The Politeness Complex: On Social Codes Erasing Embodied Truth

Friday, April 4, 2025

A woman is standing in line.
Another approaches, rushed, agitated, asking to cut ahead.
The woman refuses — then spends hours wondering if she was right.
Not because the moment mattered.
But because the system told her it did.

What we call “politeness” is not a virtue.
It is a soft machinery of control,
designed not to foster care, but to codify distance —
to script behavior away from the body and into a performance
where feeling must be filtered through acceptability.

The modern subject is trained not to act,
but to interpret every situation through inherited grammar:
Should I let her pass?
Would it make me “good”?
Am I being rude, selfish, improper?

These questions are not born of presence.
They are symptoms of disembodiment.

Pierre Bourdieu called this habitus:
a system of acquired dispositions that shape perception and action
without conscious reflection.
Politeness is one of habitus’s most insidious forms —
because it dresses itself as kindness
while operating as invisible discipline.

To be “well-mannered” often means:
to suppress your instincts,
to obscure your no,
to prioritize the scene over the self.

Erving Goffman, in his theory of interaction rituals,
explains how the “presentation of self” is always a performance,
tailored to maintain social order.
But what if the order is built on the erasure of the authentic?

What if saying “no, I don’t want to”
is not rude —
but radically ethical?

Sara Ahmed speaks of “affective economies,”
where emotions circulate and attach to bodies unequally.
Politeness, in this sense, becomes a form of emotional regulation:
those who comply are seen as good;
those who resist are marked as difficult, cold, unfeminine, dangerous.

Politeness is gendered.
Politeness is racialized.
Politeness is class-coded.

And worst of all:
Politeness is dead time.

It fills the space where real interaction might happen.
It produces thought-loops over nothing,
occupying mental real estate that could otherwise
host intuition, rest, discernment, or presence.

Judith Butler reminds us that gender is performed —
but so is “virtue.”
Virtue, in this context, is not about ethical clarity,
but about legibility.
Being “good” means being recognizable as good,
which requires compliance with the codes.

But true ethics cannot be codified.
It arises in the moment —
from the body, from the pulse, from the refusal to pretend.

What politeness asks us to do
is betray ourselves in favor of a socially approved mask.
To smile when we don’t want to.
To hug when we don’t feel it.
To say “no problem” when we are deeply disturbed.

The true cost of this is not just fatigue.
It is the slow erosion of inner alignment.

I don’t care whether someone “deserves” to cut in line.
I care whether the person in front felt sovereign in their no.

I care whether they were present enough to know what they wanted.
Not to calculate their moral score.
But to remain real in a world of simulated niceness.

Politeness is not kindness.
It is a choreography of self-erasure.
And I refuse to dance.