The tyranny of niceness

“Be nice,” we sometimes hear parents say, when they berate their children for being too critical, too vocal about an issue.

But what exactly does “nice” mean, especially when we have the adage “Nice guys finish last”?

The saying is attributed to baseball Hall-of-Famer Leo Durocher. Durocher was once interviewed, pre-game, and asked for his opinion on the opposing team, some of whom were Durocher’s friends. “All nice guys,” he said, “They’ll finish last.”

Notice the nuance here. Durocher, in looking at the other team, saw the people he hung out with; but once the game began, there would be no laughter or teasing, only a serious game to win. The focus was on nice guys, i.e., friends, not guys who were “nice.”

Somewhere along the way, the saying focused on “nice” as the synonym of “good,” or even “kind”—a confusion that birthed essays, self-help books, and TEDTalks, all claiming that nice people can finish first.

But what exactly is “nice”? Svetlana Whitener, writing for Forbes, sees niceness as a mere politeness, to act the way one is expected; and, in extreme cases, to use this to get what one wants. Niceness, then, has the potential for manipulativeness, even selfishness; kindness, on the other hand, is based on genuine care for someone else’s welfare, and then acting on it, even if the action is not viewed as polite or tactful.

Gregory Ciotti, on Help Scout, agrees and adds that true respect means being honest enough to speak up when another person’s work isn’t up to standards. To be silent (i.e., nice and polite) when things are obviously wrong is to also be uncaring. John Gorman takes a more melodic route on Medium: in a series of statements, he demonstrates how being nice is the shallow version of being good. Niceness seeks to fulfill oneself; goodness seeks to help another. “Nice is wanting to be loved. Good is loving,” Gorman writes.

It’s easy to tell the kids to be nice: it means to be polite, put on a tactful front, let injustices slide. It’s expected in a culture where critique is believed to be a stab to the heart, where a critique of government is automatically red-labeled as rebellion. Because those who criticize aren’t nice, and not being nice has its consequences.

Niceness is expected in a place where no one is allowed to speak up against their own relatives, even if a parent is beating their children, refuses to find a job to support their family, demands respect without first earning it. Because those who speak up against family aren’t nice, and not being nice means being cast out of the home.

Niceness is expected in a country where a president was once allowed to speak in the vilest, filthiest language, but everyone else had to be silent. Niceness is expected in a country where elected public officials still owe millions upon millions of pesos in taxes, spend hundreds of millions in mere days with no accountability, and/or use helicopters or stop traffic on major highways just so they can get to wherever they want to go—but everyone else has to pay taxes from their meager salaries, present receipts for even the smallest centavo when their auditors come knocking, and sit in traffic for hours without raising hell.

Because those who complain aren’t nice.

Maybe the best definition of “nice” comes from Naomi Shulman, in a 2016 opinion piece for Boston’s WBUR. Shulman castigated those who were silent during the United States 2016 elections, who didn’t want to discuss politics because they were too afraid to lose friends.

She told her mother’s story, of being raised in Munich on the eve of the World War II, and being surrounded by “nice people who refused to make waves.” These nice people busied themselves by being happy, looked the other way as their neighbors were taken to camps, said nothing when carnage, injustice, and murder were happening all around them.

“Nice people made the best Nazis.”

Today, “nice” people make the best campaigners: they won’t disturb the status quo because they’ve been taught, all their lives, that critics, dissenters, and complainers are not “nice.” They make the best excuses for bad governance, for history repeating itself, for the corrupt to stay in power because they always “move on” and are therefore “nice.” They make the best support for any kind of genocide: they’re quiet, won’t speak up when they see something wrong, won’t protest when half a world away, children are being slaughtered by snipers and bombs.

But because they allow evil to flourish, they’re not “good.” They will never be Alexei Navalny, Edgar Jopson, or Liliosa Hilao. They will never be remembered.

But Navalny, Jopson, and Hilao, and many others like them were killed for their goodness, right?

Well, under bad governments, there are fates far worse than death. The nice stay alive, and get left behind to deal with the consequences of their inaction; until, in their suffering, they remember and envy the dead.

Looks like the saying might be true. If we’re going to be strict about it: Yes, “nice” people do finish last.

iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu