Of Choices and Respect

"I have made my choice and I expect you to respect it."

And that started me thinking, and below is an edited excerpt of what's in a letter as a response ...

Respect is to be earned not demanded.

But then not all respect earned is important or of value anyway.

There will always be fools, flatterers and sycophants all around who are more than willing to lavish praise and good wishes on whatever you choose, be it good or bad, detrimental or beneficial, wise or foolish.

I rather not have such respect from such fools.

I rather earned their scorn and derision; and choose anytime and without reservations, the rebuke and correction of the wise, then the praises of fools.

And to earn any respect that matters, you must be able to stand up to your choice, to justify it, and be clear and certain that it is wise.

That the outcome of one's choice is uncertain is not an issue as there are human limits in knowing what will happen tomorrow. But rather it is the awareness of such limitations and making decisions and choosing within the boundaries and the implications of such unknowns and unknowables, which is definite evidence that one have been wise.

But if you make a choice blindly and unable to say why, but rather to obstruct, by saying that there is no need or that you do not want to think about how and why you made the choice; or to obfuscate by saying things like there were many factors, without able or wanting to enumerate them nor ranked them by importance; or to be evasive by saying that it depends, and again without able or wanting to say what were those things depended upon, when clearly the choice was made in the past and what were depended are historical facts; or to deter by throwing a temper and getting angry and unreasonably pigheaded; or finally by becoming a fool altogether by saying that we should not think too much, if at all, then your choice deserves no respect whatsoever.

And I will also certainly not respect your choice if it is foolish, harmful to you or others, uninformed or based on fallacies and falsehoods, and especially when it is deliberately chosen, perhaps to spite, or in contempt, or to annoy and to frustrate.

So in conclusion that you choose is NO BIG DEAL at all!

For even fools, mad men, and evil people, choose.

Exercising a choice is no basis for respect at all whatsoever.

It is what and how and why you choose what you chose that is the true matter.

And upon this basis is then your choice to be condemned and rejected, or to be accepted, praised, respected and emulated.

That people ought to be respected regardless of their choices, as long as they choose, is an example of the fallacy of popular wisdom: falsehood disguising itself in humanistically persuasive, flatterring and lofty truth-sounding language. And my theory is that this so-called wisdom has its roots in the American political scene from their popular marketing of democracy to make people come out to vote, ie vote or choose and as a reward you know that you are respected for it: a feel-good temptation appealing to human vanity.

It is obvious that this so called wisdom is not true. For can you respect my choice to kill because I don’t like you? Surely not!

Therefore it is not an unconditional thing. Not ANY choice anyone made is to be accorded automatic respect. No! There are conditions upon which some choices are to be respected and others to be rejected.

And what I am saying is that this condition is why and how a choice is made, their reasons, and their justification in terms of future outcomes or some other terms.

So if you want me to respect your choice - if, in the first place, my respect is something you deemed important to you for whatever reasons - then you had better be clear WHY you choose what you chose.

And if you obstruct, obfuscate, evade, deter, and be a fool, then I have to make my own conclusions for myself.