I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s noticed it: the people who prate loudest about ‘kindness’ are invariably the most swivel-eyed haters on the face of the planet. We’ve all seen it: the purple-haired harpy with the ‘Be Kind’ button, screaming dementedly at some bewildered elderly person they/them has decided is a ‘Nazi’. The HR Karen who blithers about creating a ‘kind and inclusive workplace’, but who shuns anyone who deviates an inch from her mandated ideology.
No one embodies this myth of ‘progressive empathy’, though, more than Jacinda Ardern: the politician who gibbered about ‘kindness’ like a broken record but presided over spiralling rates of child poverty and abuse and agreed with a giddy laugh that she was creating a two-class New Zealand society.
Jacinda Ardern, in an interview broadcast to the country, had suddenly enforced vaccine mandates, ensuring that all those who refused would lose their individual rights.
She had a smile on her face.
Asked whether this would create two classes of people, she replied:
Yes… yes, that is what it is.
Many reluctantly, even angrily, submitted to the new regime. Some of them paid the ultimate price for Jacinda’s demented ‘kindness’.
Early the following year, 2022, my brother’s friend died from a vaccine-related injury after my brother had counselled him to suffer the social and professional consequences, and not get the vaccine. He was 26, incredibly fit and healthy.
The story was suppressed in the media.
Beyond the grotesque anecdote of Jacinda Ardern, though, is some solid research that explodes the myth of ‘liberal empathy’.
The finding is well documented, but a study in 2023 replicated it:
In four studies, US and UK participants (total N = 4,737) read hypothetical scenarios and extended less empathy to suffering political opponents than allies or neutral targets. These effects were strongly shown by liberals but were weaker among conservatives, such that conservatives consistently showed more empathy to liberals than liberals showed to conservatives.
There are many reasons why this might be the case, here’s a list:
Many conservatives are ‘matured liberals’ and thus know what it was like to be one;
Conservatives are more likely to be Christian and thus view all people, even their direct political enemies, as children of God;
Conservatives are less ideologically homogenous, and contain far more disagreement between sub-groups, and may be ‘more trained’ in offering empathy to dissidents;
Conservatives are happier on average, and thus are more likely to engage altruistic emotions like empathy and compassion.
Another explanation is that we are confused by a basic category error. Even ‘liberal’ is a myth of course: what these people actually are is left-wing authoritarians. When you clear your head the modern mistake of calling left-wing authoritarians ‘liberal’, their apparently contradictory behaviour becomes perfectly explicable.
Especially their vicious intolerance of disagreements. Remember: left-wing authoritarian Joseph Stalin ordered the brutal murder of fellow left-wing authoritarian Leon Trotsky, simply because the latter disagreed with him on finer points of left-wing ideology.
The researchers of the original paper found that:
This asymmetry was partly explained by liberals’ harsher moral judgments of outgroup members (Studies 1–4) and the fact that liberals saw conservatives as more harmful than conservatives saw liberals (Studies 3 and 4).
Essentially, liberals believe they are morally superior, and that conservatives are dangerous […]
The authors speculate that Left-Wing Authoritarians perceive powerful men as antithetical to how they believe wider society should be organised. Such men are more likely to value competitive hierarchies (perhaps in part because they are more likely to rise in them). Left-Wing Authoritarians and modern liberals in general, on the other hand, prefer what I call ‘Participatory Systems’ or ‘Anti-Hierarchies’ – social structures that select against competition … that are ‘kind’.
With often horrific consequences.
Arguably the lie where the consequences were the most horrific, was the one told in the United Kingdom for over 20 years. After limitless immigration from third-world countries, in particular Africa and the Middle-East, groups of radical Islamic men began grooming and raping young girls. In concerted collusion on a damning level, this reality was hidden from the common man and woman. Those who attempted to expose this tragedy with nuance, noting that the vast majority of immigrants do not behave like this, were scolded as far-right racists – of course, they were not ‘being kind’ to Islamists.
But, hey, at least nobody called the coverers-up ‘racist’. Because that wouldn’t be ‘kind’ at all.
