Do you mean false dichotomies?
To an extent, yes, but that would also be a simplification.
I mentioned Hegel's idea of the Master-Slave dialectic (
Herrschaft und Knechtschaft.) because I think it fits.
The passage describes, in narrative form, the development of self-consciousness as such in an encounter between what are thereby (i.e., emerging only from this encounter) two distinct, self-conscious beings; the essence of the dialectic is the movement or motion of recognizing, in which the two self-consciousnesses are constituted each in being recognized as self-conscious by the other. This movement, inexorably taken to its extreme, takes the form of a "struggle to the death" in which one masters the other, only to find that such lordship makes the very recognition he had sought impossible, since the bondsman, in this state, is not free to offer it.
There's a problem of trying to train attention on something, only to find that by doing so it turns out you (as perceiver) change what you are apprehending.
In the case of kindness/niceness, it is true that there are degrees of niceness that are superficial and reliant on socially approved 'forms' of interaction. Collective cliche's and assumptions. At the same time niceness may also be a protective habit for the idea of 'keeping the peace' which often comes across as a kind of lie, but it isn't necessarily so. Especially since emotion is not linear.
And kindness isn't always nice if it is viewed as the kindness that someone is blind to. I.e: that a person may be self-destructive or stuck in an unhelpful mindset (there are innumerable contexts for this) and that the kindness looks like cruelty from the perspective of the recipient but it may be recognised as, once again, a degree of kindness.
So Disco is kind of right & "kind of" is an important distinction to make, in that it is vague enough to almost reject distinctness.
The either/or issue is one that goes very far back throughout history, but I don't want to write a huge essay. So I'll try to be brief and describe it as being part of a modern agony towards uncertainty; people demand answers and actionable choices with set outcomes & unfortunately this gives rise to Scientism over Science and a dogmatic approach to the allusions of life that are half seen and never fully graspable.
This could be reduced to a kind of immature "what-if-ness" of mindset that tries to play up subjectivity to the point of solipsism, but that would be a gross reductionism that falls victim, once again, to the concept of Herrschaft und Knechtschaft.
Language is also a part of the issue as it tends towards definition and settlement of terms (although a clever poet might move language towards the deliberate vagueness of metaphor) but it often remains insufficient to communicate an idea of what is 'Other' in our phenomenological experiences.
Trying to make literal the eternally ineffable is why we have ideas like typology and perhaps even divinity.
Many modern systems run on being certain, which is not in itself something that should be shunned or feared, but the appropriation of certain systems to uncertain existences and phenomena results in a powerful swing towards either/or thinking.
As either/or becomes more relied upon, more stark, metaphor and paradox retreat...leaving everything looking like a contradiction. And where there is only contradiction, there is only conflict.
