I have been reflecting for days on the revolutionary power of kindness.
I lift my finger after typing the point of the previous sentence and feel that I have put something very frivolous on the record. Something empty, soft, limp and meaningless: “the revolutionary power of kindness”. Something only a person mired in the purest privilege could say.
But I persist. I want to defend this idea. Because I want it as something viable and consistent: if there is no room for kindness in my mind, there will be no rest for me. And above all I want to vindicate it as a legitimate, solid and viable praxis in the public space. Because if we expel kindness from our horizon the world will become the most hostile of places.
I understand kindness as an expression of ahimsa, non-violence. I understand by kindness the gesture that arises from the conviction that all beings want to be happy and seek desperately and clumsily the means to achieve that end. Sometimes they seek happiness in means that profoundly contradict my ideals and even my way of living. Sometimes they believe that the way to happiness is violence: mental, verbal or physical. Sometimes they even believe that by harming me or my collective - whatever it may be - they will find peace. Sometimes they are aware of this. Many other times they are not.
But it would be arrogant to assume that my life has not been, is not, or will not at some point cause suffering and harm to other beings. It would be insultingly naïve to think that my life and the lives of my loved ones is the only open wound. Because of the interdependent condition that all beings share, we can all be harmed. But more importantly: all of us, absolutely all of us, can harm. It is constitutive to the fact of being alive that we harm. That is: no one can live in a way that does not subject or harm another being. And to think that our cause alone will liberate us from all forms of oppression is a mirage. As Marina Garcés says: “that all liberation leads to new forms of domination even more terrible and that all knowledge mobilizes new power relations is a truism”.
That means that I myself have exercised, exercise and will exercise violence in many ways. I would like to think that the vast majority of the time it has not been on purpose. But sometimes what I have understood as natural, fair and necessary has resulted in violence to others. However, as happens to many people, I tend to think of myself as free of this violent potential. That is why it has usually been others who have accompanied me to recognize the trail of suffering that I generate in my wake. Starting with my family, going through my friends, my partner, my teachers, feminist and anti-racist thinkers, animal activists, or those who reflect on fatphobia or transphobia - to name a few biases that permeate my gaze. On the vast majority of occasions I have needed someone other than myself to open my eyes: few things hurt and offend us more than recognizing ourselves as executioners and not only as victims.
And I have to say that on all these occasions I have always been grateful that they accompanied me with understanding and patience, not seeing in me a lost case or a despicable being, but a creature that, clumsy and blind, tries to find its way. In other words: I have always appreciated kindness as an interlocutor.
This leads me to ask myself the following question: if I have always appreciated a kind gesture on the other side, why would I think that the one who offends or irritates me would not also appreciate it? Why would my grievance be more legitimate? Because it is mine? Too often I miss the opportunity to see in the one who hurts or offends me a mirror of my violent potential. And there begins the old and painful truth of dehumanization, as old as our history: the inability to recognize something of myself in the other, and more specifically in the other that I do not like, that hurts or annoys me.
To delegitimize kindness, care and patience in our revolutionary practices is a mistake. Infantilizing the kind gesture, denigrating understanding -which requires slower times and cooking- is a trap of heteropatriarchal narratives and capitalism in which we are falling into from feminisms. Harshness, repression, lynching and punishment attract us because it has been the language of power. Anger and rage are not useful, effective, or productive: they are simply familiar to us because they are the codes that have conveyed the world since the beginning of time.
Kindness, on the other hand, demands a maturity that, in the face of aggravation, does not rush to demonize or counterattack. Kindness is ductile, flexible. As it understands, it adapts. Kindness is soft, yes, because kindness belongs to the semantic field of tenderness and vulnerability. The only and deepest thing we have in common.
References:
This text has been written inspired as a result of encounters, readings or conversations with references for me such as Lama Norbu, Shantideva, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Jigme Khyentse, bell hooks, Judith Butler and Marina Garcés. In addition to conversations with fellow feminists.
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