This is a phrase I heard long ago in Sales training, and I liked it. I instinctively understood what was meant.
Today, it occurs to me that brutality is sometimes necessary for kindness to prevail even within our own psyches.
As I have said often, the “kindness” being promoted by so many–most of whom identify closely with the political Left–is really a corrosive habit of self abnegation, which leads to latent anger, hostility and resentment, which is what we see daily in the bombs lobbed continually at all dissent by the proponents of “kindness” and “tolerance”. I don’t think it is all that complicated psychologically. If you develop the habit of lying to yourself, everything is possible. All crimes are possible. All lies are possible. Nothing is outside the pale when you do not allow yourself, much less force yourself, to see clearly who you are and what you are doing.
I think ALL human possibilities, all malice and hate and anger and fear and hostility and cruelty and everything else, has positive possibility within it. Everything is seasoning, everything must be in proportion.
For example, most religious traditions teach us to hate what is bad for us. The ability to hate makes it easier to follow a benignant path.
Nothing human is intrinsically evil, and no human capacity is intrinsically good. Kindness in the wrong place, with respect to the wrong person, in the wrong way and wrong proportion, is bad. Cruelty, likewise, in the right place, to the right extent, can be a positive good.