silentbob's post "Failures in Kindness" is excellent. I love the idea that sometimes, when we exaimine a situation in depth, the most "kind" course of action can be highly conterintuitive. A few other examples I'd like to offer:
Appreciative Kindness
Imagine you meet a friend-of-a-friend for the first time while attending a gathering at their home. "Hey, welcome! It's great to meet you - can I get you anything?" they ask. There's nothing you really want right now, and you don't want to take from them or cause inconvienience, so you say "I'm fine, thanks."
Some people might assume declining their offer is kind. After all, wouldn't it be inconsiderate to make them go to the effort to proivde you with something you don't even really want?
But declining in this way will likely be percieved as a minor rejection. From the other person's perspective, they can't know the difference between:
- In all sincerity, you are totally comfortable already and there's nothing they can do for you right now.
- There is something they could give you which you would enjoy, but you won't accept it becuase you don't want to initiate the early stages of a recipriocal relationship with them.
The geniunely kind thing to do in this case is to accept some kind of token gesture and show lots of grattitude for it. Even if you're not thirsty, ask for a cold glass of water and say "thanks so much!" with a smile.
This scales up to larger favours too. If a friend offers to spend their Saturday helping you move house - rejecting this due to feelings of guilt about taking too much from them, or anxiety about being endebted to them, can feel kind, but probably isn't. Most people we regularly interact with suffer little from material scarcity, but far too often suffer from a lack of feeling valued+appreciated+connected to others. So when someone offers a gift, the maximally kind option is almost always to enthusiastically accept it with exuberant grattitude.
Assertive Kindness
Say you're hanging out with a group and your friend is ordering takeaway for everyone. "Okay what should we order?" she asks the group (a failure of Computational Kindness). You're anxious about not wanting to impose your own preferences on everyone else, so you say you're fine with anything (and everyone else in the room does the same).
This leads to an akward, protracted standoff where the person doing the ordering refuses to take any action with such little information, and everyone around is too polite to provide any.
In a situation like this where nobody wants to advocate for any particular takeout option, sometimes the kindest course of action is to pick an arbitrary position and campaign for it passionately: "Actually I'm really in the mood for Three-Bears Pizza, can we please please get that, it's so good". Then, after the group orders what you asked for, if people aren't happy with the outcome afterwards, eargly accept 100% of the balme. This cuts short the frustrating decision making process, and spares everyone else from worrying about making a suggestion which others won't like. Most people are more averse to being percieved as selfish than they are averse to not eating their preffered cuisine for one evening, so you might be doing everyone a favor.
In general, assertive kindness means whenever there is a standoff where nobody wants to be percieved as imposing their wants on anyone else, and that standoff leads to a collective decision making paralysis - you act to cut through the malaise by pushing hard for a specific course of action, supressing your selfish urges to avoid the risk of becomming a target for criticism/blame if things go poorly. ("Okay we're going go to the waterfall now! I'll grab towles, we'll take my car, get in let's go!")
Volatile Kindness
Nobody would want to read a story where only good things every happen to the characters.
Sometimes you might find yourself in a group social interactions where everyone is being perfectly polite to each other - but for some reason, it doesn't feel like anyone is having any fun or experiencing any deep sense of connection. When the temperature gets too low, and there's not even a hint of drama or tension, things feel stilted and boring.
In situations like this, the maximally kind course of action can be to "play the villan" (In very trivial, not actually that harmful ways!). It takes a lot of judment to get this right, and will occasionally backfire - but sometimes a person can greatly enhance the expereinces of others by adding volatility to an otherwise bland situation.
Examples:
All these things appear "unkind" on their face, but in certain contexts, what is really going on is that the "volatile" actor is willingly accepting risk of embarrasment in exchange for improving other people's expected enjoyment.
Obviosuly the correct level of abrasiveness to assume is highly context dependent and it's possible to take things too far, but if one seeks to be maximally "kind", the correct amount of risk to take is much higher than it might seem intuitively. For most poeple we interact with, light drama and conflict is far more interesting and enjoyable than blandness, especailly when someone else is happy to make themselves main object of mockery.
Volatile kindness is also applicable when someone else embarrases themselves by accident first. When someone spills their drink on themselves by accident and feels ashamed by this, offering sweet reassurances helps a little, but intentionally pouring your own drink down your chest (to the appalment of onlookers) will make them instantly feel better.
2
1