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.

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.