‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind’: the resiliency of vulnerability

It’s fair to say that 2020 has not been kind to the world. It feels as though a decade’s worth of turmoil has been condensed into the past eleven months. The truth is, of course, that a lot of the events that have marked this year are the results of years of tension, unrest, and hurt brewing just under the surface until all that pain and uncertainty erupted. The pandemic was the catalyst.

In March, when the UK was first locked down and all of our lives and collective worlds shrunk to the inside of our homes and the occasional trip to a supermarket, I started re-reading the books that had been important to me when I was a teenager. Seventeen year old me has a lot in common with the me who was facing months of social isolation (unsurprising, seeing as we are the same person). She was scared too, uncertain, anxious, and bored, though for very different reasons. Those books had been an escape for me when I was younger, and as a result, they played a large part in shaping my philosophies and beliefs.

One such book was Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine. Written in 1965, it’s a social satire about rich people who want to do good with the money that they’ve accrued. The satiric message — that the wealthy cannot hope to fix societal injustices and inequalities by simply opening their chequebooks — was not lost on me, but it was one quote, in particular, that’s stuck with me over the years:

‘“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”’

That philosophy of kindness threads itself into all of Vonnegut’s writing; knowing his history as a war veteran who spent a lot of World War Two in a prisoner of war camp, it’s perhaps unsurprising. For Vonnegut though, kindness wasn’t a weakness. It was a strength, it took courage, and it was often painful.

I’ve tried to adopt a philosophy of kindness, and no, it’s not easy. It can be painful because when we ask ourselves to be kind — to others, to ourselves, to the world — we are asking ourselves to be vulnerable. And that… quite frankly, that can be terrifying. Vulnerability invites rejection and opens us to being taken advantage of. In many respects, it is far easier to shut down those vulnerable parts of ourselves and make ourselves hard in the face of a world that often seems to be uncaring and cruel. Adopting apathy and hardening our softest parts is a form of protection, though it’s one that also forces us to amputate emotion and connection.

So, I’ve spent most of 2020 re-reading old favourites, and that’s true, but I’ve also spent a good deal of time reading and, sadly, listening to Jordan B. Peterson. Please don’t ask me why I honestly don’t know how it started. To say that there is a marked difference in tone and message in Vonnegut’s and Peterson’s work would be an understatement. For starters, Peterson’s work is all non-fiction and Vonnegut is a social satirist. (Just as a side note, Peterson has said on numerous occasions that George Orwell was hugely influential to him in his adolescence which makes me believe that he doesn’t understand what satire is at all).

I’m not going to derail myself talking about what I dislike about Peterson, however, I bring him up for four reasons: order, chaos, hardness, and softness.

According to Peterson, order and chaos are gendered. Order represents the masculine, and chaos the feminine. If we are to believe Peterson, the shift in Western societies towards a right-wing nationalism can be laid solely at the feet of liberals who have pushed too hard for society to become ‘feminised’. In an interview with The New York Times, he said: ‘The masculine spirit is under assault… It’s obvious.’

He expands on this idea in his now infamous self-help guide 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos:

‘When softness and harmless become the only consciously acceptable virtues, then hardness and dominance will start to exert an unconscious fascination.

Partly what this means for the future is that if men are pushed too hard to feminize they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.’

The underlying message that Peterson presents is that softness, vulnerability, and kindness are feminine traits that have degraded Western societies and values to such an extent that the result is a hard shift towards to the right and an embracement of individualism and a rejection of care. His answer to the existential dilemma he depicts? ‘Toughen up, you weasel’.

Peterson paints a fairly frightening picture of a world which is collapsing into disarray, and the only way to fix it is through cold rationalism and stoic fortitude. Honestly, it’s deeply saddening. If you subscribe to this way of thinking, you must reject your emotions, you must harden yourself against the world, and I understand the desire to do so because at its core, Peterson’s philosophy is based in fear. Fear of change, of opening yourself up to others because in doing so you face the possibility of rejection. Peterson argues that ‘compassion is a vice’ but compassion goes two ways.

To be seen, we must see others — not an idealised version of them or the world, but the ugly and painful parts that we all have. To be seen and accepted is something I think we all long for, and for that to happen, we must be vulnerable and allow our softest parts to be put on display. That takes a lot of strength and resiliency.

In contrast to Peterson, another quote that’s informed this philosophy of kindness is from a project by Iain Thomas (though interesting enough, it’s often misattributed to Vonnegut himself):

‘“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”’

It’s easy to grow cold and hard in a world that is so alienating, and it’s difficult to continue to be kind and open to people when rejection is just around the corner. The answer isn’t to toughen up and accept that the world is a dangerous, uncaring place. The answer is to embrace our vulnerabilities and to offer ourselves and each other the kindness we deserve.