I think something that's not talked about enough probably because it's very obvious and yet maybe we all forget this is that it feels really bad when someone is rude to you—even when you know that person is wrong or overreacting. We talk a lot these days about the value of the honest real kind versus the fake shallow nice but I think there is a value to nice.
There is a value in pausing and thinking about what you're about to say and if the way you're saying it is unnecessarily hostile or aggressive. Not because you're a bad person for feeling that way or being transparent about how you feel. But because it's nice when people make that slight effort to be nice to each other. It feels bad when someone is unnecessarily rude or mean to you, and it's nice when people choose to keep some of that to themselves and instead phrase things a little more diplomatically or neutrally.
Obviously, as an Autistic person, I am not setting a high bar here for people to do lots of dancing around things and indirectness and mind-reading nonsense. But there's just such a big difference between the neutral-nice "Man, I'm disappointed that this library doesn't have Goncharov on Blu-Ray. Can you order that for me?" versus the rude "this piece of shit library doesn't even have Goncharov on Blu-Ray. Order it." It's communicating the same thing but honestly the tone is just such a big difference! Neither of these is "kind" they're both complaints followed by directives, but one of them just feels a lot better to be on the receiving end of!
A nice thing about being a librarian whose supervisor is a former bartender is we just treat the library like a bar. If someone is being hostile or rude to us, we just kick them out. We talk back and tell them "don't talk to me like that or I'm not ordering Goncharov on Blu-Ray." It's a free service, we don't need any individual person to borrow any individual item. But like, most other people don't have that option. Most workers don't get to talk back to customers or bosses or clients. Also, even outside of a work situation, it just sucks when someone in public is rude to you in an unnecessary way. Like, I had someone sarcastically call me "little miss sunshine" for having a flat affect and neutral face. It's just rude and mean. Leave me alone. What's your problem. Sheesh, y'know?
Anyway, not expecting everyone to have the best social skills or anything, and I really do value candor and honesty and such. I just think sometimes it's worth it to avoid cuss words in some contexts.
as someone who has spent a bunch of time explicitly teaching myself how to frame the stuff I say in a nice way in the way that Shel is talking about and: it gets results. Not necessarily in terms of "people doing what you want" (although sometimes that too), but mostly just in terms of people being happier when they interact with you and being nice back to you. It feels good!
Marsha Linehan has this story she tells about the girl who grows up in a burning building. She notices smoke and when she tells an adult everyone tells her it's nothing and ignore her. Then she sees the grease fire and she tells and adult and they tell her there's no fire. Then the fire spreads to the counters and she tells and adult and they ignore her. Then the fire spreads to the entire kitchen and she tells an adult and they tell her to shut up. Then the fire spreads to the entire house and she tells an adult "Now the whole house is on fire!!!" And the adult says "HOLY CRAP!!! What didn't you say anything sooner?!" and they call the fire department and the fire gets put out.
Well the girl grows up and she unconsciously learns that if she needs something the only way to get it is to escalate it to the level of a house fire right away. If needs to be as big and loud as possible or she'll be ignored. So from then on no matter how small the need she treats it like a house fire, emotionally experiences it as a house fire, and learns to default to expressing everything with the severity of a house fire. She doesn't even realize she's doing it.
Of course this isn't actually an effective way to get her needs met because then nobody can distinguish when she's annoyed over a minor nuisance from when her house has caught fire so they just learn to ignore her even when she says her house is on fire. They just find her bothersome and overly dramatic. But, to her, this is the same as when she grew up in the burning building. The takeaway isn't that she's being overly aggressive and dramatic about everything but that she needs to escalate even further. This is a common manifestation of complex trauma/BPD.
I think that the world we live in often feels like that burning building. Everything is on fire and our needs are not being met and even when we are grown adults we aren't really used to having much agency over any of the spaces most important to our lives. There's no point in making a polite suggestion to a corporation that doesn't care about you. You learn that the only effective method is to be loud and aggressive and demonstrate how severe the issue is in order to get attention.
And in this world, that is a necessary strategy very frequently. Municipal workers have to organize strikes just to get adequate PPE. It's awful. Even if we don't all have C-PTSD/BPD we are all living in the burning building and struggling to get people in power to listen to us and meet our needs.
But I feel like, just like the girl who grew up in a burning building, a lot of people have forgotten that not everything is a house fire. People will complain to me about really minor things at work as though if they don't use enough cuss words and extreme language I won't take them seriously that they're upset that we closed 15 minutes early to clean the carpets and didn't adequately publicize the hours modification.
Or someone in a discord server of 35–65 people will make demands of the mod team as if they're trying to convince a major corporation that if they don't change something minor about the server there will be a big media scandal and their stocks will tank.
"It fucking infuriates me that we don't have a separate channel for video games. It makes me not want to use the server it makes me so angry because it fucking sucks so much."
Like why are you making threats to take your business elsewhere during the first sentence you're even mentioning the problem? I encounter this a lot. It's like they don't know how else to express their wants or needs. They just know to emphasize how strong and extreme and important their need is using harsh and rude language to get what they want.
But, tbh? It's not effective. It makes it hard to tell what's actually important, makes people feel bad, and they just tune you out.
It's not morally wrong and like, as I said, people have learned to talk like this because in the world we live in it is frequently necessary to do so to get needs met. Being polite to the rich and powerful doesn't win union contracts.
But not everyone you talk to is the rich and powerful. It's worth it to instead be nice and amicable to people in your own community if you don't have a reason not to be in a particular case. It's not mandatory. It's just a nice thing to do.
