Of Nice And Men

I wrote a blog back in 2015 entitled Positivity.  As the title suggests, it looked at the old 'glass half full/glass half empty' conundrum and the importance of being kind, being nice.  How a human being can hear many different positive things during an average day but maybe only one negative thing and more often than not it will be the negative comment they'll remember.  At that point in time it seemed as though I was just writing it in terms of finding a way to feel good about yourself, about your own life, and allowing others to do the same, topics I believe are very important.  That even if being positive and being nice isn't seen as cool, do it anyway.

In the current climate it feels to me like that blog would now have to take a completely different approach.  I'm quite fond of using football analogies to link to real life and in this situation it's like where a manager says of his losing team "we need to get back to basics and start doing the simple things right".  That's where it seems like we are now, especially in the virtual world of social media where real life events are scrutinised and blown up into huge events as they happen.

So in particular after the fallout from the Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Donald Trump as US president, it certainly seems like a lot of characters have come out of the woodwork to make positivity and "being nice" less about not being cool and more about being weak, just being plain wrong.  It seems like it's the in thing to fight people who want to do the right thing and phrased like that the whole concept seems quite bizarre.

We now seem to live in a world where people who want to discriminate against specific groups of people tell those who don't want to discriminate against anyone that they're being intolerant, that they're ignoring or attacking anyone who has a different opinion to them, that they have no empathy with anyone who thinks differently.

Rewind time a little and think back to being at school.  There were children who misbehaved and called other children names, there were those who bullied others and of course if they were found out they were punished.  They were the ones discriminating against other children, more than likely through some kind of physical characteristic, trying to set them apart, trying to mark them out as different and exert some kind of power over them.  This is my class, my school and you come into it on my terms.

Do we stop and allow those children to behave that way?  Do we respect the fact that they just have a different opinion over how to act and let them get on with it?  By disciplining them are we disrespecting their right to think and behave differently to well behaved children?  Are we lacking empathy, should we take the time to understand why they need to, say, pick on the fat kid?  The answer to all of those questions is a blindingly obvious "no".  What we do is we punish them and set an example to all the other children that behaving like that is not acceptable.  And hopefully they'll learn from it and not grow up to be an adult who makes the same mistakes.

- Nice Guys Finish Last -

But there is a certain allure to being the bad guy.  The school bullies usually ended up having hangers-on who would look up to them and do some of their "work" for them.  It's always been cool to like the bad boy rock stars, to see them cigarette in one hand, drink in another, attractive woman on their arm climbing into a limousine on the way to a flash hotel to throw a TV out of the window.

Today's bad guy is a bit different.  Bad-guy-in-chief is one of the most powerful men in the world, if not THE most powerful, so if he says it's ok it must be ok right?  We're talking about a businessman who is used to getting everything his own way and if he doesn't then he'll throw away the parts that are stopping him and replace them with new ones.  For him being wrong is not an option, so he'll try and create a version of reality around himself where that never happens.  Come to think of it, rather reminiscent of that school bully who grew up and didn't end up learning from his mistakes.

So if he makes comments that disrespect women, then in a lot of eyes it becomes ok to disrespect women.  Harmless locker room talk.  If he wants to launch an attack on immigrants arriving in America through Mexico, then it's now ok to have a problem with those people.  If he wants to launch a similar attack on Muslims and try and prevent them coming into the country, then it's now ok to have a problem with Muslims too.  If he wants to launch an attack on black American footballers for kneeling during the national anthem then his supporters will also back him.  As he switches targets at the drop of a hat, those ideas will stick and take root with people.

Now in some quarters they'll have already been with him without the power of suggestion, there are still plenty of pockets in America where views like that are commonplace.  To see the president echoing those views makes them feel vindicated.  After keeping quiet for so long, it's now ok to come out in public and say that immigrants are a plague, Muslims only want to blow up good patriotic Americans, black people should go back to being second class citizens at best.  Before anyone flies through the roof, yes I know the president hasn't actually said any of that as I did there, but if they are your views already then you can take what he HAS said and extrapolate as vindication of your opinions.  He's "one of us".  And so far he hasn't spoken out against any of those ideas with anything remotely approaching sincerity to prove that he isn't.

- Recalibrate the Zero? -

As our TV screens and the media increasingly feed us presidential updates and the like, the extreme views then become a little more common, what was extreme is now a little less so, what was deeply unpleasant becomes "just" unpleasant, what was unpleasant becomes almost acceptable.  And this is a really important point, because this is how "the norm" becomes skewed - when you have the president of the USA making things that were previously socially unacceptable sound acceptable and regular airtime is being given to UK politicians to also communicate these views.  The fact that they have a regular platform is bad enough, what is even more scary is that it hasn't really taken much to unlock this type of feeling in a lot of people.  The school bullies are back recruiting their henchmen and that allure is working again.

This shift in what is seen as acceptable and what isn't is pushed down through the foot soldiers, you see them hiding on the internet behind their Youtube channel or spouting forth from the safety of their newspaper column, preaching hate and encouraging division.  If you're unclear as to who I mean then the higher profile culprits are the likes of Paul Joseph Watson, Katie Hopkins, Tommy Robinson.  All have an agenda to push and the methods involved vary from the blunt, discriminatory scaremongering to the more manipulative attempts at discrediting people who oppose them to somehow imply that then makes their way of thinking right.  "Aha, I have found an apple with a maggot inside, therefore that proves my point that oranges are best!".  Sadly it seems to work on some people.  The chance to get one over on anyone who simply just wants people to be fair seems to be too much to resist, like it's a bad thing.

They'll find a real life point of reference to latch onto to try and pull you in, immigration being a particular favourite because, again, sadly it does actually seem to work pretty well for them.  Taking a lower-level suspicion that people may have and feeding it until it grows and grows into something to be afraid of.  Maybe Yoda was onto something with "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering".  It might seem an odd quote to insert here, but joking I am not.  Although I must admit it's strange that even when the most legitimate ends of the immigration argument are rolled out to say that we simply can't cope with the numbers, there's an underlying element which still manages to focus on one specific group of people, which to me points towards other, less number-based agendas.

To illustrate that, if you do want to reduce numbers then who do you prevent from entering the country?  I'm guessing the first word on a lot of people's lips would end up being Muslims.  Primarily because they've read headlines in the likes of The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Express or heard people like Nigel Farage or Donald Trump telling us that we should be afraid.  Stoking the flames so we think they're all out to get us, whether that be taking our jobs, replacing our culture, raping our women or bombing us all to oblivion.  If you trust those sources then you'll probably believe it, completely fall for the attempts at division that play right into the hands of the small number of people who do actually want to cause panic and harm.  Because they also need someone to fight against and if you're that person you're handing it to them on a plate.  While the scare tactics are milling around in their heads it becomes increasingly unlikely that any thought would be given to the human stories behind such a generalised group of people.  Or the fact that they're unfairly discriminating against people for no other reason than the religion they were brought up with.  Is it the allure of the school bully again, dragged along with the momentum of the chase, not stopping to think what's fair until the cold light of day when you're sat outside the headmaster's office?  In fact, not stopping to think at all, going purely on trust or, dare I say it, faith.

- Empathy -

If there was time to stop and think, what then?  I'm curious as to someone's reaction if they were to see in-depth footage of the plight of a Syrian refugee.  Are they sympathetic at all?  If they are sympathetic is it with an additional shrug of "sad, but not our problem"?  What if everyone in every country had a similar, nationalist, "stick to their own" attitude and they were no one's problem, do you just leave people to die if their own country has abandoned them?  I imagine that most people would be outraged if they saw a video online of cruelty towards animals.  You'd feel pity for the animal, maybe want something to happen to the perpetrator, whether it's justice or even actual harm in return for theirs, maybe you'd want to express an interest in taking that animal in yourself.

If you see that video you don't necessarily know which country the animal lives in and it's a sad story so it really shouldn't make a difference.  Yet it does with humans apparently.  Do you watch the video of animal cruelty and think, well the animal lives in [insert country here] so there isn't much I can do about it.  Or that it's a dog of a certain breed so I have much less sympathy than I would for dogs that are native breeds to my country.  I've never heard that expressed before, yet it happens with humans.

I wonder what would happen if you actually sat someone down with an individual refugee or a family for them to explain their story, how they got to our country.  If you're not moved by that then fair enough, there's probably no hope for you, you're officially emotionless.  But I imagine many people would be, so could they then take any sympathy for their plight and scale it up to everyone in a similar situation?  Because that's what everyone else is doing when they defend them - thinking of the human side of the story.

Some people may be thinking at this point, "so if we're not allowed to discriminate then how on earth can you stop people coming into the country, you do-gooders will want to let everyone in because of some sob story or other".  Well no, actually.  Being pragmatic about an issue such as this, there obviously has to be a limit somewhere and if I'm honest I'm glad that I don't have to come up with a set of rules which decides who takes precedence.  But it is possible to come up with some kind of fair set of rules which doesn't just involve a blanket ban on a specific set of people from a certain background.  Take people convicted of a crime for example.  Protecting the public is obviously of great importance, regardless of whether you're talking about immigration or not.  Even with something like that there would be plenty of debates around which crimes did they commit, how long ago did it occur etc. etc. before you could find something that works, but it's certainly a much fairer starting point with a more sound reasoning behind it than a person's religion.  Better to focus on finding people who may actually pose a risk as opposed to assuming people will pose a risk because of their religion.

- All About Politics? -

If you've read this so far and wondered if talking about Donald Trump, Brexit and immigration etc. means this is all about politics then it absolutely isn't.  People say to me "how come you're interested in politics all of a sudden?".  I'm no more interested in it than I was before, which wasn't very much at all, however what has caught my interest is that it's politicians who are now the chief "enablers" of the way of thinking that I've been describing.  The war on being nice, if you like.

Politics is the vehicle which is allowing this to spread across the UK, across the USA and wherever in the world there is a champion for divisive views.  A win against the odds just reinforces the apparent validity of the views, apparently it's the will of the people.  People who know they are fighting against something and seemingly enjoying themselves as they do, but not realising that they're actually fighting against common decency.  They're being told that they're threatened so that they have something to be scared of.  If you have something to be scared of then you have something to fight against.  And if you have something to fight against you have something to hate.  Wind them up and watch them go.

It's impossible to deny that there are bad people in the world, but you don't live your life in fear of them all.  I want people to be nice to each other, I want people to look after the planet and everything that lives on it.  Not only are people fighting against fellow human beings, they're pushing ideas that will harm the planet they live on going forwards too, this time for no other reason than money.  And if you're that person pushing your own selfish reasons and prejudices and spreading it to others then yes, I have a problem with that.

A quick disclaimer: when I'm talking about Trump and Brexit being a driving force behind all of this, it's often assumed that means that everyone who voted for them behaves in the ways I've been describing.  If you were already at the extreme end of the scale, the Britain First, KKK-type of crowd, then it's pretty much guaranteed that you voted for those two options so I'm definitely talking about you.  They're the real school bullies, the ones with a wealth of experience in that area.  Then there are the ones who believed in the lies that they were fed, the scaremongering, the ones that chose to close their eyes to the unpleasantness behind the candidates pushing their ideas because they believed in their "solution" to the problems they were hyping up.  So I'm also talking about those people, provided they haven't subsequently seen the aftermath, the monster they helped to create, and realised that it wasn't quite what they thought it was going to be.

- Open-minded and Narrow-minded, not Left and Right -

Looking back at what I've written so far, I think I'm being too logical in my arguments here and logic seems to be one thing that has been thrown out of the window of late when it comes to being nice.  Acts of kindness are ridiculed as "virtue signalling", wanting to be fair and have everyone as equals is "leftie" nonsense.  I really dislike the terms left, right, centre etc, they're completely irrelevant as we're all individuals and can have separate opinions that don't always conform to someone's fixed idea of those labels.  True, it's quite likely that certain opinions go hand in hand with others simply in terms of being open-minded or narrow-minded and to be honest I think those terms describe the camps a lot better than left and right.

This can often be demonstrated when the more vocal sections of the narrow-minded people seek to discredit the open-minded people to persuade others that their way is right.  Wherever there is a good and noble cause, that cause is attacked because a small number of people use violence in connection with it, or a small minority take a more distorted view, twisting the original intentions out of shape and ending up on the more narrow-minded end of the spectrum despite being branded "the left".

So anti-fascism as an ideology is suddenly wrong because violence is used in protests, feminism as an ideology is wrong because groups of over-zealous teenagers think that it means that all men should be destroyed and women should rule the world.  Forget the fact that both ideologies stand for equality and that the vast majority of people support those causes for that very reason.  If you try and belittle that then that implies you're against those causes, that you would like to encourage division.  There's absolutely no other way of interpreting it, if you consistently attack "the left" then you're not just attacking the narrow-minded people I mentioned that are associated with that label, you're attacking all of the open-minded people too.  Why?  You can be against a crime committed in the name of a cause or disagree with a point made in its name and still support the cause in the knowledge that they weren't representative of it or faithful to its principles.  The only conclusion is that the intention is to divide.

There is one method of attack that is preventable however.  The words "racist", "fascist", "Nazi" etc. are thrown around too much and sometimes for too little an offence.  Rather like swearing, if you use the words all the time you leave yourself nowhere to go when you need to describe something more extreme or exclaim in a more forceful way.  So it leads to actual racists throwing around examples of someone using the words for relatively minor offences to try and wriggle out of the accusation themselves.  Being fair to people does also mean not accusing someone of being something they're not, save it for those deserving cases.

- FAKE NEWS! - 

Talking of hyperbole, it's now commonplace for our narrow-minded friends to bypass the powers of debate altogether by simply crying "FAKE NEWS!", and I think we all know who this comes from.  Take any well reasoned point and confidently say it's a total lie and if people trust you they'll believe you, with the added bonus of turning you into a martyr in the process.  The logic goes that you must be even more right if so many people are trying to prove you wrong.  It's very difficult to reason with a mixture of calculated denial and ignorance.  It's like trying to explain something you know is right to someone with their hands over their ears shouting "LA LA LA LA LA LA NOT LISTENING".  And if anyone loses their temper while trying to reason against that brick wall, guess what?  Apparently you're back to that accusation of being the intolerant one.

As mentioned above, there's also the alternative method of trying to discredit someone by challenging their use of words such as "racist" etc. to make them sound unreasonable or hysterical.  There's a certain irony to people with views that many would consider offensive feigning offence if either they or their hero are being called out on those views.  A role reversal of another favoured taunt of "snowflake", which in itself is meant to belittle someone's apparent fragility.   This also illustrates the staggering inconsistency that often appears, if you're against an idea, an act, a state of mind etc. then it doesn't matter who that relates to, you're either against it or you aren't.  The fact that you can always find an equal and opposite tweet from Donald Trump's past relating to his latest tirade never ceases to amuse in terms of the laughable lack of integrity.

The more manipulative might attempt to push buttons until they can provoke a reaction which isn't fitting with someone who wants to be fair and nice, as if that then nullifies any argument being made.  When people find certain views so abhorrent, it's hardly surprising that they get emotional when confronted with those views directly.  Reading this paragraph I imagine I'd be challenged on being paranoid, a predictable attempt to discredit anyone who's onto the mind games.  And the price of trying to be nice.

In fact, despite all the points that I've tried to make respectfully in this admittedly rather lengthy blog, all it would take would be one quick dismissal of "leftie rubbish" or something similar to convince some people it was wrong.  No need to actually formulate a decent argument to argue for their point of view, they're right and I'm wrong, simple as that.

- Virtue Signalling -

When using these tactics, a special place is reserved for celebrities, particularly if they're successful with lots of money, and presumably lots of followers on social media.  They're in danger of reaching out to a lot of people and ruining the party by making actual points and having real arguments and being, like, tolerant and understanding and stuff.  How they dare think that they can have this kind of outlook when they now have money and huge houses is apparently too much for some people.  So their opinions must therefore be fake, they must be just saying it so people *think* they're nice, I mean who would seriously think like that once they've got into their position?  Even if someone's sincerity was called into question (and the vast majority of the time it shouldn't be), what is actually wrong with spreading some positivity to thousands of people?  Being positive is good, being nice is good, encouraging others to act  the same way is good.  Ridiculing people for trying to do that just seems absolutely preposterous to me, what's the point?  What is there to gain, other than encouraging others to be negative, to be cynical, to be suspicious.

There seems to be some kind of assumption that gaining wealth through, say, writing books or playing football means you have no right to think like a decent human being, money sucks away sincerity and any right to an opinion apparently.  Unless you're president I suppose, where your opinion is always the gospel truth, however badly you communicate it.

Communication actually plays an important part in some of this too.  In an exchange between someone who's narrow-minded and someone who's open-minded, often the points can be made with such confidence by the narrow-minded person, with such a belief that they're right that the person on the receiving end may start to think........am I wrong?  By virtue of being an open-minded kind of person who doesn't want to encourage any kind of discrimination, it would suggest that they're more likely to consider these questions, to be more introspective and actually care if someone accuses them of anything untoward.  Seeds have been sown from someone with such confidence that they're right that the person with the more noble thoughts is now starting to doubt themselves.  They absolutely depend upon this reaction.

And you know what?  Don't doubt.  The only intolerance that is acceptable is of intolerance itself.  The only time I'm happy to have a lack of empathy with someone is when that person has little empathy themselves.  The only time that I will refuse to listen to your opinion is when it's an opinion I've already heard and have rejected outright because it is the polar opposite of what I believe.  That's not intolerant, that's not divisive, that's not lacking empathy, it's simply dismissing an ideology that is all of those things.  And if I didn't do those things I'd be a hypocrite.

If you communicate division, if you communicate intolerance, if you communicate hate, then don't be surprised if you receive the same feelings and emotions back.  It makes perfect sense because none of those things are acceptable and should be rightly derided.  Think back to the school idea and imagine some of the points outlined earlier coming out of the mouth of a child:

• "I think those kids should go in for dinner last because of their religion".
• "She's crying because I told her that her family need to go back where they came from, she should respect the fact that others have a different opinion and stop whining".
• "Sorry Sir, I've seen your big house and new sports car so your opinion is invalid.  I don't believe he got an A, you're just saying that to look like a generous teacher".
• "Everyone should get their turn to go in first for dinner?!?!  Don't be ridiculous, the weak, well-behaved kids are trying to force their agenda on us yet again".
• And lastly, how about a child who cries "FAKE NEWS" at a teacher as they're taught in class but can offer nothing further in support?

It doesn't make for good reading does it.......?  It's not about left and right.  It's about wrong and right.

There was a tweet that did the rounds recently asking why we should deny someone the right to peacefully advocate genocide.  And on further examination it wasn't even coming from someone that believed that genocide was a good thing, it was a point about free speech.  If you seriously think that free speech should allow for things like that then there's something very very wrong.  Free speech is not a licence to spread hate and where that happens, whether in a real life setting or online, there should be consequences.

The person that is next to you is no better or worse than you.  The person next to them is no better or worse than them.  And so on, until you stretch that around the world.  A man is no better than a woman, a white person is no better than anyone of a different colour, one person's god is no better than another, which in turn is no better than not believing in a god, a heterosexual is no better than a homosexual.  Take it down to an individual level and yes, of course, you can formulate specific opinions about a specific person but sorry, to question any of the above statements or something similar is a path to suspicion, to division, to hate.  It's that simple.  Be nice.