It seems that in this era of Information and Technology where everything moves at light speed, we as human beings begin to forget about values that we once hold true in the past. And because of the competitiveness that we all are subjected to in this urban life that we start forgetting the need to respect each other as humans.
What has happened to freewill and respect (for it)?
In my lifetime I have seen many cases of people who do not understand respect at all. You see a lady walking down the street, wearing clothes that you believe is too risque. The first thing that comes to your mind is that she is a prostitute or a whore. Prejudice? Maybe, but I believe this is a deeply rooted form of disrespect that people nowadays are full of it.
Her sense of fashion might not ring with yours but this should not give you any reason to subject her to such criticism? Alright, you have the freedom of expression to do so, and I’m not saying that you can’t have such thoughts, but at the very least I hope that you, the reader, would remind yourself about respect and how you have thrown that away by coming to such ridiculous conclusions.
We do not share a hive mind, and thus we do not all think alike. Sure, we have things like majorities and minorities, but these numbers only make sense when it comes to isolated issues. No two human are born with the exact moral values and tolerances for everything, and thus in our daily lives a huge part of it will be spent living with those whose views are contradictory to ours.
There is a saying “Agree to disagree”, which is a sentiment that is all but lost in this world where we enforce our ideas upon the unwilling, trading freewill for perceived respect garnered from having somebody else bend to our will and submit to our whims. This dominating procedure does not show respect, but rather, shows a frightening lack of it!
Freewill and the freedom to have our own views are important in our lives, as it essentially make us individuals and paints the world in a lively mixture of colors in different shades and hues. If freewill is taken away from us, we might as well live in a robotic world controlled by a central supercomputer!
A lot of us in this age are unable to accept a difference in views. Partly it is because of our own stubborn little struggle to proof that our views are the ultimate correct one, but is there really “right” and “wrong” in this world? Having a majority agree to your decision does not automatically make it correct. It merely means it is the popular idea. For an example, a lot of people in Malaysia advocate the move of paying bribes to settle petty traffic summons. Is this right in the eye of the law? No, but the majority agree to it, so this makes it right?
I’m not trying to bring in relativism into the fray, but when talking about such “majority/mass behavior” it is hard not to make such links.
Anyway, what do you get from getting others to agree to you? It merely shows your own insecurity in your own opinions and views. I don’t mind if such insistence on a side in an issue is for the greater good for the people around us, but when the goal is petty and revolves around a single individual then I believe such stubbornness is uncalled-for and ultimately damaging to interpersonal relationships.
So here I say, why get the big fuss over nothing at all when we could have gone down and showed some respect to each other, even if what they do not click with us?
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