I’m not nice. I despise niceness. I am friendly, considerate, respectful of others’ freedom and rights, and I care more than a sleuth of Care Bears on molly, but never nice. Niceness is dishonest. Niceness is letting yourself be abused because you don’t want conflict. Or it’s based in deception and agenda. The most evil people in the world can be nice.
Good people who care about truth, justice and freedom don’t put on fake smiles and speak in soft tones to avoid offending and triggering, they tell you the truth and give you the metaphorical butt-kicking you need to start doing the right thing. They use tough love to get you to pay attention and stop lying to yourself (like the fight scene in They Live).
If you want nice, what you really want is smoke blown up your ass. You want your feelings placated and your beliefs verified no matter how dishonest the person might be. If what you want is kindness, that’s another matter. A person can be very nice but not at all kind; and they can be kind but not nice. Kindness comes from Courage and Care. It has no agenda except to help others. Niceness is all about self-preservation.
While I’m not a “nice” person, that doesn’t mean I treat people like shit. I don’t target people to criticize and harass them with scathing remarks and insults. I don’t take things that don’t belong to me, or damage anyone’s property, or try to ruin anyone’s life over a difference in world view. I do speak in harsh terms, though, when I deeply care about a particular issue. It is never out of hate and vitriol, it’s an overflowing of care, because I know people can be so much better than they often are. It’s frustrating to see. That’s something we all need to work on: being better than we were yesterday by making a conscious choice – with courage and will-power – to evolve in our thoughts, emotions and actions and create the kind of world we all say we want. But we don’t, and I’m not going to be nice about it.
Regardless of how that makes anyone feel in the moment, it’s not a mean thing to do. Meanness is a deliberate attempt to hurt someone’s feelings. I would never do that. I’ve experienced enough of that in my own life. I will speak the harsh truth, though, because we’re all adults. I see everyone here as adults who are capable of hearing it, not as emotionally delicate children. We’ve been treated like that for too damn long, and I’m not going to perpetuate it. This fragile infantilizing of humanity has made us into a hyper-sanitized and hyper-sensitive society that’s terrified of the tiniest sliver of truth. Then, when someone speaks it, we lash out and assume they’re horrible, “toxic” people. There’s no discernment, no critical thought, just out-of-control emotions. When we’re not in control of them, someone else will be, and they’ll play upon our fears, desires, and motivations. They’ll get us to confuse right for wrong and wrong for right. They’ll get us believing that soft-spoken lies are the truth, and loud belligerent truths are the lies. Then they have us.
That doesn’t mean we’re stupid and incapable of change. It just means we’re programmable. We take in terrible information without scrutiny and then we output terrible behavior. We can’t be “nice” about that if we want to change the situation. Niceness perpetuates ignorance, and ignorance of truth keeps us enslaved. Stop being nice. Don’t be a cruel and slanderous asshole, but don’t withhold the harsh truth when it needs to be heard. Freedom is far more important than how we feel about something, because those feelings cannot determine the truthfulness of it. We have to face it, acknowledge it, internalize it, and then act accordingly.
The nature of truth is inherently belligerent, because it’s always at war with deception. Say what needs to be said so that we can stop bullshitting ourselves and start doing the right thing.
“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” – Thomas Sowell
“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” – C. S. Lewis
“The truth that makes men free is, for the most part, the truth which men prefer not to hear.” – Herbert Agar
“The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” – Winston Churchill
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains taken to bring it to light.”
– George Washington
“It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.”
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj