The be nice police

Where I'm from, there's a sneaky form of thought policing called "be nice".  It starts with making a handful of words off limit: sh**, f***, b**** etc. Taken to its next level, it puts words like stupid, annoying, and nonsense out of commission. Next, sarcasm, humor, and other forms of non-direct expression are barred. In its final form, "be nice" means only talking about a small set of acceptable topics in a rather formulaic way.

Sup. Weather's nice out today, isn't it?

Yup.

How can such a state of affairs come to be? And more importantly, what can we do to keep life lively? In this essay, we will take a dive into the minds of the be nice police and see how freedom-loving people can respond to their control tactics.

How to control agreeable people

Psychology has given us some useful terms for talking about personalities, tendencies, and behaviors in people without moral judgment. One of my favorites to discuss is is agreeableness, which describes generally optimistic people who get along well with others. Agreeable people are often perceived as kind, warm, sympathetic and cooperative.

Let's now put on our evil manipulator hats and think about how we can turn agreeable people into our slaves.

BE NICE.

The first thing we need to do is to use agreeable people's agreeableness against them. Agreeable people, we expect, have their own values and preferences. We need a way to make sure we can express our desires but they can't express theirs.

We can appeal to their preferences for social harmony and suggest that certain speech is off limits. How's this?

There are offensive words out there. Words that must not be spoken. So, do not speak them. Feelings are like glass windows. Your tongue is a baseball bat. Speak with care.

Better yet, let's condense it into a nice proverb.

If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all.

With these defenses in place, we can call anything we don't like not nice or inappropriate. 

Resistance!

Oh no! After a couple weeks of making some agreeable sheeple buy our artworks (or compliment our speeches/rants, or include us in their groups) through nagging, guilt tripping, and legislation, some agreeable people have approached us and criticized our behavior in polite terms (no bad words).

We can't exactly say that they used offensive words or that they didn't say nice things... In fact, they softened everything they said with "I think..." and "I feel...".

Really, in a word for word transcription... they would appear to being quite nice. But... we don't like what they're saying... What should we do? 

IT'S NOT WHAT YOU SAID, IT'S HOW YOU SAID IT.

Aha! As if that were a problem. Just say, "it's not what you said, it's how you said it". Tell them that the way they are talking is hostile or aggressive.

Be ready to play the victim and say how you feel scared or threatened by them if they don't like this.

You can even give a little ground, admit a small this or that, and then say "you're being hypercritical" or "why do you have to be so disagreeable?".

The point is that they are the ones being difficult. If you can convince them of this for even a moment, their agreeable nature will put them back into line.

No more Mr. Nice Guy >:(

Okay, evil hats off.

From this little exercise, we can see how bullies (actually not nice people) can push around agreeable people using their agreeableness.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to deprive agreeable people of the ability to express themselves when they do disagree. By making "mean words" taboo, we take away some very useful words for describing bad behavior. 

"Being nice" can amount to "being exploited for being agreeable". That is not behavior we should encourage in people we care about.

Yet, all too often, the more agreeable, more cooperative people answer to the demands of outspoken minorities who show no commitment to reciprocation, mutual trust, and other rewards typically expected of good relationships.

A remedy called voluntarism

The be nice police are often in power because we feel obligated to be inclusive. Specifically, inclusiveness here means allowing double-standards to exist without explicit consent in some relationship. We feel we have to interact with each other and behave on the be nice police's terms.

For example, if two people are beginning to speak to one another, and person A does not like to hear the word shit while person B commands this word freely in her linguistic repertoire, there is no agreement made up front about whether or not it is okay to say shit. 

Now, person A may decide that he will not speak to anybody that uses the word shit; this is all fine. Does person B likewise have this option?

Oftentimes, it seems that the answer to this question is no. Particularly in the contexts of families, education, and other spheres where coercion is widespread, the freedom-loving person is put at a disadvantage. Others can control what she says using threats of throwing fits, but she cannot do anything to claim her freedom without sinking to similar levels. 

That is, as long as we force people to interact with each other. 

We must embrace voluntarism, the principle of relying on willful (voluntary) action, to combat the "be nice" police. Voluntarism means people can do whatever they want, as long as they do not initiate force against others (i.e. the Non-aggression principle). Voluntarism permits saying "NO" to interactions with unpleasant people.

For the freedom-lover, voluntarism means choosing to not associate (i.e. ostracize) those who will not play nicely. This of course is a choice, so the freedom-lover will freely choose to interact with difficult people sometimes (i.e. dealing with a difficult customer). The be nice police are people too, so they enjoy these same freedoms.

What freedom-loving, but also agreeable people need to do is this: exercise your freedom to put yourself around people you are happy to be agreeable with. Agreeableness is easily exploited, and controlling, manipulative people would love to use your presence to make their ranks look bigger and better.  Recognize that your agreeableness is something that you can freely rescind from people who will not reciprocate with appropriate standards of behavior towards you.

Now, you are ready. The be nice police will try suggesting to you that voluntarism and the willingness to ostracize people that won't play nice is somehow the same thing as violence or being a racist. You don't have to have that conversation with them.