Weaponizing Kindness
And the Looming Threat of Kindness Credential Revocation
Sometimes in life we find ourselves facing an impossible choice. Through circumstances forced upon us, not of our own making and against our wishes and best interests, we are put in a position where we must make a choice. Whatever option we choose from among those available to us, we will be left with nothing but heartache and regret. Sometimes there are no good options, and even refusing to choose among them is not possible. It doesn’t matter how careful you are to do everything “right”—sometimes, through no fault of your own, you may find yourself in this position.
This is allegorically referred to has having to make “Stacy’s Choice,” after the plight of teenage Stacy, of Fountains of Wayne fame, whose boyfriend fell in love with her mom leaving only terrible options before her: Pretend to be happy for the two of them to be “the bigger person” or seduce the boyfriend’s dad to exact revenge, which, yuck.
I know sometimes it might feel like I overexplain stuff. Remember, not everyone comes from the same background so it’s important to define the pop-cultural touchpoints you reference rather than assume everyone has the same life experience as you do and will take your meaning, immediately or at all. Anyway, in case you didn’t already know, that’s why this kind of situation is called a “Stacy’s Choice” scenario.
I trust I have been crystal clear, as usual. Good job, Catherine. All in a day’s work.
I have written on the subject of kindness several times in Shelf Life (here, there, and everywhere) and this is yet one more instance. I am telling you right up front so, if the subject is not of interest to you, you can simply not read it. It’s not directly writing- or industry-related. It won’t hurt my feelings if you stop reading. I mean, you already clicked so as far as I’m concerned you read the whole thing and spent a long time thinking deeply about it. I don’t look at my analytics that closely. Or at all.
When you write an article or exactly three about something, you can come back later and say “oh I wrote an article or three on this, so I’m an expert.” I’m not an expert on anything, let alone kindness. Don’t quote me as a kindness expert. If you want to quote me, here’s a bona fide Catherine quote:
Human beings are born knowing how to do two things: Suck and cry. When you get tired of sucking and crying come talk to me and we’ll start on everything else.
I’ve been working on being kinder and more thoughtful for a while now. Can you tell? Considering I just said you suck?
I’ve been trying to plant kindness seeds and cultivate kindness crops. It’s going much better than my actual gardening, the kind with the plants and the remembering to water them. Fortunately I’m friends with a green witch. When it comes to kindness, you need the real thing or there’s no point. You can’t fill your kindness planter with fake plastic kindnesses like I did with my cactus garden.
Wherever kindness is authentic, there will inevitably be drawn those who want to turn it against you. Today’s Shelf Life is about the ways people use the kindness of others to manipulate, how to notice and avoid their attempts, and how to remain as kind as you can in the face of these challenges.
Be the Bigger Person
See also: Forgive and forget.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Someone treats you badly, or behaves badly toward you or others, consistently over a period of time. You ask them to stop the behavior, you provide feedback on the behavior and how it’s hurtful or harmful, but the behavior doesn’t cease and you notice only superficial or temporary attempts to change the behavior, if you notice any attempt at all.
Left with no alternative, you withdraw from this person to mitigate the damage. If they won’t stop doing the behavior, you can only remove yourself from exposure to the behavior, after all. This is usually what prompts the perpetrator to say, “Okay, now I understand you are serious so I will change my behavior and if you give me another chance I will show you I have changed.”
Wouldn’t the kindest thing be to give them another chance? If you’re a person who practices kindness, don’t you now owe this person another—a final—chance to make a meaningful change and demonstrate that they have changed?
You don’t. This is a fallacy. Most of the time, the problematic person in this instance doesn’t want you to give them a chance to change but to give them some more time enabled not to change. They are counting on stringing you along in the relationship—whatever type of interpersonal relationship it is, it doesn’t have to be romantic—long enough that you feel too invested to quit them. The longer you enable someone’s bad behavior, the more you are likely to say, “Well I’ve done it this long, why would I stop now?”
It’s not kind to enable someone’s bad behavior that they’re comfortable with. It’s not kind to them and it’s not kind to yourself if the behavior is making you net unhappy in your overall relationship with the person.
What if someone really did take this as a wakeup call to make a meaningful life change, though? What if they really heard you, in this final moment, and took what you said seriously, and put in the work to change? How can they demonstrate to you that they really changed if you don’t reconnect the interpersonal relationship?
I’ve been asked this a lot of times, and your mileage may vary but my answer is:
You can’t.
When I have come to the point of breaking off an interpersonal relationship because of repeated or egregious bad behavior, there’s no way back. The person I have said goodbye to can take their reformed behavior and their newly overturned leaf to their new friendships and relationships with some of the other billions of people on the planet. I do not believe that I am so unique and so special that no one else can ever fill the hole I’ve left in someone’s life.
There often follows pressure from the person themself or from mutual friends to move past it and “be the bigger person” so they can have another chance. Anyone who tells you that you need to give more chances to someone who treated you badly if you want to think of yourself as a kind person is wrong. They have more chances. They have billions more chances.
If you have room for that person in your life in the event they actually reform, it’s not hard for you to look and see if they’ve actually reformed. Are they treating mutual friends better? Are they doing anything meaningful or good with their life?
Pro-tip: If someone is using their time and energy to pester you about reconsidering the boundary you drew with them, they’re not actually reformed.
Each One, Teach One
See also: How will I know if you won’t tell me?
Sometimes people really want to do better, but they just can’t do better unless someone—you—sits down with them and explains exactly what they’re doing wrong or could improve, gives them the whole history lesson of why it’s a problem, and helps them plan a path toward being better.
This manifests in questions like:
How was that racist?
Why are women reacting poorly to this thing I do?
Can you explain this scary concept to me so it’s less scary?
How was my behavior creepy?
I still don’t understand how that was racist?
You do not owe anyone an answer to any of those questions. Like The Truth™ on The X-Files, the answer is out there. By “out there,” I’m sure you understand I mean on the internet. Also in books. Also social science and STEM journals. And classrooms with paid teachers. Support groups. Blogs. Newsletters. Sometimes even this newsletter you’re reading literally right now. The information is there for people who care enough to go and look for it and learn. No one has a right to demand that the information they seek be provided by you.
Would it be a kind thing for you to help someone understand? Sure, it would be a kindness to them and I would say go ahead and do so if you have the bandwidth, the emotional energy, the overall wherewithal, if you’re an expert and you’re sure you can do the topic justice—and if you’re certain that they’re asking out of genuine desire to learn and not looking for an opportunity to have a super fun argument with you in which they play Devil’s Advocate and impress you with their logic and wit.
Look, I’m an entire person and so is everyone else. Nobody you meet is a non-player character (NPC) with an increasingly complicated fetch quest line that you work on with them till you earn the ultimate reward—they fix your problem! But, surprise! The real fix was to be found in the lessons you learned along the way doing all their little quests! Probably the reward also includes some gold coins and a change to your character’s title.
If someone asks you to teach them how to stop a bad behavior, or learn a new or better behavior, or generally improve their life or situation, it’s not unkind to say no to them. It’s not unkind of them to ask—respectfully and once—and it’s not unkind for you to tell them “no”—respectfully and directly.
Someone who continues to push on you for assistance after you have declined is being unkind to you as well as unfair. The perception that someone who puts effort into being kind should therefore be available on-demand and for free to help others learn information that is readily available to them is completely false. Actually, it’s ridiculous. I don’t know why anyone thinks this.
Remember: It’s okay for someone to have a defensive reaction in the moment when you say “no” to them, as long as they overcome that defensive reaction and do better. If someone pushes back on you to say, “If you refuse to teach me then I’m going to continue on as I have been in the past, only now it will be your fault”—that’s the unacceptable reaction. The only person responsible for bad behavior is the person who knowingly does bad behavior.
The Curious Case of Schrödinger's Jerk
See also: The benefit of the doubt.
I’ve previously received feedback that jerk is a gendered term and is sexist against men. Since I am a person who would never want to hurt the feelings of men and am always trying to be considerate of men, for the purpose of this article I am using jerk as a gender-neutral term. Men can be jerks, women can be jerks, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people can be jerks. All kinds of people can appear in your life as Schrödinger’s Jerk. Most of the time Schrödinger’s Jerk isn’t a jerk at all.
Rounding out our kindness fallacies of the morning, I want to address giving people the benefit of the doubt. Doesn’t a kind person, when interacting with someone they don’t know or don’t know well, give the other person the benefit of the doubt to begin with? To start things off on the right foot? And if you don’t give someone the benefit of the doubt, if you begin with the presumption that they might be a bad person, isn’t that unkind?
When I meet a new person, that person is Schrödinger’s Jerk. You may have heard this person referred to by several other terms; I am not the originator of the term. I didn’t invent this person or this idea. I’m just using a more neutral term for them.
Someone is Schrödinger’s Jerk when I do not yet know if they are a jerk or not. They have not yet committed any action in either direction, neither indicating that they are a jerk nor conversely that they are not. I have not yet opened the box and I don’t know if the poison capsule has deployed. The new person is in a quantum state, jerk and not-jerk simultaneously. I have two options:
Give this person the benefit of the doubt and treat them as though they are not a jerk.
Assume that this person has the potential to be a jerk and protect myself accordingly.
No one likes to be treated with suspicion. Even when someone has earned it they don’t like to be treated that way, and someone who has not earned it likes it even less. I get that. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that’s universal. No one likes that.
Schrödinger’s Jerk is counting on all the people who are not jerks to take umbrage at the merest hint of being treated with unearned suspicion. S.J. is counting on those others to say, to a kind soul, “I’ve done nothing to inspire this suspicion. It’s unfair to treat me this way, as though at any moment I might be a jerk to you. What have I done to deserve this?” Most of the time, those others will be right. They will go on to show you that, on the whole, they are not jerks. Schrödinger’s Jerk is counting on this behavior so that when S.J. insists that you give the benefit of the doubt you have enough false alarms in your rearview to think, “Enh, it’s probably fine.”
This gives Schrödinger’s Jerk avenues to access you that you would have held back from someone who is or could be a jerk. Once someone has that in—when they have your phone number, your address, when they’ve joined the friend circle, whatever—it’s much harder to extricate yourself. Schrödinger’s Jerk is counting on this. Their plan doesn’t work if you enforce boundaries until you get to know them better.
But what about “innocent until proven guilty”? Friend, you are a person; you are not a court of law. You have no obligation to give anyone a presumption of innocence.
Here’s how we can all combat the weaponization of the benefit of the doubt in real time, all the time, every day:
When you meet someone new, be respectful of their boundaries.
Don’t express personal offense at the mere existence of boundaries.
When someone tells you no, don’t argue or bargain with them. Accept your no and move on.
Showing kindness to people by respecting their boundaries is something everyone can do to contribute to an environment in which Schrödinger’s Jerk has nowhere to hide.
On the topic of quantum states and paradoxes, consider: If you express a boundary to someone, and they respond that your very expression of the boundary is hurtful because they are a kind person and resent the presumption that they could potentially act unkindly—they are in that moment acting unkindly. Toward you.
A few parting words: When someone is coming to you to ask for something, even if their motives or methods are (or may be) insincere, there’s no harm in treating them with the respect you would give any act of supplication.
If you say no to someone’s request of you—no, I won’t give you my time or energy, or move past your transgressions, or teach you what I know, or help you do better next time—just say no directly and succinctly. You don’t need to explain why; in my experience it doesn’t help and often invites argument. Certainly don’t take the opportunity to be punitive.
You can simply say, “No, I’m not going to do that.” That’s a value-neutral statement. The statement itself is neither kind nor unkind. Someone may be hurt by it, but it’s not a hurtful statement to make.
Be kind to yourself first.
Hi, yes I know it’s about a delusional teenage boy, yes I know about Meryl Streep’s Oscar, thanks for reading, don’t at me about that, feel free to at me about anything else, see you Thursday.
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