I try to be kind, upbeat, etc in my interactions with other people, especially at work. I want to treat others well, work together peacefully, and leave the project happy. I’ve noticed that some people (particularly more curmudgeonly folks) seem to read that attitude as naïveté, and feel like they can walk all over me or treat me like I don’t know what I’m talking about. Why is that?
IMO it’s just propaganda, it’s as simple as that. Evil people with no empathy want everyone to turn off their own empathy, so they can use their positions of power to exploit everyone else.
If people (sensibly) think that we should strive to be as kind as possible, it exposes the evil people as being obviously evil when they exploit others, and because we’re trying to be as nice as possible we then wouldn’t tolerate that and we’d take away their power so they can’t exploit people any more.
Abusers try to stigmatize sympathy and empathy, because as long as it is a stigma then people won’t talk to each other about their own abuse, then the abuser gets away with it. But no matter how strong and powerful an abuser is, even a fairly small number of dedicated, close-knit victims and their supporters can make the abusers lives extremely difficult, if not tip over their power completely.