Blog post: Tridimity: Gold Dust

If I were to ask you, what is the single most precious and important commodity in modern society, what would you say?

Perhaps you might reminisce on the toil of your 9-5 and its diminishing returns, and state that economic prosperity is the most precious and important commodity of all. Or perhaps you berate the lack of quality time that you are able to allocate to friends and family members, and propose that a healthy work-life balance is most important and precious of all. Still others might site lifestyle considerations, or some conceptual commodity, such as freedom or liberty or love. All of these are, of course, important. However, I would argue that the single most precious and important commodity in modern society – the fabric of society, even – is a basic mutual respect.

Disrespect obviously takes many forms – from overt disrespect as displayed by criminals willing to invade, trample and generally destroy all social order – to those subtler guises, that tend more to be more mildly irritating, as in those friends, family members and colleagues who ignore individual autonomy/agency and promote disempowerment by bullying in a subtler form. Today I learned of a new form, some of you may well be aware of it already: acronyms used by doctors to refer to their own patients, as between-doctor in-jokes. It really is sickening that a person – a supposed professional – in a position of trust would abuse fellow members of the public, I guess the fact that they feel it is acceptable to do so comes back to the God complex, give a person an MD and they think they own the world.

“NFN (Normal for Norfolk), FLK (Funny looking kid) or GROLIES (Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt)â€

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3159813.stm

Been to college for 5 years, earned stethoscope and white coat. Makes you my subject reducible to offensive acronym. Who cares, right?

While we may readily admit that doctors who abuse their patients in their way are WNKERS who should GFTs, that response in turn presents a paradox: in attacking our attackers out of self-defence, we are in turn feeding the cycle of disrespect. Yet to fail to reject their disrespect means that we leave ourselves open to abuse, and also that anyone who witnesses us being disrespectful in this way, ignorant as they are of its cause and context of self-defence, will in turn label us as disrespectful and not worthy of respect. I think that the optimal algorithm in such situations is to address the offender directly and assertively, to calmly explain the situation and how it made you feel and why, and to offer suggestions for different behaviour in the future. If the person fails to respond, to refrain from offending them, but instead to silently extricate yourself from any situation in which you are likely to meet them, until they are eventually cut out of your life for good.

Most people can tolerate difficult living conditions, or even the absence of a love life, but very few people can tolerate situations in which they are repeatedly subjected to disrespect at the hands of a tyrant – be that tyrant a supposed lover, or an employer, or an authority figure. People simply cannot hack such conditions – and, I think, this is related to a very fundamental point, that the moment one accepts disrespect at the hands of another, one also loses respect for oneself, and self-respect is more important even than the respect of other people. Basic neutral respect is the most valuable commodity in contemporary society.

Nobody can take your self-respect; only you can give it up.

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