Babel 2.0: The tyranny of kindness.

One of the premises of Post-Truth is that everyone has a right to their own perspective and that every perspective carries equal weight by virtue of being expressed. All perspectives are acceptable because no one can hold more truth than everyone else – there isn’t any left to hold.  Transported into the metaphor of Babel, this implies that every culture building a tower thinks its foundations are sound and right.

However, even towers that are content with their foundations need to communicate with those around them, and because singular Babel has never spoken the same language and a common dialect is unlikely to emerge among myriads of structures, “Kindness” has emerged as a mediator of meaning and judge of peace.

This isn’t kindness as the individual value that encourages us to treat one another with consideration. Instead, it’s the elevation of “Kindness” to a framework that governs morality and how different towers should interpret it whenever the question of right or wrong is raised.

Speaking from within one’s worldview it’s impossible to be wrong especially when your thoughts play back in affirmation. We’re all prone to use our thinking to self-soothe, however the challenge emerges when different worldviews are meant to interpret the same issue as “Kind”. What a worldview may see as “Kind” another may label as the opposite.

In this case, enforcing one worldview’s interpretation of “Kindness” turns the framework into a form of tyranny towards those who simply don’t interpret the issue in the same way. This gives birth to “cancel culture”, where disagreement is equated to moral failure, and moral failure leads to public punishment. War ensues among the standing towers.

“Kindness” becomes a religion approaching fanaticism and demanding retribution. Gaining retribution from a worldview that doesn’t read values in the same way as one’s own becomes cathartic, a supreme form of self-righteousness. However, this self-righteousness should reach its limit when the price extracted is freedom of thought or speech.

What dismantles this bastion is increased awareness of the coercive nature of “Kindness” and the realisation that “Kindness” alone cannot interpret morality and hold societies together. At first, it’s virtuous to see the ideology of “Kindness” as capable of holding social constructs, towers – if you’d like, together. However, social constructs are heavy to carry, and they need foundations that are stronger to withstand what comes their way.

Herein lies the paradox of building in Post-Truth.

Multiple worldviews attempting multiple towers, holding differing values, hoping to dialogue and mediate conflict through thin scaffolding. The clamour will be never-ending; the culture wars and retributions will be incessant until they decimate the foundations we’re aiming to build.

Decay will only be prevented by agreeing on or by recalling a series of mutually held values, stronger than kindness, from which we may collectively build. Solid foundations need morality, structure, and Truth. Truth, by definition, is exclusive, as well as being exclusive of what is false.