“It costs $0 to be kind” is a terrible saying. Why should the motivation to be kind be based on money? If it cost $100 to be kind, would it follow that you shouldn’t do it? It often costs $0 to be cruel, too.
https://youtu.be/Eodd2IBDLbU?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/LL998ajnjN4?feature=shared
Love Advice from the Great Duke of Hell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5apw7Zb7G0M
https://youtu.be/O2Ya6d3U4yI?feature=shared
If nobody ever acknowledged your existence, you wouldn't exist as a person. You'd just be a personless body. Hegel puts it like this: "Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when . . . it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged." Suppose nobody else ever talked to you or interacted with you. In some cultures (like the Pennsylvania Deutsch), one way of punishing people is to "shun" them: refuse to speak to them, refuse to eat with them, never touch anything they've touched, never hand them anything. Shunning is far crueler and more effective as a threat than jail or even a beating. ~Prof. Eric Steinhart
“Honesty as a virtue is a discerning respect for truth, not a mindless fetish for transparency or context-free data dumps… We forget that truth always has a context. We cannot respect truth by stripping it of all reference to the concrete worldly situations that make it true.” ~Shannon Vallor