Kindness

NY Times: Kindness Is a Skill - Practical tips for fighting a culture of savagery. By David Brooks

Tough conversations are usually about tribal identity. Most disagreements are not about the subject purportedly at hand. They are over issues that make people feel their sense of self is disrespected and under threat. So when you’re debating some random topic, you are mostly either inflaming or pacifying the other person’s feeling of tribal identity.