As I was listening to the current weekly episode of "Start The Week", Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips said the following regarding kindness:

People are actually capable of doing terrible things to their children, and to children, and being very, very kind people. But it's as though we want mutually exclusive moral and personal categories here, and I think we'd all be better off if we could allow people to be much more internally divided against themselves and against other people.

Of course, it reminds me of Michael Stone and his eternal battle for his ludicrous 22-level "scale of evil". Bah, humbug.

Phillips also noted that children can be "incredibly cruel and incredibly kind", which of course neither brands them as psychopaths or jots them down on Stone's scale; people make mistakes, nice people can be utterly tempestuous and I'm sure that even those like George W. Bush have something nice in them.