Kindness or enabling a problem?

(Nimue)

I’m a big fan of having kindness be the default. Cooperation gets a lot done. There’s no point demanding perfection – people are flawed and make mistakes, don’t know everything and to get things done you have to roll with this. Waiting for perfection means doing nothing, while kindness in face of honest human inadequacy gets a lot done.

However, kindness without some discrimination can become part of the problem. If those of us who aren’t affected by workplace bullying are kind and forgiving to the bully, then the bullying will continue, for example. What this issue tends to involve is people who have power declining to use it where that power could prevent abuse. If it’s easy for us to be kind to someone because we are not impacted by their problematic behaviour, then we probably have privilege issues.

At some point, kindness becomes complicity. It’s difficult if you are feeling anxious. Bullies create environments in which challenging them feels unsafe. It may genuinely be an unsafe choice if you have no power. It is also not easy to tell what’s going on when  other people’s kindness looks like complicity, because it might genuinely be enthusiastic participation in whatever isn’t good. Unsafe spaces are often set up to make it hard for you to change them.

There are no simple answers here that will reliably work for all situations. It is not easy deciding whether someone deserves the benefit of the doubt, or needs calling out. When calling someone out would put your job at risk, that’s a really unsafe place to be – few of us can afford to act in ways that could cost us our incomes, and whistleblowers are often mistreated. Plenty of cultures – in business, in religious and social groups – will close ranks rather than admit there’s a problem. It’s often easier to throw out the person making a fuss, than a more involved person who is behaving badly.

I usually have the luxury of getting to choose who I work with. I won’t knowingly go along with people who I have good reason to think are abusing their power. Being self-employed and working with lots of different people has always made that easier for me, and it’s an advantage I try to use wisely.  What I know for certain is that being kind to people to are deliberately horrible doesn’t make them become better people. I feel like it should, but I’ve tested this a few times, and it doesn’t fix things.