A new billboard appeared recently next to the grocery store where I do most of my shopping.

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I don’t mean the “now leasing” sign, but the one next to it. The one with the country singer on it.

Back when I was in middle school in Venango, Nebraska, I didn’t know a thing about Dolly Parton except that she apparently had large breasts. I might have vaguely known that she was in a band or something, maybe, but I couldn’t put a face to the name. I knew she had big boobs because all the other kids told me she had big boobs, and if all the other kids are saying something, like they put spider eggs in bubble gum or whatever, you know it’s probably true.

We would get together at recess and tell Dolly Parton jokes, all of them dirty (at least by the standards of a fifth-grader; ah, how little I knew!) and all of them about her breasts.

As I moved into adulthood, I learned that yes, she was a singer, she sung country and western songs, and she had that one hit because of that one movie everyone liked but I didn’t see. I don’t listen to country and western music, so that was about the sum total of my knowledge of all things Dolly Parton.

Nowadays, as I learn more about her, she strikes me as a genuinely marvelous person: kind, generous, giving, and genuinely invested in leaving the world a better place than she found it.

I still don’t listen to country music, but by all accounts she seems quite extraordinary. She is that rarest of things in creation: a genuinely compassionate person.

That’s something the world needs in greater quantities.

As I get older, I become more and more aware of the value of kindness. The truth is, callousness is easy. Indifference is easy. Cruelty is easy. The world is filled with people who see kindness as weakness, but in truth, kindness costs more than insensitivity. To be kind is to see the world from someone else’s point of view, and the ego rebels against that. It reminds us we are not the sun-center of all creation.

Empathy: Humanity’s Secret Weapon

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Pop quiz time. How did human beings—soft, weak, squishy bipeds with no claws, no massive canines, and thin skin—become the dominant mammals on the planet? Survival of the fittest says we should’ve been wiped out by fiercer, stronger, creatures, right?

No.

Our special sauce, beyond our big brains and abstract reasoning, is our cooperation. We work together. We help each other. We tend to our sick and injured. Where one of us goes, the rest follow.

We have each other’s backs.

That makes us unstoppable. There are many creatures larger, stronger, faster, and fiercer than we are, creatures that can take us one on one in a fight, but the thing about humans is it’s never one on one.

You kill one of us, the rest of us will come for you. We are an unstoppable force of nature.

Losers and idiots think that kindness is a weakness because they see the world in terms of the Rugged Individual™, the lone warrior standing strong against a world red in tooth and claw. They don’t see the army that stands behind that Rugged Individual, making his tools and his clothing and his weapons, nor the entire history behind him that brought him to this place. The Rugged Individual stands on the shoulders of others and says “look how I rose to this lofty height all by myself!”

Today, we live in a world increasingly dominated by loudmouth bullies, people for whom the world is always zero sum, people who believe that every interaction has a winner and a loser.

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This attitude appeals to the sort of person who thinks of himself as an Alpha Male™, taking charge through force and strength to leave his mark upon the world, but it’s comedically inept.

And the math is behind it. Entire branches of game theory show that cooperation always wins out in the long run, always…not that the sort of person who sees the world as force against force in a battle royale to the death actually understands the math.

In the end, it comes down to a simple but surprisingly subtle idea: Other people are real. In a world where we act with reciprocal kindness, everyone benefits. We are a social species; we do more acting together than acting alone.

I will admit this has not always been obvious even to me. The Internet makes it easy to forget that other people are real—that the letters we see on the screen come from a real person. I had an experience about ten or so years ago when I met in realspace some people I’d been needlessly abrasive to online, and it occurred to me, holy shit, these folks are actual human beings! Since then, I’ve tried—not always with perfect success—to be more mindful in my online communication.

Bullying is easy. Especially when it’s anonymous, and most especially when it curries favor in our social in-groups. We live in a world where kindness and compassion are increasingly seen as weakness. Let us not forget that it is cooperation that carried us here.

Be kind.