Is Implicit Respect Good?

I've often wondered about the reasons that lead to a reduced capacity for independent thinking and/or intellectual and emotional immaturity in people as they grow up. And I think the seeds for such problems get sown early in life.

Here's an example:

Instruction: Always respect your parents.

Question: Well, what about parents who are corrupt in their daily life (or even criminal), or parents who are abusive to each other (examples about of men as well as women being physically or emotionally abusive with their spouses)? Do such parents also deserve respect?

So the instruction is incorrect! The correct instruction ought to be: Observe your parents, and respect them if they conduct themselves in a manner that deserves respect.

This has multiple implications:

1) Parents will have to earn their respect, as they ought to. I cannot accept the proposition that two people sleep together --> lady gets pregnant --> parenthood --> get respect. This means nothing. Parenting is much more than that. The mother and father are obliged to create a positive atmosphere at home, conduct themselves honorably in society and at work, and bring up a child well!

2) Children will learn to observe and question honestly. They will think about what deserves respect and what doesn't. They will develop the courage to speak up when needed. I'm not encouraging misbehavior and arrogant disobedience. But a child always cowering in fear and servility cannot possibly grow up into an emotionally and intellectually healthy and mature individual.

3) Parents insisting on discipline is obviously a good thing (if they set a good example to start with!) and obedience up to a certain age certainly has a place. But at a certain stage (~ Class 10) parents need to sit down and ask their children what they want to do with their lives and help them pursue their aspirations. 70-80% parents I have met never ask their children what they want to do with their lives! It's just one long exercise in control and dominance - all the way even to what they study, the profession they choose, and who they marry! This is not parenting! Parenting means nurturing children and helping them blossom and flower into intellectually and emotionally mature adults who are capable of thinking and living independently.

Are you seeing what I'm saying? We have created value systems that encourage blind obedience and servility, and then we expect a society that is intellectually and emotionally mature and honest. It can't happen this way!

And then there's the politics of it!

You either have patriarchy, where the male species is adjudged to be the wiser guides of families and societies simply because they can physically overpower women. Just look at the utter lack of logic in that statement! And we have generations of children growing up in such twisted houses and communities and imbibing this distorted value system. Girl children who eventually accept being made to submit to a servile existence as their lot, or face a continuous threat of violence. And "boys of the family" who learn to bask in that sense of enlightenment bestowed on them simply by the chromosomes they carry. Now they have the first unquestioned unearned right to food, the first unquestioned unearned right to education, the first unquestioned unearned right to money, to independence. And when their time comes, they have to propagate this nonsense to the next generation. Their "family" will live where they want them to, how they want them to, they will be the "heads of their families" : just like that, simply by accident of birth in being born male.

Young children are innocent, they can see the nonsense of all this. Yet, they are to respect all of this till they get cast in the same rotten mold.

Or you have matriarchy, which, to me, is the same degraded imbalance in the other direction, the other side of the same dirty coin that no longer ought to have currency in any civilized society.

Why would children respect this either? Societal imbalance is fundamentally undeserving of respect.

I have tired myself asking couples this simple question: You live together, you sleep together, you are able to perceive each other in some depth, there is intimacy, all barriers have dropped, and you can't let go of this power play, this politics? What's the need for it? It's so ugly! Just trust each other, be equals in your relationship, raise your children with that sense of equality, bring about a balanced society that is free of all this oppression, all this violence, all this anguish.

It's specially strange to be having this conversation in India. In our tradition, the wife is referred to as Ardhaangini : literally, half the husband's being. And the man immediately becomes Ardhaang : half the wife's being. Perfect equality. Perfect balance. Nay! One step further! The two become one - period! No scope for disrespect from either side. No scope of oppression from either side. That's intimacy. That's a relationship. That's walking together on the journey of life as equals. As one.

That's the starting point. Step zero. Then comes sensible, conscious, parenting directed at raising children into intellectually and emotionally mature adults capable of engaging with the world with intelligence and empathy and thinking and living independently.

Be such parents, and you would have earned your right to be respected. Else, no.