Limits of Kindness
Recommended listening: Running up That Hill (A Deal with God)- Coffeeshop, Aadish Sheth, ADÁI
Being kind to your fellow earth-dwellers should be a basic tenet for life but, in the current stressed and strained 'world order' where does kindness cease, and self-preservation take over? Has the 'everyone for themselves' bar been dangerously lowered by current social factors such as technology and politics? Let's have an unreasonable debate...
THIS POST has surfaced due to a situation I have been aware of this week that got me thinking. A colleague has the unenviable task of reducing their team by half and, though it is not down to them to deliver the coup de grace, the input into the process has taken its toll. The whole exercise has to be approached without fear or favour, but they have struggled with knowing that decisions are going to lead to huge changes in fortune for young families, those nearing but not quite at pension age, all with financial commitments and varying personal challenges. They've built up relationships with everyone they have been responsible for, knows all their limits and strengths and, at the risk of being melodramatic for a moment, can't fit all of them on the lifeboat of continued employment. It's a huge shit-sandwich and all involved are going to have to take a bite, with some having to swallow more than others.
It got me thinking about the judgement calls we all have to make, weighing the desire to do right by others against keeping our own universe on track. The choice is going to have different weights for different people - you might be reading this thinking about the last time you donated to charity rather than going out for a skinny latte, or you may be a parent who knows the very real choice between switching on the heating or feeding yourself and your children. When I reflected on it, I have been very lucky in having been employed by the same employer for 22 years (bar the odd takeover and merger), and enjoyed the relative security that has provided. My long-term employer has also been a bit of a straight-jacket on ambition with a notoriously flat structure but, I am just under two years from finally paying off the mortgage on our house, and the kids are in the process of flapping their wings to flee the nest forever. I could have been more career focused and earned more along with accepting the risks of climbing the greasy pole while switching employers and locations; I could also have been a lot better with money and dabbled more in investments, but generally speaking I have done alright. In that context, this current period of uncertainty is a new experience for me and sits in a wider context of world instability.
I am guessing any other GenX'ers like myself will remember all the other conflicts we have lived through (Falklands, Iraq, Iraq2: The Search for WMD, Syria: Is it WMD Tho?, Afghanistan: Here We Go Again) before the current attempt of a deluded head of state to stick their dick, I mean, flag, in Ukraine. Many BlueSky posters like to occasionally shit on 'Great' Britain for its colonial past and the effects we feel today from the very British collapse of their imperial global domination (Yes you're free! Have you met my friends Democracy, Weapons Industry and Free Markets? Need help with those pesky maps - pass the biro..), but it's a handy way to distract from the fact that empire building is a constant human preoccupation. Humanity hasn't found a way to effectively limit this instinct when it reaches critical mass and leads to charismatic nutters urging zealous reclamation of historic lands or smiling subsumption of others using the iron fist in a velvet glove approach of commercial agreements. The 'world order' that has been established in my lifetime feels more at jeopardy than ever before, with powerful country blocks forming (such as BRICS) and others imploding under populism or forming ties that wouldn't ordinarily be considered, such as Israel and Russia-leaning India. In our gradually heating, food and water insecure world, it's getting a bit 'every AK47 for themselves'.
I've put 'world order' in quotations a few times now, as how much credence you give to humanity being organised and benevolent enough to work together in a productive or evil manner is an interesting conundrum. It's also a phrase that tends to be linked more to conspiracy theory - 'new world order' - than meaningful discussion. Any students of history will, however, remember studying agreements such as the Entente Cordiale that was one of many treaties in place that led to global conflict in World War One and was indicative of a Europe trying to move on from the enmities of the Napoleonic and Medieval periods. This attempt at mutually agreed security didn't quite manage (massive understatement!) to take killing each other out of the equation. Modern times sees the expansion of NATO as a reaction to Russian aggression, but also many side organisations such as AUKUS that appears to be a tilt at limiting the currently unchecked maritime expansion of China that threatens traditional allies such as Taiwan and The Philippines. Making sure Australia has nuclear capable submarines seems to be the answer for those concerned with this; if the recent UK trident tests are anything to go by, the Chinese Communist party will be laughing so hard into their tea that the cleaning bill for bright white tablecloths will be astronomical. Watching Grant Shapps calmly asserting the second failed test was a success because they were 'testing secret things he couldn't possibly talk about coz it's secret innit!' was a glimmer of joy in the regularly turgid news output.
One thing that appears to be quite certain, and perhaps indicative that we have globally passed the point of flipping from being kind to looking after our own, is that humanity is completely failing to collectively tackle global climate change. I remember the challenges we faced in everything from clothing to food security and accommodation being voiced in the early 90's - of course I was too young and self-centred to dedicate myself to changing the world for the better and, in my defence, world governments weren't particularly bothered either. Spinning the family and work responsibility plates all the time means I am now wiser but more limited in what I can do about it now - even democratic protest is being framed as mob-rule by a desperate culture-war UK Government in its death-throes. Financial responsibility has well and truly choked off my barricade building time - I can type a mean pithy witticism on BlueSky though. Down with this sort of thing! Careful now! Which, ironically, pitches me back in the other direction of the kindness versus self-preservation see-saw.
Faced with the inability to effect much change on pig-headed UK governments mired in the career politics election cycle, I'm trying to increase the positive effect I have locally. I'm not doing it for clicks, likes or awards, but for a general feeling that I can make an impact. It doesn't have to be celebrated or acknowledged outside of the established or brief relationship I have with the person I am helping. The possibility that an act of kindness will create further kindnesses is enough for me, and it's all the more satisfying when not being involved in the social media merry-go-round. Kindness shouldn't be performative and is probably why, philosophically, I find TV shows that provide 'opportunity' and 'uplift people to realise their potential' a bit problematic as I am never sure who is the true beneficiary. This is why the current situation my colleague faces around having an influence on the future prosperity of others is so hard to live with.
The horrible rituals of consultations, evaluations, meetings, unofficial counselling, anger management and poker-face nodding to wild accusations against the backdrop of still having a job to do has been brought about by the march of technology. Increases in automation are mesmerising to behold - tasks that at the start of my career that were cumbersome, like examining calls that are 'held for training and monitoring purposes' is now as simple as checking the score spat out by a system that picks up positive and negative sentiments and reports on the entire journey of a customer within the organisation. The laborious use of Vlookup linked spreadsheets has been replaced by Big Query, Tableau dashboards and the rapid examination of vast amounts of linked data. Ai transcribers turn up to meetings before the attendee and cloud systems remember when you regularly open work items so it is always on hand for those tasks, and we don't even have to remember where it is stored.
Human memory and will is going through the process of being augmented to the point that less of it is needed, and whether that is a good or a bad thing is an interesting debate in the context of the existence of States. How do states generate enough taxable income if the population finds it harder to get work? Do states take the approach of the UK and raise the drawbridge, looking to become a corporate island where business is king and determines access to healthcare and opportunity for the people based on corporate need rather than people's will? Do they take the approach of the European Union and provide a wide geographical net covering a multitude of opportunities for people to move around and find where they fit, seeking out the corners where progress is slower or manual labour thrives? Or do they become authoritarian empire builders, ensuring vitality through conquest and control, determining for their population what they do to live based on their leaders' strategy for conquest?
It's a fascinating and unnerving process to observe and gives some insight into how early Industrial Revolution society must have felt in the 18th century. One thing is certain, as pressure grows to look after you and yours rather than 'others', there's going to have to be a lot more acts of kindness to balance the see-saw.
NEXT WEEK: We're going full thought experiment and God complex and creating a new philosophy. Oh yeah! Dust off your Kant, Mill and Plato - let's give birth to Carrumbaism!
