Imaginary Castles

I could see it coming.

My friend Victor (yes, another Victor, not me) and I were walking toward the entrance of the oldest governor’s house in the Americas, now converted into a luxury hotel. I was visiting from New York. We wanted a cigar. That was the entire plan.

Victor was behind me in a suit. I was in jeans and a t-shirt.

The doorman looked at me and made his decision instantly.

“Can I help you?”

“No,” I said, and kept walking.

Victor stopped behind me. "Victor, let's go," I said. But he went on to explain why we were there. The doorman relaxed immediately. Another crisis narrowly avoided in the war against people not looking the part.

But I recognized the type.

The traffic cop who lets silence hang too long at your window. The clerk who discovers new policies the moment your turn arrives. The man whose tiny amount of temporary authority becomes a full psychological event. The supervisor who confuses respect with submission.

Give a man a clipboard and suddenly he’s defending the Roman Empire.

I spent years living at the mercy of these seemingly powerful people.

They aren’t powerful. They are brittle and cruel.

Cruelty of this kind is not sophisticated. It is animal instinct wearing a name tag.

Make you small so I can feel large. Exclude before being excluded. Dominate before being ignored.

Any goose can do that.

What surprised me, over time, was realizing that the smartest people I had ever met behaved almost exactly the opposite way.

The truly intelligent ones were rarely cruel.

They were kind.

Not performatively kind. Cognitively kind.

They remembered names, they noticed discomfort, they moved through rooms without needing to shrink anyone else inside them.

They could hold authority quietly.

Kindness at that level requires actual processing power, restraint, pattern recognition, emotional regulation. The ability to resist the immediate gratification of dominance.

Cruelty requires none of that.

Victor, my friend, is the kindest man I know.

He stopped that day not out of obligation or embarrassment. That’s simply who he is — a man who extends grace even to people guarding imaginary castles.

The doorman never saw him coming.

I’ve watched Victor in rooms full of powerful people. He is never the loudest. Never the man whose shoulders shift to claim the moment.

He listens like a spy decoding messages.

And when he speaks, I lean in.