On Kindness

I’ve been feeling pretty rough about the political situation these days, and I know there’s a lot to be done, but one of the things on my mind is the overarching cultural moment we’re facing.

I’ve been working on articulating my thoughts, going back and forth on more in depth discussion and more off the cuff, and I’ve come to settle on something simple — mainly because I won’t get it out otherwise.

David Lynch passed away the other day, and everyone started sharing the iconic image of him in Twin Peaks: The Return where his character says “Fix your hearts or die.” This statement, which some folks reminded us has long held resonance in the trans community, has brought forth a lot of talk about kindness and the necessity for it.

It leads me to a lot of questions about how we actually practice kindness, and why in this moment it might be so vital to an anti-fascist, pro-human movement today. So here’s a first, possibly clumsy attempt at voicing these thoughts.

The Era of Unkindness

Since the election, I’ve been saying we’re in a sort of “Era of Unkindness.” There’s many things to describe, but the general direction of my attention is the willingness of many people to accept dehumanization as a way of communicating with each other and treating each other, how that’s supported by media and politicians and recursively reinforces dehumanization as a cultural behavior.

I think people are being sold a lie of primacy of personal comfort over comfort of others. It’s very enticing. Folks want control over their own lives, but to me, an inverse of control is obedience and this creates a power relationship. Our capitalist system relies on reinforcing this cycle. It creates a permission to exploit people to gain wealth. Power comes through obedience and subservience of workers.

This seeps into the basic way we learn to treat each other and ourselves. The media and social media ecosystem owned by obscenely rich people has been exposed time and time again over the last decade to be a useful tool in spreading divisive social practice with very little interest from the owners and editors at these companies to really discourage this or provide competing views — their hearts are poisoned too.

Politics of Kindness

The political story that people are buying today that dehumanization is an acceptable and appropriate way of building society. It’s up to us to offer a different vision.

We need to make kindness and humanization the basic acceptable ways of treating others, that the positive experience and comfort we get from that is clearly shared and communicated with others. That people feel we have their backs and we feel they have ours. That instead of being isolated and alone, we’re together, and that we make space for others as much as they make space for us.

How do we fix hearts?

This is not a kittens, puppies and rainbows let’s all hold hands and sing sort of appeal. This is radical hard work that I’m talking about. It’s empathy, care, commitment, compromise, boundaries, strength and values based. Fixing our hearts is hard fucking work.

I’m a strong believer that action is necessary to create change. I also believe that you have to change yourself to change the world around you. It’s easy to lean into aphorisms, like:
“Change starts in the bathroom mirror,”
“Fix your hearts or die,”
“Actions speak louder than words,”
etc.,
but what does that actually mean and how do we actually do it. How do you change culture by changing yourself?

I think it’s from corporate culture development (maybe Andy Grove’s High Output Management.. but I don’t have it in front of me) that basically offers a definition of culture as “what we see others doing and copy ourselves”. And honestly, I think that’s as good as any place to start, because it fits my experience. And it leads us to the very simple idea that to change a culture into what we want it to be, we have to act that way as a model for others to follow. And, I personally don’t think that’s enough — I think we need to make commitments to ourselves to walking people through the hard parts of these processes.

I used to work with the nonprofit Build Up doing work in peacebuilding and conflict transformation. Build Up is concerned with helping people rebuild societies after violence and helping people not fall into or back into violence. We worked hard to hold a non-hierarchical cooperative structure, rooted in our open and trust-based financial and social relationships with each other. We were in active process of peacebuilding and empathy building and care work with each other, because we felt it was only reasonable to ask others to do that if we were practicing it for ourselves.

Here's Build Up's description of their cooperative model, including their financial model. A radical financial model like this is an effort to break the need of power and control and obedience within the organization.

If we're going to challenge these, we'll need to do similar things together. This is the work.

• It's understanding our own position in power structures and redistributing power we have, and similarly working openly with finances together to make sure everyone is getting what they need to sustain themselves.
• It’s empathy building as a core activity. It requires being committed to others’ comfort and happiness.
• It’s about getting comfortable with uncertainty and with not being in control, of letting go of our egos.

We have to practice not being in control.

In my work with Michael Chekhov acting technique, we explore archetypal qualities of heaviness, lightness and balance. We have a physical and imaginative training to reach sensations and emotions for our acting impulses. We have to practice these in order to have control over them for our characters on stage. Chekhov says if we want to enact something that should be unconscious for a character on stage, that it should and feel unconscious, we need to practice it consciously first. Only then can we move it back toward the unconscious.

Do this exercise:

• You can imagine qualities of heaviness and lightness — do it now.
• Take a moment to really imagine that you and the air around you are light.
• Take a moment to imagine that they’re heavy, that you can feel the heaviness of the air on you.

But balance? It’s not a zen-like place of perfection that might first come to your mind.

• Think about standing on one leg, on a tightwire, or finding your balance in some other way.
• It’s a constant shifting, a readjusting, an interplay between light and heavy.
• Imagine that — switch between your sensations of light and heavy. Try to find a sensation of seeking balance.

That sensation, this slightly off-kilter wobble, this searching for stability and constant micro-adjustment. This is how I understand balance.

This is, to me, what it feels like to me to be in cooperative process with others. It can be scary and disorienting sometimes, especially if we’re new to it, or working with new people, or even doing something new with familiar people. It only works if we feel safe, if we can trust, and if we can hold empathy for the people we’re working with.

All this work is what I think we need to do with each other as we work toward building a more just and sustainable future together. It’s not easy. It doesn’t always feel secure.

Moving forward

This is not an appeal to immediately treat political opponents who are intent on dehumanizing and abusing us with trust and empathy from the get-go. We do not have to share this practice with fascists and nazis and people who would seek to abuse it.

This is just one piece of a big effort we're undertaking to grow ourselves and shift the world around us within our reach in small ways. This is instead maybe the start of an instruction book for how we build resilience together and get used to these tools and practices.

We’re responsible also for holding our values firm, for not standing for abuse of others, that we work in regenerative and restorative ways with each other. That we “be gentle with each other so we can be dangerous together,” to practice a core ingredient of a real antidote to the poison that fascist politic is pumping into our culture.

I don’t know all the answers or where this goes. I don’t know how to heal the world or even fix anyone else. If this resonates with you, cool. I’m happy about that.