Quote:
Originally Posted by Toy Soldier
Happy to. I believe that "respect for elders" is a bull**** concept and ones elders should only be respected if they are in turn being respectful. In fact, I'll go further than that. I think pushing the idea that one must unquestioningly "respect one's elders" is straight up dangerous and opens to door to covert abuse and exploitation. It's an idea that has been used time and again throughout history to intimidate and silence young people when they are being mistreated by a supposed superior. One does not become more worthy of respect with age. Respect should be the default from birth and equal for everyone until they do something to lose that respect.
Are they? Do you have some stats on figures on this? Or is it observational?
Because fear and ingrained response =/= respect, and I would counter that what you are identifying as "respect" is little more than Pavlovian dog training, and completely unrelated to true, deserved, ideological respect.
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That's a great point actually. Here I'm going to speak about my own culture as an example of that in practice, with the Catholic Church and the unquestionable and un challangable respect that was given to priests in the past and look at what happened because of that, all the sexual and physical abuse that went on, mainly towards children and they were far too scared to speak up because of that power and respect they were given. My mother told me once that she heard a rumour that a priest in her area had fathered a child and she went home and said it and her dad said "don't you dare say something like that about a Priest!" you couldn't say a single bad word about them