Is Kindness A Forbidden Pleasure?

Ahhhhh... the pleasure of Brain Pickings in my inbox. Today the first few paragraphs were so striking I had to place them here. I may have overshot fair use, but this is too important of a message not to share:

"Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now," Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful 1957 letter. "Kindness, kindness, kindness," Susan Sontag resolved in her diary on New Year's Day in 1972. And yet, although kindness is the foundation of all spiritual traditions and was even a central credo for the father of modern economics, at some point in recent history, kindness became little more than an abstract aspiration, its concrete practical applications a hazardous and vulnerable-making behavior to be avoided – we need only look to the Internet's "outrage culture" for evidence, or to the rise of cynicism as our flawed self-defense mechanism against the perceived perils of kindness. We've come to see the emotional porousness that kindness requires as a dangerous crack in the armor of the independent self, an exploitable outward vulnerability – too high a cost to pay for the warm inward balm of the benevolence for which we long in the deepest parts of ourselves.

Kindness has become "our forbidden pleasure."

So argue psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor in the plainly titled, tiny, enormously rewarding book On Kindness (public library).

"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. People are leading secretly kind lives all the time but without a language in which to express this, or cultural support for it. Living according to our sympathies, we imagine, will weaken or overwhelm us; kindness is the saboteur of the successful life. We need to know how we have come to believe that the best lives we can lead seem to involve sacrificing the best things about ourselves; and how we have come to believe that there are pleasures greater than kindness...

"In one sense kindness is always hazardous because it is based on a susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures and sufferings. Putting oneself in someone else’s shoes, as the saying goes, can be very uncomfortable. But if the pleasures of kindness – like all the greatest human pleasures – are inherently perilous, they are nonetheless some of the most satisfying we possess.

[...]

"In giving up on kindness – and especially our own acts of kindness – we deprive ourselves of a pleasure that is fundamental to our sense of well-being.