Be kind to people, even idiots

Be kind to people, even idiots is Nadia’s hard-won rule for meeting others: apparent foolishness is no reliable measure of what someone is enduring. Shaped by her own brush with suicide and her work as a psychologist, the principle asks for compassion without pretending that compassion is always easy. It recurs in the novel’s account of listening, crisis, and the small acts through which people try to help one another.

Origin in Nadia’s experience

After waking in hospital, Nadia cannot know what she would have done if a boy had not pulled her away from danger. She does know that the encounter changed the course of her life: she became a psychologist and chose to sit with people whose pain made them feel close to the edge. Her work does not erase the questions she once asked herself or the loneliness she remembers. Instead, her experience gives her a way to recognize distress in others without assuming that it will be visible.

That recognition becomes the practical basis of the rule. Nadia tells herself that a person’s burden may be heavier than it appears, and that uncertainty is reason to be considerate. The maxim is not presented as the conclusion of a life free from anxiety; she continues to find ways to cope with it and to learn to carry it. Kindness is therefore less a settled virtue than an ongoing effort grounded in intimate knowledge of vulnerability.

The difficulty of kindness

Nadia’s principle includes its own resistance. People want to be good and kind, the narration observes, yet it is not always possible to be patient with people who behave like idiots. For Nadia, that contradiction becomes a lifelong project rather than a problem solved once and for all. The rule does not demand that irritating behavior cease to be irritating; it asks that irritation not become a reason to dismiss the person altogether.

The novel connects this difficulty to the questions people privately ask about their worth: whether they are good, useful, generous, competent, loved, or decent parents. These concerns are shared beneath the different ways people present themselves. Nadia’s kindness principle grows from that common uncertainty: someone who appears absurd or exasperating may be wrestling with fears that are familiar to nearly everyone, but hidden from view.

Listening and action in a crisis

The principle’s emphasis on attention has an echo in Jack’s recollection that he had taken an active-listening course. When a hostage crisis leaves him unsure how to establish contact, Jim reminds him of the training. Jack searches for a way to reach the hostage-taker and considers what the police can safely do, including whether Jim should enter the building. The evidence does not show that a listening technique resolves the crisis; rather, it places careful attention alongside the uncertainty and responsibility of trying to help.

The negotiator’s advice is similarly practical: avoid negative formulations, find common ground, and learn the other person’s motivation. Jack asks whether that was truly how the negotiator had once brought someone out, and the negotiator admits that the answer was a joke. The exchange keeps the rule’s ideal in proportion. Attention may offer a starting point, but it is not a guaranteed method for changing another person or controlling a dangerous situation.

A wider ethic of helping

Jim’s recollection of his late wife gives the same ethic another form. She taught Jack that people cannot change the world all at once; they can help one person at a time, and must then live with what they could not save. That lesson links kindness to limits as well as responsibility: care means doing what can be done when the chance arises, not claiming power over every outcome.

The novel also gives this ethic a communal setting in Nadia’s annual work at a camp for children who have lost a family member to suicide. The camp offers company for people who otherwise might carry guilt, shame, and silence alone; Nadia listens, speaks little, and makes room for laughter. Later, when Zara finally lets Nadia open the decade-old note she has kept, their encounter brings another person’s long-held pain into the room. The rule’s significance lies in that movement from an unseen burden toward a moment of attention and possible companionship—not in a promise that kindness can undo the past.