Whatever happened to just being nice

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“You give away nice like it doesn’t cost you anything.”

Levi laughed. “It doesn’t cost me anything. It’s not like smiling at strangers exhausts my overall supply.”

“Well, it does mine.”

“I’m not you. Making people happy makes me feel good. If anything, it gives me more energy for the people I care about.”

Cath and Levi in Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

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“If you were a great talent, but not a nice person, we had no hesitation in saying ‘No.’ Life is too short to sacrifice so much of it, to living with a bastard.”

Bill Bernbach

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Not only has the world become a bit nastier it sometimes feels like if you are not nasty there is something wrong with you. You aren’t strong. You aren’t a leader. You aren’t confident. Well. That’s not only nuts its also a pretty unhealthy way of thinking about life.

Which leads me to say that we all know that the world is often not kind and what can happen. Yet. We make our own world. As Milton said:

“The mind is its own place, and in itself,

Can make heaven of hell, a hell of Heaven”

Now. I will admit that kindness and niceness needs to get a bit tougher (and, yes, I believe you can be tough and be kind and nice). What I mean by that is it seems like there is something unique to our era that encourages the tricksters and cheaters to not only have confidence but be confidently nasty. They thrive in fantasylands of myths and tales willing the narratives to take the form of reality; even when they are not. and when you point out the magical thinking or fantasylands, they get nasty.

I say that to make a point about increased nastiness and tough niceness.

There is increased nastiness in the world because there is an increase in cheaters try to convince us of some alternative reality. They have to be nasty in order to shut down, well, reality. Ponder.

There needs to be increased tough niceness to battle the nasty cheaters and charlatans. Kill them with kindness AND reality. I say that because people really don’t like nastiness. Yeah. they may find it entertaining in the short term, but in the long term everyone is much much more comfortable when a citizenry is kind and nice to each other.

It doesn’t always happen in the moment but over time reality is kind of unforgiving in pointing out that if you are the kind of person who wants something badly enough to be nasty, you will inevitably discover that the price they have paid for it is too high.

Which leads me to suggest this is an individual and society issue.

The individual part is easy to see – be nice rather than nasty and you will be more consistently surrounded by people who actually like being with you. For the society aspect I will lean in on Peter Drucker and his 1999 book The New Realities. He believed the disappearance of the belief in salvation by society would create an environment in which would likely be anti-society … and that salvation could only be achieved outside society … only in and through the person (selfishness & individual zero-sum thinking) and even perhaps through withdrawal from society (to small likeminded tribes). A Bruce translation. Let’s call this the growth of a “me” generation or “what’s in it for me” philosophy.

He may have meant it in a slightly different way, but that is how his idea came to life. In addition, society tends to offer 2 important pillars: experts to help make sense of things and some basic common sensemaking beliefs. So once society had been deconstructed experts were deconstructed as well as some important common sensemaking beliefs. It deconstructs collective societal values. Which leads to valuing the individual (beliefs and wealth) over the collective; or at least proportionally the individual became significantly more important than the collective.

It became easy to be nasty and it became easier to find charlatans and cheaters who nastily espoused our grievances.

Which leads me to suggest that the increased nastiness is a reflection that society is sick.

There are unresolved problems of attending to the common good and we are increasingly unable to address the problems of society. The issue is exacerbated by the fact that as businesses fail at their commitment to society the government began establishing huge bureaucracies to attempt to address the issues and have failed to measure up to the problem. The lack of success of government in solving social problems is not solely the government’s fault or incompetence. It is more a reflection of lack of alignment between people’s attitudes & behavior, i.e., if we cannot agree on what is the right thing to do, we will never be supportive of government’s efforts – even if they are the right thing to do.

Personally, I think we are becoming nastier because we are unhappy we are not being nice and doing kind things as a shared societal responsibility <including businesses>.

Maybe that s my point.

If society is sick, and being nasty is a symptom of that sickness, maybe being nice and kind is the cure. Ponder.