Areas › Anger › What you are actually defending
Respect comes from the Latin for looking, with the prefix meaning again. It is literally the second look, the head that turns as somebody important walks past.
Knowing that does something useful. A word that felt close to sacred turns into a plain social behaviour you can examine: who gets looked at twice, when, and what it is actually worth to you. You can still want it. It just stops being the thing your standing rests on.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not turn your nose up at people, nor walk about the place arrogantly (Quran 31:18). The two things named there are postures, small and describable, which is a useful size for something that usually feels enormous.
وَلَا تُصَعِّرۡ خَدَّكَ لِلنَّاسِ وَلَا تَمۡشِ فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِ مَرَحًاۖ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَا يُحِبُّ كُلَّ مُخۡتَالࣲ فَخُورࣲ
Do not turn your nose up at people, nor walk about the place arrogantly, for God does not love arrogant or boastful people
Qur’an 31:18read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of perfectionistic self-presentation, meaning the need to appear perfect rather than to be perfect, found it associated with a range of mental health problems. The trouble sits in the appearing. It pooled cross-sectional studies, so it shows this pattern travelling with distress rather than causing it.
Casale S, Svicher A, Fioravanti G, Hewitt PL, Flett GL, Pozza A. (2024). Perfectionistic Self-Presentation and Psychopathology: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A word you can define is a word you can weigh, and one you cannot define tends to rule you.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Not knowing is not a fault in you. It is the ordinary condition of being alive, and much of the distress comes from the belief that it ought to be otherwise.
Say what you would prefer and what you will do, not what they have to feel. I do not like being spoken to this way, and if it carries on I am going to step out of the conversation.
Disrespect is a paper tiger. It comes at you looking like something, and it has never once actually done you any damage.