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“It’s embarrassing that after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.” — Aldous Huxley
If we do not pay attention to who we listen to, what information and news we consume, we are likely to conclude that we live in a cruel, cruel world and humans are just awful.
What’s worse, cruelty is the intent, it is glorified, it is spectacle. Violence, torture, bullying, lying, hurting the most vulnerable, flaunting one’s wealth, behaviours that not too long ago were shameful and outrightly condemned are now bragged about.
Those in charge of our politics and news are intent on only showing us the worst of humankind: we are driven by greed, are all competing against each other, even freedom, we are told, is available in limited supply. Kindness is seen with suspicion or ridicule, everything and everyone should be commodified.
But we must not fall for these easy narratives. Yes, there is cruelty, but it is not human nature. Our world has been distorted by a mean world syndrome, a cognitive bias which makes people think the worst about humans (initially observed in those who watch the news too much), and so we act accordingly. Refusing to go along with this is a form of resistance.
What it requires first and foremost, is a shift in mindset. In Humankind, Rutger Bregman writes that few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people, so if “we want to tackle the greatest challenges of our times – from the climate crisis to our growing distrust of one another – then I think the place we need to start is our view of human nature.”
There is overwhelming evidence, for example, that when catastrophes occur, this brings out the best in people, yet as Bregman points out, no other sociological finding that has been backed by so much solid evidence has been so blithely ignored.
Biology students today learn that cooperation is more important than competition. And we know that hunter gatherers the world over understood that everything was connected and understood the importance of the collective.
Where did we go wrong? Bregman suggests there were two defining philosophers whose impact is still at the root of society’s deepest divide. On the one hand, Thomas Hobbes, who believed in the wickedness of human nature, that human beings are driven by fear, and fear of the other and this makes them ruthless and nasty, but they can be controlled by relinquishing some freedom. On the other hand, there was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who believed that man is naturally good and it is by the imposition of institutions of civil society that they become wicked. What he favoured was more freedom, more equality. The Hobbesian perspective is much too prominent today.
So what do we do about it?
The solution we love to believe in is that we need to replace our leaders with less awful ones. But if the system is rotten, it will produce rotten leaders. Research in psychiatry in the United States showed that people in power develop what is called ‘acquired sociopathy,’ an antisocial personality disorder people would normally get from a blow to the head and which can turn the nicest people into horrible ones. They become numb to the pain of others, they become disconnected.
Some suggest that what we need is more empathy and that we could start by teaching empathy from a young age. But it’s not just Elon Musk who thinks empathy is problematic. While more empathy won’t speed up our demise, it does not necessarily lead to moral action, it is usually biased (some deserve it, others don’t), and like the news, it shines a spotlight on an issue but it doesn’t lead to insight.
Empathy, which means the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, can be emotionally exhausting, it saps our energy, and doesn’t equate to action. In fact, Matthiesen and Klitmøller suggest, the idea of having empathy for people is more of a result of neo-liberal individualisation of responsibility, where instead of calling for political and social responses to suffering and injustice, we call for empathy.
In order for people to become the recipient of empathy, they need to submit to a worldview that makes them acceptable victims. Hannah Arendt, who believed that deep down humans were decent, was critical of empathy and compassion as moral guides because it closes down the space for difference. She argued instead for the active concept of understanding and of visiting the other.
This means we should stop trying to make people fit into our worldview or overcome differences, we should accept that there are multiple perspectives, without needing to accept them or be comfortable with them, it’s the discovery of other ways of being. Understanding is about learning to live in a shared world with people who are different. This is the foundation of moral action for Arendt.
If indeed we believe that someone is evil, it’s easy to just dismiss them, to cancel them. But if we believe that people are fundamentally good but evil exists, it requires us to engage, to understand, to act, Bregman explains. This requires work, but it is also a form of resistance, and it can begin with kindness.
Unlike empathy, kindness is an action, it extends outwards, towards the other, it’s subversive and it’s contagious. The beauty is that we don’t need to intellectualise or strategise, we don’t need to wait for system change, for funding, for the revolution in order to start, we can simply be a little kinder to each other.
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes.
Humankind, A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman.
Encountering the stranger: Hannah Arendt and the shortcomings of empathy as a moral compass. Matthiesen, N., & Klitmøller, J. (2019). Theory and Psychology, 29(2), 182-199. Download here.
Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm.
A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit.
‘Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (w/ Mohammed el-Kurd)’ | The Chris Hedges Report, 12 March 2025. Read and listen here.
‘How America Got Mean,’ by David Brooks, The Atlantic, August 14, 2023. Read here.
The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch.
‘How Kindness Became Our Forbidden Pleasure,’ Maria Popova, the Marginalian. Read here.
“They called it woke but it was being aware. It was defensive, it was what any mother would tell their Black boys, ‘you better watch out, be aware of your surroundings, you know that you move through space and time in a different manner than white people. You better be woke.’” — Peggy Parks Miller
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” — Anais Nin
“To be nobody but yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” — E.E. Cummings
Archimedes: ”Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.” Chinua Achebe: “But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.”
