State emphasis on niceness reaps nastiness
The Tyranny of Nice in the UK.
Renowned political philosopher Kenneth Minogue remarks on a paradox at the heart of contemporary British society. For many years, government policies and public institutions have been based on compassion, empathy, and concern; yet, increasingly, the result is a society manifesting the opposite qualities—indifference, lawlessness, and violence.
Young offenders are given counselling rather than punishment. Our troops are sent overseas, not to fight, but to ‘win hearts and minds’.
In large swathes of the public sector, the fashionable concept of ‘emotional intelligence’ has replaced efficiency as the central goal of the workforce.
Yet in the face of this sweeping tide of officially sanctioned benevolence, Britain is increasingly violent and degraded.
‘The gentleness of English civilisation is its most marked characteristic,’ George Orwell once wrote. How hollow those words sound today, as the shadows of aggression and disorder loom over our society. Almost any British town centre on a Friday or Saturday night is a maelstrom of drunken fury.
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The state’s focus on compassion, it would appear, is being met by mounting viciousness. Officialdom’s supposed kindness is matched by deepening social nastiness.But this is not a contradiction. It is precisely the Government’s imposition of the creed of politicised sympathy, what might be called ‘the tyranny of niceness’, which has created the culture of disorder in our midst.
Prof Minogue believes that official niceness is seen as weakness and apathy. The state effectively does not care how citizens behave. There is no penalty for evil or malicious behaviour and no incentive for civic virtue. Indeed, attempts to promote the common good or social order are seen as judgmental, oppressive, and contrary to human rights. Thus has social cohesion been undermined in Great Britain.
I had a disturbing thought while reading this. The anarchy describes lays the groundwork for the reverse swing of the pendulum. People will seek clear punishments for crime and welcome a brutally oppressive Shariah law.
True. Many extremist Muslims in the UK point to moral debauchery as justification for their pro-Shariah, anti-Britain beliefs.
[...] BRITISH State emphasis on niceness reaps nastiness …. [...]