instead disguise it as pleasure. Thus the dispenser will resent the receiver, and animosity will form, where criticism (being mean) would have solved the problem and prevented any division between the parties.
Thus, Progressivism and its ilk has mutilated the act of being nice and turned it from a tool for positive reinforcement, to an underhanded, destructive act laced with venom. Who knew you could literally ruin someone's life by being nice to them!
Do someone you know a favor. Be hard on them when they screw up. Make their loss of status exquisite and sharp, pointed like a surgeon's knife. They will be better for it.
For the dispensing party, being indiscriminately nice poisons their attitude toward the receiver, as they are not able to vent their displeasure and must instead disguise it as pleasure. Thus the dispenser will resent the receiver, and animosity will form, where criticism (being mean) would have solved the problem and prevented any division between the parties.
Thus, Progressivism and its ilk has mutilated the act of being nice and turned it from a tool for positive reinforcement, to an underhanded, destructive act laced with venom. Who knew you could literally ruin someone's life by being nice to them!
Do someone you know a favor. Be hard on them when they screw up. Make their loss of status exquisite and sharp, pointed like a surgeon's knife. They will be better for it.
*For libertarians, this changes to will or bootstrap. It's the same damn thing, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment