When someone tells you they are a kind person, start the stopwatch for when they say something mean. Sometimes it literally is stopwatch material.
And you know something else as well. You know that they have no insight into themselves, no power of self-observation, so explaining things to them is going to be fraught with misunderstandings.
I haven't heard that much that I can recall. I _have_ heard people insist on how frank or honest they are, which seems to translate to "I do not tolerate contradiction."
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ReplyDelete“The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.” -- C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
ReplyDeleteWowsa. I had read that but forgotten it. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI had a similar one with a co-worker, who early on after starting to work with us, repeatedly claimed to be "very empathic". If he hadn't said that, I probably wouldn't have noticed his below average ability to read the room and recognize that people had checked out of listening to his discourse on topics near and dear to him.
ReplyDeleteI don't remember anyone telling me they are a kind person, but it seems similar to people claiming to be funny. They want to be, they wish they were, and they want some kind of recognition for it, but they're usually trying way too hard.
These two may run a slightly deeper pathology than mere cluelessness. Both have shown incidents of meanness, but are extra-special double good to people who do what they want.
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