Everything wrong with Kindness

Captialism wants to define kindness as a characteristic separate and distinct on its own. When it’s disruptive to the exploitative order, it’s considered a weakness. When it’s exploitable, it’s encouraged in a derogatory and humiliating manner: as pity, as sacrifice and misunderstood suffering.

Captialism wishes kindness to be percieved as a quality that someone might ‘accidentally’ have, sometimes as an ongoing trait in one person or as an accidental or an occasional action by any person. It is not a defined part of any known system, it is an orphan concept. The term “random acts of kindness” implies loneliness. It implies we are not in control of kindness as a society, and we are dependent on chance and probability. It is not like anger, which is a defence for fear, and has measurable physiological traits, heart rate measurements and brain scans. We know so much about fear and desire too—things that sell. Religions might describe certain kind people but give no explanation where it comes from and why. We say some people are kind, and leave it at that, because to inquire about it would be socially awkward. In any case, conversation around what is kindness is exactly, is discouraged. What I really want to know, is that if I write an essay about why kindness is bad, why that feels so wrong, and why it’s not supposed to be questioned. But what is not allowed to be questioned is always the same thing that is ruling over us. As long as this idea of kindness exists, somewhere else, it is silently judging my every interaction, judging if I am worthy of participating. As long as this word exists I am never enough, always in audition. 

“kindness” as it’s defined in Western culture — an abstract, moral virtue often tied to self-sacrifice — does not show up in the same way across all cultures. What does appear globally is reciprocity — not as an optional nicety, but as an obligatory, communal logic. The western concept of kindness has closer relation to catholic guilt and the performance of virtue. Ayni is the Quechua term for reciprocity and it doesn’t just mean “I help you now, you help me later,” but “we are in a cosmic relationship of mutual obligation.” Similarly, Ubuntu from southern Africa is the idea that “I am because we are.” Again, not kindness in a vacuum — but identity and ethics rooted in interconnection.

Other examples:

• Mutual aid in anarchist and Indigenous traditions.

• Confucian “ren” (仁), which is more about relational humaneness than feel-good benevolence.

• Polynesian “aloha” as a life-force of mutual regard.

These are not acts of “kindness” but ecosystems of relational accountability.

Kindness is not a quality in and of itself. It is not an act or entity. Kindness is a byproduct of community. It does not exist alone as much as an outline of a drawing or a face of a coin. The experience of kindness is actually one of relation, and is pleasurable to both giver and reciever. It is in the interest of labour exploitation to deny the existence of reciprocity and reduce it to its byproducts, because to acknowledge what reciprocity is would question and invalidate transactional relationships, which is what the machine of exploitation is built upon. To admit that we enjoy giving something for free collapses the market system of price. To admit that we are deserving of recieving collapses social hierarchy. to admit that it can be done by free will collapses the need for surveillance and punishment. To admit that it is an interaction complete between two people collapses the need for structure, social norms, gender relations, the nuclear family, market, religion, and government. 

To call someone kind does not make sense at all. It seems they are standing alone on an island, and yet the term itself implies relation. Is it not required that two people are always kind together? Are you not equally kind for recieving it well? If someone offers me a job, am I not equally a good person for fulfilling it well? If I’m given a book shouldn’t I take the time to read it? If I’m given equipment should I not go practice? Does proper reception not imply an active agency? 

To me the word kindness does not feel good. It feels like loneliness and moral burden. Why was the other person not acknowledged in my being called kind? Why did they abandon me? I didn’t want to be kind, I wanted relation, reciprocity, a friend. This one word is precisely the cause of loneliness. It has inserted itself between our relations and plays silent referee, while distracting and diverting the reality of connection away from us towards capitalist aims. 

I am not kind, it is not possible for me to be kind. I am connected. I use my strength and intelligence and cunning to survive transactional society and to stay connected to my own wholeness, to my own participation in the invisible community. Through explicit action I make the invisible community visible. My kindness is a byproduct of the connection I see  when I interact with others, and their surprise at recieving kindness is simply their awakening to the community they had overlooked. When people consider me kind, what it means is that I have overcome the system of transaction. And that is an important triumph. 

The irony is that my refusing to be kind is kind, and this essay will feel like kindness. And yet it is still not ‘kind.’ This is only the tip of the iceberg that uncovers just how much our language is exploitative and defined by the needs of oppression, and how urgently we need a new language for a new order. How am I supposed to connect to someone when the very language I need to describe their greatness isolates us?