For some, cruelty is the point. It’s not enough to deport a person. Non-violent undocumented immigrants must be chained hand and foot; deprived of food, water, or even a restroom; herded like animals onto an Army plane; and transported to a country they’ve never stepped foot in.
It’s not enough to shame transgender people, already the act of a bully. Transgender people must be deprived of their right to access medical care, prohibited from taking the medications they depend on, forbidden to play on sports teams, hounded in restrooms.
It’s not enough to disagree with people who dared to combat treason and sedition, or who simply tried to keep fellow citizens safe during a first-in-a-century pandemic. Some people need to stir up anger, hatred, and violence against them and then deprive them of their security details.
Bullying used to be something to civilize out of a child. Cruelty was the mark of evil or sociopathy.
In his Commencement address at Northwestern University in 2023, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker laid down the truth.
“The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel…When we see someone who doesn’t look like us, or sound like us, or act like us, or love like us, or live like us, the first thought that crosses almost everyone’s brain is rooted in either fear or judgement or both. That’s evolution: we survived as a species by being suspicious of things that we are not familiar with. In order to be kind, we have to shut down our instinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges.
“This may be a surprising assessment because somewhere in the last few years, our society has come to believe that weaponized cruelty is part of some well thought out master plan. Cruelty is seen by some as an adroit cudgel. Empathy and kindness are considered weak. Many important people look at the vulnerable only as rungs on a ladder to the top. I’m here to tell you that when someone’s path to the top is marked by cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instincts. They never forged new mental pathways. They never forced their brain to overcome their instinctual fears. And so their thinking and problem solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades.
“Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true. The kindest person in the room is often the smartest.”
–J.B. Pritzker, Illinois Governor at the 2023 Northwestern University Commencement Address
The Dalai Lama believes that compassion is our natural state. Not only are we hard-wired to feel compassion—our pro-social behavior is what helps us to cooperate, an evolutionary imperative—our mental health benefits from feeling and expressing compassion.
His Holiness’s claim seems to contradict Pritzker’s, but I don’t believe these two opinions are at odds. Both compassion and othering are atavistic behaviors. We express care and compassion for our tribe, fear and suspicion for those outside our tribe. Both Pritzker and the Dalai Lama suggest that we must work to expand our compassion to those different from us. The Dalai Lama tells us to find the similarities: we all suffer, we all fail at times, we all struggle. Pritzker mentions training our brains in a different pathway in order to become a citizen of an advanced society.
Certainly, one way to do this is to follow the Dalai Lama’s suggestions for meditation. Another is to listen to those different from us until we find common ground, which we will; we’re all human. There are other options, ones that, like these, are not easy. That is the very reason that kindness and compassion aren’t signs of weakness. They are unmistakably signs of strength.
Pritzker was speaking to the graduating class of a highly respected university. Perhaps that’s why he equated kindness with intelligence. But it doesn’t take extraordinary intelligence to find compassion and kindness for individuals unlike us. It takes humility, patience, time to listen. It takes a willingness to be human.