Be Kind To Enemies

In the Bible, Jesus tells his followers to treat their enemies nicely. If they hit you on the cheek, offer them the other also. If they force you to walk a mile carrying their stuff, walk two miles with it.

I’ve always wondered where you might see something like this actually working for good in the real world. I’m not saying it always happens like this, but often it does. If you treat people nicely, even when they are mean to you, you just could have a greater positive effect than trying to pay them back for the injustice. Take a look at this excerpt from a Wired interview with Nicholas Negroponte:

Wired: What do Wired readers tell you about your column?

Negroponte: I get up to 30 messages a day from readers, and they tend to be binary. They are either very fiattering or very nasty. If anyone had an ego deficit, the fiattering ones would make it disappear. People tell me they’ve changed jobs or redirected their lives because of things I wrote. But while the good ones are very heartwarming, the bad ones can be quite abusive: “Hey, you jerk, why didn’t you think of this or that?” On a couple of occasions they’ve been right. I really did make a mistake.

Wired: How do you respond to being flamed?

Negroponte: I always send back a nice reply thanking them for their remarks, however harsh. Then, what invariably happens is that the person turns into a mellow tiger and starts falling all over him- or herself with apologies. E-mail is funny. If people fiame at you and you reply gently, it catches them off guard.