On Kindness

I. Against Kindness

• Purpose of book: to show “how the kind life—the life lived in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others—is the life we are more inclined to live, and indeed is the one we are often living without letting ourselves know that this is what we are doing.”
  • “How do people come to forget about kindness and the deep pleasures it gives to them?”
  • Children are inherently kind

Kindness—that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself—has become a sign of weakness (except of course among saintly people, in whom it is a sign of their exceptionality).

We are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.

II. A Short History of Kindness

People need other people, not just for companionship or support in hard times but to fulfill their humanity.