niceness is golden, or why poseurs are shit
- Thread starter zhao
- Start date
dilbert1
Well-known member
I have a couple friends who recently were going on about how little the fact that someone’s nice tells you about the person, and how little it means. Even that they can’t stand “nice people.” To be pleasant in all matters is at best boring, and at worst highly suspicious, but maybe I’m more sensitive, because the magnificent effect of another person being genuinely friendly, smiling at you, inviting you to be fully alive with them, whether it comes from personal fondness or merely a general feeling of good will toward one’s fellow man, has never worn off. Sure, taken in pure isolation, it pales in comparison to the rich spectrum of human dispositions, trying as it does to quarantine interaction from concrete reality and all its negativity. But I tend to find it makes the difference more often than not, especially when it comes from a real place, which we should always hold out the possibility for. It’s tempting, but the attitude “nice = fake” is too lazy and cynical. Even the superficial, false, compulsory, normative niceness can sometimes be better than no niceness at all. Sometimes I’d rather be manipulated into feeling good.
dilbert1
Well-known member
“In earlier periods of history, sociable man did not have to be wrested from so many objective claims. His form, therefore, emerged more fully and distinctly in contrast with his personal existence: behavior at a social gathering was much stiffer, more ceremonial, and more severely regulated super-individually than it is today. This reduction of the personal character which homogeneous interaction with others imposes on the individual may even make him lean over backward, if we may say so: a characteristically sociable behavior trait is the courtesy with which the strong and extraordinary individual not only makes himself the equal of the weaker, but even acts as if the weaker were the more valuable and superior.
If sociation itself is interaction, its purest and most stylized expression occurs among equals — as symmetry and balance are the most plausible forms of artistic stylization. Inasmuch as it is abstracted from sociation through art or play [including via the tact and discretion exercised in joking, flirting, and polite conversation], sociability thus calls for the purest, most transparent, and most casually appealing kind of interaction, that among equals. Because of its very nature, it must create human beings who give up so much of their objective contents and who so modify their external and internal significance as to become sociable equals… Sociability is the game in which one does “as if" all were equal, and at the same time, as if one honored each of them in particular. And to do “as if" is no more a lie than play or art are lies because of their deviation from reality. The game becomes a lie only when sociable action and speech are made into mere instruments of the intentions and events of practical reality — just as a painting becomes a lie when it tries, in a panoramic effect, to simulate reality. What is perfectly correct and in order if practiced within the autonomous life of sociability with its self-contained play of forms, becomes a deceptive lie when it is guided by non-sociable purposes or is designed to disguise such purposes. The actual entanglement of sociability with the events of real life surely makes such a deception often very tempting.”
- Georg Simmel
If sociation itself is interaction, its purest and most stylized expression occurs among equals — as symmetry and balance are the most plausible forms of artistic stylization. Inasmuch as it is abstracted from sociation through art or play [including via the tact and discretion exercised in joking, flirting, and polite conversation], sociability thus calls for the purest, most transparent, and most casually appealing kind of interaction, that among equals. Because of its very nature, it must create human beings who give up so much of their objective contents and who so modify their external and internal significance as to become sociable equals… Sociability is the game in which one does “as if" all were equal, and at the same time, as if one honored each of them in particular. And to do “as if" is no more a lie than play or art are lies because of their deviation from reality. The game becomes a lie only when sociable action and speech are made into mere instruments of the intentions and events of practical reality — just as a painting becomes a lie when it tries, in a panoramic effect, to simulate reality. What is perfectly correct and in order if practiced within the autonomous life of sociability with its self-contained play of forms, becomes a deceptive lie when it is guided by non-sociable purposes or is designed to disguise such purposes. The actual entanglement of sociability with the events of real life surely makes such a deception often very tempting.”
- Georg Simmel
Also, you can be fake nasty or miserable. People trying to hide a smile, remain stoic and not be seen having a good time.
dilbert1
Well-known member
Its an interesting idea, the coolness or rudeness masking a real contentment and affirmation of life. I don’t think about that as often
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
Take some oestrogen.
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
Or if they're Parisian