The Despair and Danger of Nice Guy Syndrome

Kindness is a virtue. Niceness is a vice and a danger to goodness. We all have the dark nice guy lurking in the shadows of our souls. Its desire is to take us over. And our job is to smother it and stand for what matters. 

On the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told the crowd that peacemakers are blessed. Wyatt Earp called his revolver The Peacemaker. He didn’t say blessed are the peacekeepers. Keeping the peace in the face of injustice or immorality or a credible threat means people suffer because of inaction. 

Niceness is a self-protective quality. Nice guys aren’t kind. Nice guys are a liability. True kindness often means doing things people don’t like. When I look back through my life, I can point to the nice guys that I’ve known or known about, and everyone of them caused heartache and difficulty more than they caused anything else. When I look at the state of the world, I can see the violent effects of nice guys in the wars that are ravage Eastern Europe and the Middle East. 

This is the result of men who go along to get along, who lazily and fearfully cow tow to evil. So I’m not denigrating love and kindness, which is what I want to exhibit to my family and to the people in my life. I’m talking about the jellyfish men who aren’t ready or willing to die for anything that matters, and may inadvertently lead those closest to them off a cliff in the process. 

They don’t have moral conviction. They’re ready to jump ship at the first sign of trouble. They blend in, sink into the shadows when the heat is turned up, and behave like cowards when they need to stand up and fight.

Attribute #1 of Nice Guys: They Don’t Say Hard Things

Nice guys never say hard things. They want to be liked more than they value truth. This puts their needs, their wants, their identity, their insecurities, their need to be affirmed as the most important thing in the world. Truth and justice are someone else’s problem, because nice guys want everyone to like them above everything else. 

They are the ones who won't speak against the many social evils and crimes against humanity, because they don't want anyone to get offended. They're easily bullied and become the minion of narcissists. They’ll self-censor when the “you can’t say that” crowd comes around.

Nice Guy Attribute #2: They Don’t Take Risks

They don't take risks and they don't lead. Leadership requires confidence in the midst of uncertainty. Calm in chaos. A willingness to take risks. They’re like the remora, those fish that suction to the sides of sharks so they can benefit from the predators in a weird parasitic relationship. 

They leach off the strength of others to attain power without risk. Their insecure selves will hunger for power to make them feel strong, though with their risk aversion, they use their mantle for their own ends rather than serving and sacrificing for those that they're supposed to lead. 

This makes them highly attracted to bureaucratic jobs that assign power without merit and give power without accountability. Nice guys want safety and security above all.

RELATED LINKS | Why Tough Guys Ruin Relationships • How To Become Courageous • Erosion of American Greatness

Nice Guy Attribute #3: They Want to be Taken Care Of

They desire more than anything to be taken care of. They are nice so that others who are stronger will take care of them. Nice guys want comfort. Nice guys want security. They may not like the job, but the fear of leaving their job to hunt for something else can be so horrifying that they'll complain and really do nothing. 

Now this risk aversion and lack of leadership assigned to a romantic relationship is extremely frustrating for a woman who selected him because he is sweet and safe. Then she gets tremendous buyer's remorse when she sees he's unwilling and unable to lead her and he displays this weak whiny apathy to life in general. 

A woman is built to desire male leadership even if she's been socially programmed to hate the idea. Biologically, internally, spiritually, she's primed to follow strong leadership. So, she'll naturally begin to lose attraction to the nice guy and desire instead a strong man, even if he's the bad guy, the bad boy. At least he was leading and exhibited a masculine attribute.

Nice Guy Attribute #4: They Don’t Protect

Nice guys don't protect. They're not protectors being risk-adverse and cowardly, the nice guy castigates all violence as immoral as a way to morally justify their own abdicated responsibility to be protectors. In other words, because they aren't dangerous and strong, anyone else who is dangerous and strong is unloving and is evil. 

The nice guy will be strongly attracted to idealistic notions of utopia and will see the world through the lens of how they wish it was instead of the way that the world actually is. They’re is a certain pacifist tribe of manchild out there terrified by notions of a dangerous world out. 

So they really can't even discriminate between the dangerous evil person and the dangerous good person. It's a way to make their cowardice and their lack of ability to be violent as a moral great thing. So, they turn a weakness into a moral good and they lump all violence together in their minds as evil.

Nice Guy Attribute #5: They Lose the Faith

A nice guy does not keep the faith. The nice guy will betray you. They'll betray their creed, their religion, their God whenever anything gets really hard. If they have to choose between themselves and their convictions, they will abandon the convictions to save their own skin. 

They're the Judases of the world who seem trustworthy so that they can watch the money purse for the group of disciples, but they're really the traders who will sell you off to the enemy. This is because the nice guy is not courageous and only the courageous can actually be truly virtuous. There's no such thing as a holy coward. Jesus calls a man to come after him and die, deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. Now, they'll still fill the pews of the church. 

They'll have Sunday smiles and warm greetings, but the moment persecution or difficulty shows up at the door, they're going to run for the hills. Cowardice has no place within the church. The righteous are as bold as lions, and if you are not as bold as a lion, you are not righteous. 

Jesus wasn’t offensive because he was rude, he was offensive because he was speaking loving truths that the world hated so badly that they murdered him for it. Nice guys learn the language, dress the part, talk the talk, but they don’t walk the difficult walk of obedience. If your church is filled with nice guys, your church is dead, even if it looks alive.

Beware the Nice Guy in Us All

Maybe I've overstated something. Maybe you feel like I’m talking to you. Just because you might be a bit of a nice guy today, doesn’t mean you have to stay there. I just care where you go from here. Let's get better. 

You and I will get a little bit better today together, and that's what I care about. That’s what our movement of Warrior Poets is all about. We’re getting stronger all the time and we’re doing it together.

Train Hard. Train Smart. Live Free.