Politeness

 My partner, Rick, was complaining about his sore knees—they’d been bothering him the entire previous shift. After we returned to Winnipeg, he went to the doctor, who put him on sick leave, which meant I’d get a new partner. And so it happened. My new partner was from India, named Arvin. He’d been working in security in Canada for nine years, but with a different company. When his company’s contract for that site ended, the staff was let go, and he had to find a new job. We first met at my company’s office to discuss our trip with the management. Arvin was a dark-skinned man in his middle years, of average build, about a meter seventy tall. There wasn’t anything particularly striking about him—I think in India, he’d blend right into a crowd. The only thing that stood out a bit was his very bulging eyes. In the office, he was very friendly. We exchanged contact info, discussed the trip details, and went our separate ways.

When we finally started working together, I noticed he tried to be polite even when it wasn’t necessary. With the mall staff, he acted as if he’d known them forever and understood them well, but it came off as overly rehearsed. You could tell he wasn’t comfortable in those conversations, so in those moments, I just watched him like I was binging a show with a bad actor. There was also this one time when we were standing in the middle of the mall, about two meters apart, just observing passersby. At some point, a man in his thirties with a swollen face and a bruise under his eye approached us. I could tell almost immediately that he just wanted to chat, so I stopped paying attention to him. Seeing this, he went up to Arvin and started telling him something. I glanced at them now and then, and it was clear Arvin didn’t want to talk to the guy but was still trying to be polite, even forcing a smile occasionally. The man, thinking he was sharing something fascinating, got so confident that he called out to me, gesturing for me to come over and repeating it a few times. I stared at him for a few seconds, realized I didn’t want to join the conversation, firmly said “no,” and turned away. I heard him calm down a bit, but he kept pestering Arvin. When they finally said goodbye, I asked Arvin why he talked to the guy even though he didn’t want to. He said he didn’t want to create a conflict.
What I’m getting at is that politeness, in every sense, is incredibly harmful to everyone. I looked up the meaning of “politeness” online, and all the definitions essentially boiled down to one thing: being polite means trying not to offend someone. That struck me as odd. You’re not polite when you say “thank you” because you feel gratitude, but when you say it because the other person expects it. That’s the whole essence of modern politeness. Modern politeness binds us with fear—we’re afraid of offending someone, forgetting that we can’t actually do that. When someone gets offended, they do so because of their own issues. That’s why some people get upset even if the person who said something “offensive” had no intention of hurting them. Offense is a feeling, and all it does is highlight our problem areas. Right now, I don’t even know what could offend me, and if someone manages to make me feel offended, I’d be glad because I’d know exactly what I need to work on.

Modern politeness only breeds fear. Arvin was afraid of being treated poorly or sparking a conflict, so he talked to that guy, even though I was a clear example that showing the man I wasn’t interested didn’t lead to anything bad. People choose their words carefully in conversations because they’re afraid of offending someone. Modern politeness only creates fear, and nothing good comes from fear. From childhood, we’re taught—and sometimes forced—to be polite, but instead of explaining the point, we’re just told that’s how it’s supposed to be. How many other things are we taught as kids without their meaning being explained? Parents, caregivers, teachers, and close people are authority figures for a child. When they tell a child something, the child believes it, trusts it completely, and rarely asks why. The responsibility of those who teach lies not only in showing how to do things but also in explaining why they need to be done. This applies to every sphere of influence.
I had a classmate who was very well-mannered; he knew how to behave properly—his mom made sure of that—but he didn’t know why he needed to. As a result, after just six months of living in the dorm, he was swearing like a sailor, smoking like a chimney, and proudly competing to see who could drink more. When I worked at a retail chain selling phones and accessories, I had a trainee. He was a young guy who’d just left his parents’ nest. His parents were religious, and they raised him very devoutly—they didn’t even have a TV. He was a good, proper boy with no bad habits, and he spoke very politely. A few months after his training, I ran into him at one of the stores, and we went to grab coffee and chat during a break. I noticed he had a tattoo, and his speech was much bolder than before. He pulled out a cigarette with his coffee and told me about how he’d been partying drunk at some club the previous weekend. What I’m saying is, it’s not enough to just tell a child how to act properly—you always need to fully convey why it’s the right way to act. By “fully,” I mean not forcing them to accept the information but helping them understand it through their own experience; otherwise, it’s pointless.

When I was little, my family always celebrated holidays with relatives. Sometimes people came to us, sometimes we went somewhere. I liked going to my mom’s mom’s place for holidays because a lot of her relatives gathered there, and it was always a big crowd. But I was always more drawn to my dad’s side of the family. There were fewer of them, but they were closer and more attentive to each other and to me. We had a tradition of giving gifts or money to kids we hadn’t seen in a while. So when my mom’s relatives gathered at Grandma’s, it was not only fun but also profitable, since no one bothered with gifts and just handed out cash. They didn’t pay much attention to me, and there were hardly any kids my age, so I’d collect money from relatives, stuff myself with treats from the table, and go play with the neighborhood kids. It became such a habit that one time, when we’d just arrived, I didn’t wait for them to come to me—I went around to the guests myself. I approached my mom’s sister’s husband, who always gave the most. He was talking on the phone, and I just walked up, looked at him, and waited. He got the hint, pulled out his wallet without breaking his call, and handed me some cash. I said thank you and moved on. From the outside, it was terribly rude, and I felt ashamed of how I acted for a long time. That day, my mom came up to me and said I couldn’t do that. But now I see that situation differently. For years, they conditioned me to this, and besides money, I got nothing from them, so I only approached them to get something—no other expectations. But when I got used to their system and decided to save time by not waiting for them to come to me, I was told I did something bad and should be ashamed. And I was ashamed, for years. But why? I just adapted to their system, just tried to save a little time. They taught me their rules, and I’m supposed to feel ashamed for it. Absurd.
There were also people I found interesting, and I always looked forward to being around them because they gave me their attention. Those were my mom’s brother, my dad’s brother, and my brothers. I was always thrilled to see them, and though they gave me gifts too (especially my brothers—they spoiled me), that wasn’t important because I knew I could get so much more from them: their genuine interest and undivided attention. They didn’t confuse me; they were just themselves.

How many people today do or say things not because they want to but because they were told that’s how it’s supposed to be, and they just believed it? People get tangled up in this. I remember when my friend David was driving me home from work when I was still at the window factory. Another coworker, Mark, was in the car with us—they lived in the same building near me, so sometimes I asked them for a ride. They were discussing a situation that happened to David. He said he’d recently run into an acquaintance and, like everyone does out of habit, said, “Hey! How you doing?” What happened next caught him off guard. His acquaintance greeted him back and started telling him how he was doing. This raises a logical question—why isn’t that normal? The thing is, in America, when someone greets you and asks how you’re doing, they don’t actually care what’s going on in your life—it’s just a polite way to say hi. So David was outraged, saying something was wrong with that guy because when he says, “Hey! How you doing?” all he wants to hear back is, “Hey! Good. You?” That’s it. And that’s become culture. People have stopped putting literal meaning into their words. How can we expect to understand each other if we don’t even put understanding into our own words, and thus our thoughts? If the direct meaning of our feelings, thoughts, words, and actions don’t align, it means we can’t even understand ourselves—how can we try to understand someone else?
The fact that it’s become culture only means it’s the opinion of the majority, nothing more. That’s another thing I want to clarify: the opinion of the majority. My mom is exactly the kind of person who always relies on it. That’s why it’s so hard for her to understand me, even in the simplest things. She probably thinks I love her less, though that’s not true at all, but she measures my love through the eyes of the majority, not her own. And though I understand this, I don’t stop trying to reach her.
What is “the opinion of the majority”? You could say it’s a dumb question, answered by the question itself. But what if we think a bit more? Where does the majority’s opinion come from? We don’t have a collective mind where we all think about something together and instantly decide it’s right. I believe the majority’s opinion is just one person’s opinion that their close circle accepted, then their close circle’s close circle, then it was broadcast on TV, spread through the internet, and soon it became the culture of entire nations. At its core, the majority’s opinion is just one person’s thought that, like a plague, infected the minds of most people, who were taught from childhood to trust others’ opinions over their own. There’s no such thing as the majority’s opinion—only one person’s highly contagious idea.

That’s the beauty, magic, joy, and rightness of self-discovery. The difference is that when you’re taught something, you receive information and rarely check it against yourself. But when you try to find answers to questions within yourself, you eventually find those answers and only then seek proof in the outside world to confirm you’re right. There’s a huge difference between accepting answers from someone else and finding answers in yourself, then verifying them externally.