Friday, November 5, 2021

The Freedom Of Forsaking Gratuitous Kindness

A lack of kindness is not cruelty.  Shallow fools who feel entitled to the kindness of strangers might be offended by this, emotionalistically enslaved to assumptions.  Their stupidity is evident to anyone who is willing to look for it, and it is because of people like them that so many false ideas about the concept of kindness are so prevalent in Western culture.  As with almost everything, the typical unthinking person expects to be treated with a level of kindness they have neither proof nor evidence ready to demonstrate such an obligation exists.  Kindness is comparatively unimportant next to almost literally every aspect of reality that one could ponder, and yet it is clung to more openly and vehemently than other things in many cases.

Even someone who comes to realize all of this, understanding that only justice can be obligatory and that kindness rarely overlaps with the concept of justice, they might still feel a desire to be kind in spite of the futility (for kindness will only rarely help influence people to turn from error to reason, and no one needs kindness to do so).  This desire can drive people to intentionally perform acts of kindness where there is not any obligation inside or outside of the Christian worldview.  For some, kindness is simply meant to make their own selves feel better; for others, kindness is mistaken for some integral part of Biblical morality or something all people should display indiscriminately by default.

If one can manage to do so, shedding the desire to be kind to those who are not friends, ideological allies in the truth, neutral, or useful imbeciles can be one of the most liberating experiences of one's life.  No longer is such a person compelled by emotion to show kindness just for the sake of showing kindness.  Instead of relying on pleasing others or whether or not one treats other people in some non-obligatory way, looking to reason and exploring moral concepts as they are can provide all the empowerment one needs.  One is at last free to examine concepts and moral epistemology without a care for something as ultimately insignificant as the subjective pangs of conscience getting in the way.

Again, a lack of kindness is not cruelty.  There are some who will almost certainly think I somehow have endorsed cruelty.  Even if I had, unless a person has philosophically verifiable grounds for their objection and not personal preference or offence, he or she has only been a fool to believe that kindness would be obligatory just because people generally want to be treated kindly.  Kindness is a distraction from moral epistemology just as it is a distraction from understanding logical axioms, the existence of the uncaused cause, and most other issues of foundational significance.  Becoming free from the subjective desire to show kindness even when it makes one vulnerable to exploitation, emotionally distracts one from rationalism, or contradicts the notion of justice is thus something everyone with this desire could benefit from.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.

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