Fake Kindness as Symbolic
Power
A core characteristic of fake kindness is that it is mostly used by
dominant agents in social relations that are already asymmetrical. As a
strategy, fake kindness only really makes sense for agents who can rely
on underlying social or organizational structures to grant power to
their words [10, 11]. Imagine a supervisor meeting an employee to
inform them they will be transferred to a less desirable position, or a
public health officer announcing that efforts at protecting vulnerable
populations will be abandoned. In those examples, the discursive
situation makes the words spoken highly performative in themselves. In
such contexts, the capacity to convince others may not be that important
and, hence, the usual rhetorical tricks might not be favoured by the
speaker. On the other hand, as we will discuss, the speaker’s reliance
on external displays of behavioural kindness can prove an effective tool
to deprive hearers from otherwise legitimate responses.
Fake kindness is a tool used by dominant agents to force their
counterparts to limit themselves to similar behavioural boundaries:
soft-speaking, well mannered, “professional” and courteous. But,
precisely because those exchanges are heavily asymmetric, the social
effectiveness of civility won’t be fairly shared. The supervisor firing
an employee in a calm and courteous way can impose their will, but the
employee can’t reply in a calm and courteous voice to state that they
will keep their job and expect it to work. In such a hypothetical
exchange, the supervisor is using fake kindness as a social trap to
impose obedience on the employee. Behavioural deviations (shouting,
crying, swearing, etc.) would then be construed as indications that the
employee is conflictual, unprofessional, or dysfunctional and further
prove the appropriateness of the termination. As such, fake kindness
heavily relies on tone-policing [12, 13] and those using it can
generally also rely on institutional rules and structures that will
enforce tone-policing in disciplinary proceedings.
As such, fake kindness is essentially a way for the speaker to force on
their counterparts a passive acceptance of their subordination by
limiting the behavioural repertoire available to them [14]. In the
same way, excessive displays of fake kindness – where the behavioural
component is pushed to quasi-caricatural length while the absence of any
teleological good intentions is also made abundantly clear – should be
understood as social signalling. They are ethological warnings from the
dominant to the subordinate that any behavioural deviations from passive
obedience will be harshly sanctioned.
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu [15] coined the term symbolic
violence to describe how social norms and institutional rules are
intertwined in a way that implicitly, but forcefully, constrain
individual behaviours within asymmetric social hierarchies. His theory
[2, 3, 15] conceives human agents as being socialized to – more or
less consciously – integrate such social hierarchies and structure
their behaviours accordingly. As such, symbolic violence is both a tool
of social discipline and a manifestation of internalized hierarchies.
It is also important to keep in mind that social spaces – or maybe more
accurately fields in the Bourdieusian sense [11] – will not all
value kindness to the same extent. For example, one expects agents to be
kind in education or healthcare settings but don’t have the same
expectation when they are involved in business transactions or political
activities. In the same way, there are multiple social roles in which
the accepted social expectations include a significant level of
behavioural kindness. Primary school teachers or nurses [8], for
example, are heavily socialized around such expectations.
As some fields value and emphasize kindness to different levels and
extents, the symbolic value associated with behavioural kindness will
vary accordingly. In Bourdieusian terms, the symbolic capital one can
gain from displaying the attributes of behavioural kindness will be
field-dependent. A nurse is likely to be able to gain a significant
level of symbolic capital by displaying the attributes of behavioural
kindness because the institution they work in, and their colleagues will
often construe those displays as examples of professionalism. The
fictional character of Nurse Ratched, for example, clearly
instrumentalizes behavioural kindness as a source of institutional
support and power. On the other hand, a foreman working in an industrial
setting would likely gain much less symbolic capital using the exact
same behaviours.
The elephant in the room that we skirted around so far is the gendered
component of fake kindness. Whether kindness itself is gendered is a
question we will leave for others to discuss. But we believe that many
characteristic displays of behavioural kindness are clearly gendered as
feminine. We recognize this has resulted in centuries of gender-based
criticism and that at present, certain professions and people who
identify as female in high-profile roles are particularly vulnerable to
gender-based attacks. Further, we reject the idea that characteristics
of behavioural kindness should be viewed as a weakness. However, acting
in bad faith is not bound to an agent’s gender. In a society striving
for equality, one’s gender or profession should not remove the
possibility of a critical inquiry into their behaviour and motivations.
At the individual level, there are well-documented gendered social
expectations about the “proper” balance between assertiveness and
meekness for people who identify as female. On the one hand, these
expectations can result in a significant barrier to achieving gender
equality. But on the other, this might create the opportunity for some
to strategically use fake kindness to advance their own interests. At
the collective level, those gendered norms will, in turn, increase the
effectiveness and prevalence of fake kindness in traditionally feminine
fields and professions. As with all socially structured behaviours, the
interdependence of individual actions and social norms are complex and
probabilistic [2, 3, 11]. Therefore, describing behavioural kindness
as a gendered expectation says little about the respective way a person
who identifies as male and professionally socialized in a feminine field
such as nursing or childcare or a person who identifies as female and
professionally socialized in a masculine field such as surgery or
carpentry, might act.
We also want to stress that affirming, as we do, that fake kindness is a
gendered expression of symbolic violence does not imply in any way that
symbolic violence in itself is something feminine. The opposite is much
more likely. Symbolic violence is a concept dealing with the ways
existing power imbalances and rules of dominance are expressed, enforced
and maintained. In patriarchal societies like ours, people who identify
as female are overall much likelier to be on the receiving end of
symbolic violence[16]. The point we are making here is limited to
stating that one specific expression of symbolic violence – among
others – is intertwined in gendered social norms.