Is kindness a virtue

[Lao Tzu]

I'm not sure how to explain this but last night I was thinking about North korea vs. Tibet.

The Tibetians are peaceful, compassionate, kind but weak people. The North Korean gov. is dangerous, evil and destructive but powerful. As a result the Tibetians have been overrun while the North Koreans get to blackmail the world. Not only that but the North Koreans are so powerful that they have brainwashed their own population into a life of slavenly obedience. The Tibetians on the other hand are being overrun.

So it makes me think about kindness. What good is kindness if what really maters are issues like influence, strength, defensiveness, etc? Nature didn't evolve us to be nice, it evolved us to be alive and we are alive through issues like strength, the ability to defend ourselves and influence.

Supposedly one of the reasons people do not fight back against abuse is because fighting back rocks the boat. It is easier if people just lay back and take threats, fighting back can lead to physical damage or being expelled from teh social group. So over the eons we evolved to be weak and passive. But that makes us fodder for the strong, and it also probably deludes us into thinking things like 'love makes the world go round' when it doesn't. Power makes the world go round.

I'm not saying kindness is bad, just not a good way to approach life based fundamentally on compassion. Life should be approached on strength, power, influence, knowledge, the ability to defend yourself and others, etc. Kindness should be reserved for after you have proven yourself to be strong and able to defend yourself. If you do it w/o that you run into problems. I've been an asshole and I've been kind, everyone has.

Even good & evil are social constructs for the most part, created within the confines of biology. And biology and sociology are created by the powerful. So kindness only exists within the framework of strength. Kindness only matters w/in the framework of strength and power.

 

[nimbus]

prisoner's dilemma. in simulations, the kind ones get knocked out first followed by the dicks. The successful model is to be kind as long as it reciprocated, and then become selfish if necesarry

 

[Lao Tzu]

I read about that in the moral animal. Kindness is good, but only when given to people of value and only when reciprocated. For example young, fertile, beautiful white women get tons of media coverage when they disappear because they are valuable (healthy, fertile, young) but older, uglier women or men do not.

But even kindness is at the end of the day subservient to strength. Consider someone who donates millions to building healthcare infrastructure. All they are doing is promoting a lifestyle that allows us to fulfill our biological programming, which is to survive as long as possible w/o disease or disability. Kindness is structured w/in the context of strength and it is designed to fulfill goals established by the strong.

Kindness, ethics and morality all come down to and are subservient to the ambitions of amoral strength in one form or another no matter how you look at it and that is hard to deal with. Thank god I can discuss it on a fitness board though.

 

[vansmack2000]

I was in Speech and Debate in middle school, I did my speech on being mean Vs Nice.
i tried to argument its better to be mean than nice.

i didnt do so well, but then again i only did it to get out of school early.
wrd.

 

[biteme]

You're making me think too much. Not in my nature to be mean, so I'd rather just avoid people cause I'm afraid I will have to kill them.

 

[Lao Tzu]

You're making me think too much. Not in my nature to be mean, so I'd rather just avoid people cause I'm afraid I will have to kill them.

We are all mean but you're not mean to people who don't deserve it within the framework of biology and sociology. People who do deserve it within that framework you are mean to, as is everyone. If someone hurt your daughter for an unacceptable reason you'd be very mean, but that meanness serves biological & sociological agendas that most people don't understand and have no role in the creation thereof. Point being that all human morals and ethics are at the end of the day subservient to and designed to further the agenda of strong forces which are universally amoral and undemocratic. I think Nietzsche or Schopenhauer wrote about this, I have a book on them so I'll reread parts of it.

 

[Phenom78]

You confuse condition with cause.

Kindness and strength are not exclusive. Nor are strength and evil tied at the hip.

The simple truth is that one must defend whichever condition he individually, or society collectively, chooses to follow.