Random acts of kindness are an essential part of building a better world

Decades ago, I was sitting at a busy intersection in Manchester in the UK. It was a grey and miserable day as only that north-of-England capital can be. I was at a low ebb, a crossroads in my life. If I was to be honest, I had lost my way a bit. 

As I watched the traffic entering and leaving the massive roundabout, I spotted an old woman trying to cross the road, against the stream of oncoming traffic.  

Suddenly a man appeared from nowhere and helped her across the busy road. 

It was a small act of random kindness, but it sparked an epiphany with me. Life is a forcefield; just as there are multiple forces pushing us towards the abyss, there are just as many forces pushing us back from the edge. 

We never see these micro-kindnesses, because it is human nature to become captivated by negativity and triggered by micro-aggressions. We never see the million little acts of random kindness holding the status quo in place.  

Suddenly I started looking for these acts and I started to see them – all the time. 

The innate humanity in all of us makes us instinctively kind, but somehow we take it for granted – and often deliberately work against it. The Arbinger Institute brought out a marvellous book titled Leadership and the Art of Self-Deception, essentially discussing how self-deception clouds our vision and leads us to blame others rather than admitting our own faults and complicity in the broader problem.  

A great example of self-deception happens every day in Johannesburg when we stop at the traffic lights (if they are working). A beggar will invariably come up and beg. 

The human impulse is to give them something, to reach down into your pocket and dig out some change, but you’re also scared that you might be putting yourself at risk, or deny the impulse for other reasons. Somehow this makes us feel bad, but instead of owning up to this, suddenly we blame the beggar at the window for being there, for not having a job, for the simple act of being in your space. 

In that moment of denial, you traduce your common humanity, but instead of owning up to that, we project our bad feelings onto the beggar. We dehumanise that person and reduce them to a two-dimensional representation of a human because it’s easier than looking in the mirror. 

Prejudice, fear and denial work in other ways in corporate settings too – we see a group of people standing together speaking, who are different from us and so we objectify and categorise them by race, gender, class or creed. It might be the “boys’ club” around the watercooler, or the “girls’ club”, but all labelling does is prevent you from seeing the whole person and the individual nuances of the people all gathered there.  

When that happens, it’s a very short step into blind judgement based on your own prejudices – and unkindness. 

Volunteering is a great way of breaking stereotypes and corporate classism. It is another act of kindness, it’s also a very good way to meet others and park all your preconceptions at the door as people from different walks of life get together for a common cause – to someone else’s benefit.

It’s a wonderful way of grounding ourselves and stripping off the nonsense of the trappings of authority and office that can often lead to the very self-deception that the Arbinger Institute speaks about. 

Kindness is transformative. There are countless studies that show that the act of kindness releases dopamine in us, that literally makes us feel good about being kind, but we must beware of kindness predicated on guilt or, even worse, performative kindness.

We often see this on social media, the humble bragging that is nothing more than an act of vanity or an act of so-called “little empathy” that skewers the “big empathy” that we so desperately need if we are to truly address the world’s ills, from climate change to State Capture.  

It is wonderful to be kind and to forgive, because forgiveness can be a fundamental pillar of that, but we must always be aware of the dangers of expressing a kindness to an individual that lessens or even endangers the value of our kindness to a bigger group.

“Little empathy” is a single act of kindness that can neither be repeated nor sustained at a mass level. Cutting someone slack in the workplace always has to be fair, justified and replicable and not damage others, otherwise it’s not kind at all – it’s discriminatory and potentially far worse. 

Sometimes, as the adage reminds us, we have to be tough, “cruel”, to be kind because the ultimate objective is far more important than the immediate need. Declining someone’s request can often turn out to be far more beneficial in the long run than acquiescing just because we want to be seen to be kind. 

Kindness is ordinary and normal, but we’ve lost that. Instead, an act of kindness now seems abnormal and exceptional. Viktor Frankl’s seminal treatise, Man’s Search for Meaning, drawn from his experience of surviving the horrors of the Holocaust, was a key text for many of us in the darkest days of the recent pandemic. We can apply his lessons to kindness too. 

Often it seems as if life is changing so fast, there is so much disruption, uncertainty, volatility and, yes, chaos and ambiguity too. So it is understandable if we retreat within ourselves and throw up walls to protect ourselves. We tell ourselves we are doing it to protect ourselves, to be kind to ourselves, but the opposite is true. 

Kindness is a fundamental sense of humanity that is deeply wired into us. It is in us not to betray that. As Frankl reminds us, if life is worth living, it’s worth being kind. We tend to be tough on the concept of kindness because we see it as soft and weak, and it’s often self-congratulatory, but real kindness can be exceptionally hard, especially if you are giving something of real value to yourself to another person who needs it more.

We need more kindness, not less. We must rebalance the force field, stop what we are doing and get the oldies across the road so that we can start building a better world for all of us, but especially those who come after us. DM 

Henley Business School Africa is developing a Kindness Lab led and conceived by adjunct faculty John Vlismas and community leader Rabbi David Masinter. See www.henleysa.ac.za