There’s always a lot of talk about respect going on, especially whenever the government makes controversial decisions. One side will disagree and typically start complaining about the people and circumstances involved. The other side will rally in support of the decision and its makers.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since it opens up a dialogue about tough issues. But the thing I want to focus on is a common occurrence in such a situation. When this happens, there’s often at least one person in favor of the decision who will state that the other side “needs to respect their leaders.”
That’s not how leadership is supposed to work, however—at least, not in a democracy. If questioning someone’s choices means that we’re being disrespectful, then nothing would ever change. We would never question worldviews and we would never invent something new. After all, inventing the telephone is to question, and therefore disrespect, the invention of the telegraph. Worse, what if those decisions have a huge negative impact on certain people? Don’t they have the right to question the decision? How can we say that someone’s title earns them more respect than other people’s rights do? We can’t.
This is where the idea of respect breaks down a little. See, there are two ways to interpret respecting others, and they are not interchangeable. The first way to interpret it is based on power. We have this tendency to associate respect with those who have power, or who have done something that earns our favor. It’s understandable, really. Those with power over us are the ones that we tend to fear or look up to. Both emotions feed into a respectful mentality, so we tend to interpret respect through that lens.
The problem with this version is that it means that we may fear a person whose decisions shouldn’t be given any respect at all. But that fear leads to a sort of respect and we don’t question them or their version of the status quo and next thing we know, we have a new dictator or something.
The second way to interpret it is through the idea of human rights and validity. The ideas of liberty and human rights are based on the idea that every human has an innate value that must be respected. If we do anything less than that, we are infringing on their rights as people.
But, some may argue, doesn’t that mean that we need to respect the people that are awful and cruel? If we interpreted respect to equal obedience, then yes, we would. But we respect our friends without giving unquestioned obedience, don’t we? So why is it so difficult to the same for the people we dislike or disagree with?
Others argue that giving respect to all people equally might allow for really horrible ideas to gain ground because we treated them and their worldviews with respect. But there’s a difference between treating a person with respect because they’re a person with thoughts, feelings and rights and treating their ideas as valid simply because they had them.
To use a really strange analogy, that would be like saying that I can’t tell my annoying neighbor that their idea to make soap out of poison ivy is a bad idea because they believe poison ivy is good for the skin and their validity as a human being somehow makes all their ideas and beliefs equally valid.
That’s not how life works. Even the best people make really stupid decisions and believe stupid things at times. We need to respect people as humans and respect the fact that certain circumstances might have led them to these choices and perspectives, but that doesn’t mean that titles, power or past deeds mean their decisions can’t be questioned. They absolutely should be.
*Note: This story ran Feb. 28
