What amazes and irritates me, in equal measures, is the conflation of courtesy and respect. Somehow, we have substituted courtesy in place of respect and in return, we managed to wrap our relationships with one another with cheap glossy packaging that promises less than it delivers, so much so, we find ourselves living in disrespectful times.
Courtesy is the false and impersonal display of politeness and diffidence. Respect however, is the feeling of admiration and appreciation towards others for what they do, how they do it and what they stand for. Respect can be thought and felt without necessarily being overtly demonstrated, while courtesy insists and demands on being ostentatiously displayed for all to see in all its horrid colours.
Everywhere you go these days people bow and scrape to you because they want your money, custom or approval for their own benefit. However deep down, they see you as a source of benefit to them while their true feeling towards you is at best indifferent and at worst, downright hateful.
You drive to the supermarket carpark and see a number of cars parked badly and utilizing more than one parking space, thus forcing you to wait for someone to leave and if you happen to accidentally shoulder bump into one of those offenders while pushing your trolley round the supermarket, they will immediately apologise, even if it was your fault.
You have the receptionist at the hotel who calls you ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’, constantly bows and smiles at you but the moment you ask for something out of the ordinary like: can I have a sea-view room please, his attitude is to lie to you and say they are all taken, while his smile remains affixed to his over-cologned face.
You call your bank to resolve a minor administrative manner and after 15 minutes of listening to multi recorded messages, you may be lucky and get through to a human being who fields just about every request you have with ‘sorry, it is not possible’ and finally when all your patience and desire-to-live have been exhausted, she asks you: is there anything else I can help with you, Sir?
This last example actually happened to me and after asking for help on four or five different small matters, all of which were met with ‘no can do’, she actually asked those pre-rehearsed words of: ‘what else can I help you with today?’ I finally flipped and said: I don’t think I can take any more of your type of help today, or any other day, because you have just destroyed my soul for all eternity. She was genuinely surprised but grateful I ended the call so abruptly.
It seems these days people use sugar-coated words of thanks, apologies, and compliments while their actions tell you they don’t care for you or about you. The overall objective is to get rid of you as quickly and as painlessly as possible.
Then there is the place of work where the concept of ‘respect’ has probably been taken out by ‘courtesy’ and shot in the back of the head sometime ago.
For a start, the hierarchical organisation structure brought with it a new kind of behaviour: one-way-upward-respect. This means that I must respect my boss and my subordinate must respect me however, the opposite may not apply. Here is the thing though, this entitlement to respect is rarely a genuine one because your subordinates may actively disrespect you in every way possible except when you are physically there whereupon you are shown our old murderous friend ‘courtesy’, which you foolishly take for respect.
Genuine respect that demands of you to tell the truth, to show honesty, to give unbiased and honest opinions, even at your expense, hardly ever exists. You may try to behave that way however, your boss would rather have the false courtesy than the genuine respect that may make him feel uncomfortable or challenged.
We have all come across such bosses who want soothsayers instead of truth-sayers, who want to be praised, idolized and feared instead of being helped to be better managers than they really are. Bosses who deeply believe that knowledge, wisdom and good judgment conform to gravity and only flow downwards, when it is blatantly untrue. They also believe that everyone below them, less powerful than them or even less rich than them are their instruments to utilize and agents to do their bidding, for as long as it suits them and then discard them when their use-by-date has expired. There are the less megalomaniacs who are content to criticize and admonish in public yet, praise or apologise in private.
So, what are you to do? I wish I knew the answer to this question but, I don’t. All I know is what works for me and helps me go to sleep with a relatively clear conscience. I start by working on my own self-respect. I try to work out what behaviour I need to adopt to attain and maintain my own self-respect, which I hope can guide me to respect others because they deserve it and not because they demand it.
That’s the easy part. The hard part however, is the opposite of this principle: how do you deal with people who demand but not deserve your respect? I wish I could say with all honesty that I cast them aside, ignore them or even challenge them. This is one major area of “work in progress” on my personal self-improvement. Wish me luck!
