---
# System prepended metadata

title: Radical kindness
tags: [kindness]

---

# Radical kindness

> _Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle_ --- Unknown

In our better moments, we recognize the sense in which other people are fundamentally just like us: they just want to be happy, but often go about it in deeply unskillful ways. Our hearts open as we realize that much of what looks like malice is really just confusion.

It is possible to go a step further, and discover that you're not just _like_ others, but in some profound-but-impossible-to-describe sense, you _are_ them. Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh communicates this with heartbreaking beauty in his [poem](https://plumvillage.org/articles/please-call-me-by-my-true-names-song-poem/) _Call Me By My True Names_ (which I suggest you read in its entirety):

> _I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,  my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.  
> And I am the arms merchant,  selling deadly weapons to Uganda._
>
> _I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,  who throws herself into the ocean  after being raped by a sea pirate.  
> And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving._
>
> _I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands.  
> And I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people dying slowly in a forced-labor camp._

Lest you think he's just being poetic, here's Zen priest (and punk rocker) Brad Warner:

> Even if I want to put this realization down I can’t. Sometimes it’s excruciating. You know those morons that rammed those planes into the World Trade Center? That was me. The people that died in the collapse. Me again. Every single person who ever paid money for a Pet Rock? Me. I don’t mean I identify with them or sympathize with them. I mean I am them. It’s impossible to explain any more clearly than that, **but this isn’t a figure of speech or bad poetry. I mean it absolutely literally.**
>
> But the universe is sooooo much bigger than any of that. The sky is me, and the stars too, and the chirping crickets and the songs they make; sparkling rivers, snow and rain, distant solar systems and whatever beings may live there: it’s all me. And it’s you, too.
> 
> [emphasis mine]

When this is glimpsed even briefly, we discover that _all_ malice ultimately works the same way: the _only_ reason that people ever misbehave is that they're caught in profound delusion. In particular, they can't yet see that everyone else is also them --- and that therefore, when they harm others, they are ultimately harming themselves. Beyond a certain point, this behavior appears to us as _evil_.

It can feel nearly impossible to have compassion for such people. They don't seem to deserve it. What we can't see is that our inability to be kind in such moments is actually a symptom of the very same disease that has overtaken them --- and that if we give in to it, we necessarily strengthen the pattern.

Countless people have tried to point this out, to apparently little avail. I have no reason to believe I can do better, but this is my attempt.

---

There exists darkness in you. This terrifies you, so you do everything in your power to hide it from yourself. This sets up a subconscious mechanism whereby you eagerly search for the evil in others, so that you may destroy it --- thereby removing any doubt about your own goodness.

The problem is that part of you can always perceive the kernel of good at the root of others' minds. When you ignore this and view them as _fundamentally_ bad, you end up attacking not only their darkness, but their entire being. _Your_ darkness is perfectly okay with smothering any remnant of good in the process --- and part of you knows perfectly well that you're doing this.

Part of _their_ mind can sense that you are knowingly extinguishing their light --- and only one kind of person would do such a thing. They are peering directly into _your_ evil. Whatever their past sins, they now feel justified in perceiving themselves as the righteous one in this interaction, and vow to be cruel in return. They are only _fighting evil_, after all. But _you_ know that you're the good one, and so this only further convinces you that they're really bad, thus compelling you escalate _your_ cruelty.

Despite whatever temporary suppression of misbehavior you may have accomplished, the world is made darker as a result. You tell yourself that this is merely an unfortunate side-effect of your good intentions (and entirely their fault), but what you can't acknowledge is that the whole thing was secretly orchestrated by the darkness in your mind. Far from yours _fighting_ theirs, the two are secretly allied in a bid to create more.

This is nearly impossible to admit to oneself. If we consciously recognized that we were doing this, we would be forced to admit that we ourselves are capable of tremendous self-deception --- and it would suddenly make no sense to judge others for being caught by an _even stronger_ version of the same trap. With this deflection mechanism disabled, we would have no choice but to confront our own complicity in the whole mess --- which is the one thing we try hardest to avoid seeing. 

It is the greatest irony of all: our attempts to hide our darkness from ourselves is what enables it to operate with impunity, with nobody ever suspecting their own complicity for even a second. All of us are somehow only ever "fighting evil."

> _Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply._ ― Reinhold Niebuhr (author of the famous "serenity prayer")

You know that literary trope where all the horrors of the world can be traced back to a secret conspiracy that is hidden in plain sight, and yet, maddeningly, which nobody can see? Well, _this is it._ I am not just sharing an interesting theory; I am pointing at something that you can discover concretely in yourself. No twist ending in any fictional story could ever gobsmack you as hard as the first time you discover that part of your own mind has always been in on the "evil conspiracy" --- and that some part of you has _always known it_.

To be clear, you don't do this because you're bad. That conclusion would just cause you to bring the same ugly fight to yourself (or to me, for daring accuse you of it). You're also not a "good person," to be contrasted with all those "bad people." Nor am I better than you. We're just _human_, and this is how we work. The deepest part of us just wants things to be okay; the rest is just horrifically misguided attempts to get us there.

If you actually want to fix the evil in others, you have to heal them of their capacity for self-deception. This is only possible to the degree that you are free of your own. Otherwise, your every action will be imbued with a hypocritical sanctimony that only makes it _harder_ for others to confront this most painful truth in themselves. This only serves to reinforce the very conditions that your mind tells you it is so honorably fighting --- and makes it harder for you to detect the part of you that is doing this _on purpose._

At the very deepest level, you've never wanted to harm anyone --- and it is entirely possible to fight evil from this place. In fact, it is the _only_ place from which evil can be legitimately fought. You are not fighting the _person_, but their self-deception. The internal feeling is, paradoxically, one of _blinding love_. As corny as this sounds, it is the one thing that evil cannot endure. It gives it absolutely nothing to latch onto; nothing to feed on; no way to justify its own existence via your hypocrisy. This makes it die a little (or a lot) inside, and signals to their "good side" --- however buried or remote --- that it is safe to come out. Despite your surface differences (which may still be great), this deepest aspect of their mind slowly begins to identify you as an ally in the larger fight against _evil as a principle_ --- the only fight that ultimately matters.

This is true kindness. To be perfectly clear: it is not about being _nice_. Kindness can be as fierce, wrathful, or perhaps even [violent](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dalai-gun/) as the situation warrants. But one thing it never is, is self-righteous. This shift in motivation makes all the difference in the world, and it becomes possible to perceive this directly. When enough people do this, I believe it produces something like "herd immunity" against evil. This is the condition we ought to be aiming for.

> _Such a [person] knows that whatever is wrong in the world is also in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow, he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved problems of our day._ — Carl Jung

It's been said that forgiveness isn't for the other person so much as for yourself. The same is true of kindness. The exhortations to be kind to "bad people" are not a trick to justify weakness or condone evil, but precisely the opposite. It is ultimately the _only_ path toward the world you most deeply long for. You owe it to yourself to discover just how fiercely powerful your love --- the "real you" --- can be in getting us there.

> _If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?_ --- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

> *My most recent mushroom trip (also the largest dose I've ever taken) I became fixated on a news story I had heard that week. About an 8 year old girl from a tribe in the Amazon, who was [tied to a tree and burned alive](https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/8033) in order to scare her people off their land so it could be logged. I realized that at the moment he did it, whoever lit that gasoline actually felt / thought more or less okay about what he was doing. **And my mind was illuminated with dozens of the parallels between that man's malformed, horrific perceptual / behavioral state, and mine. I saw the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance of the consequences of my acts and words. And there was nothing I could do to deny the similarity.***
>
> *Reminds me of something (I think) Duncan [Trussell] said on some recent podcast, quoting somebody else: it isn't the victim of violence you have to pray for so much. It's the perpetrator. They are the one who is more trapped in delusion, more estranged from love, etc.*
>
> [From an online forum. This is a perfect example of discovering one's own self-deception, and why pyschedelics are such a powerful and important tool.]

Also see this [page of quotes](https://hackmd.io/@monktastic/radical-kindness-quotes).

###### tags: `kindness`
