We hope that being able to understand how professional norms and institutional rules are often turned into social tools to enforce obedience and existing hierarchies can empower victims of those phenomena to resist them more effectively.
Introduction
In 2010, Phillips and Taylor published a short book aptly titled “On
Kindness” whose main thesis is that contemporary Western societies
evolved into framing kindness as a moral weakness: “Most people,
as they grow up now, secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of
losers. ”[1] This view suggests that we live in societies where
people would likely try to hide public displays of kindness.
However, our own understanding differs. What we see around us is a world
where displays of kind-looking behaviours are ubiquitous but largely
disconnected from actual kindness. In this paper we argue that there is
a twin social trend of, on the one hand, overemphasizing the importance
of visible displays of “kindness” while, on the other hand,
discounting the value of actually paying heed to the needs of others.
We interpret this disconnection as a weaponizing of external displays of
kindness in symbolic struggles. This weaponization takes multiple forms
– such as aggressive tone policing – that have in common to impose a
narrowing down of legitimate forms of expression and an appropriation of
legitimacy for purposes that have nothing kind about them. In other
words, fake kindness is a form of symbolic violence [2, 3] used by
dominant agents to strengthen their control on others.
We also believe that this weaponizing of fake kindness in social
relations isn’t evenly distributed throughout the social space. For
reasons we discuss here, fake kindness is more prevalent in some fields
and contexts. Among those contexts, healthcare and education professions
and institutions are especially propitious. We take the special case of
nursing to explore how seemingly innocuous professional norms and values
can turn out to be a nurturing ground for toxic behaviours.
Overall, we hope to provide a more sophisticated understanding of the
role the strategic use of public displays of kindness play in social
struggles. We also believe that our conceptual clarification and
analysis of fake kindness can eventually help victims of that symbolic
violence to self-defend.