The Nice Guy Fallacy

I read part of a poem recently by one of my favorite poets. It reads:

I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage
The linnet born within the cage
That never knew the summer woods.

I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time
Unfetter'd by the sense of crime
To whom a conscience never wakes.

Nor what may call itself as bles't
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth
Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate'er befall
I feel it, when I sorrow most
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

At base, Tennyson contrasted a life of risk, and consequent pain, with one of security. He sides conclusively with the life of risk, and says he fails to envy those who have faced no hardship.

I agree with him; and, for good or ill, his words are just as relevant today as they were in the nineteenth century. Like then, there are those today who choose to live their lives with as little risk as possible, and therefore as little pain as possible. Today, perhaps, this duck-and-cover approach to life is most salient in our relations with others. There are those of us (notice, "us," because I am included) who would rather appease those around us instead of confront them, even at the cost of allowing an injustice to continue. The reward for this lack of backbone, we feel, is a safety from rejection, isolation, and- ultimately- pain.

In my own experience, however, a man whose first goal is to stay safe at all costs brings upon himself a different form of the very thing he strove to avoid. He will find pain anyway, in a form far more subtle- and I would argue far more debilitating and destructive- than he would have had he chosen to speak his mind. Instead of the pain that comes from confrontation, however, this nice guy's pain comes from disaffection and confusion. He lacks identity because he cannot muster the fortitude required of him to live out his dreams in front of a judgmental world. He asks questions like "Who am I?" because he cannot find the courage in himself to find out on his own.

This must be stopped. I drove to the coast today and back (nine hours of driving gives you time to think), mostly because I'm still trying to see if I'm more than just a "nice guy." What I found out is that I have the potential to be more than a nice guy, but that I haven't mustered enough of the necessary courage to move beyond that point yet.

Shocking to me, however, was what I encountered as the solution. It was with me the whole time. Simply put, we as men must choose to fight for those things we hold most dear, and for those everyday occurrences that scream injustice. There can, of course, be a decent, "good" way to go about this. The point is that we- the frozen ones- will no longer be paralyzed, confused, and bitter. We will, instead, become the men God meant us to be.