Disrespectful people

When it comes to managing yourself with disrespectful people – less is always more. That’s to say, silence is golden.

To me it’s very simple. If one is stupid enough to engage disrespectful people in the hope of gaining their respect. All you are really doing is giving them power over your life.

If you are foolish enough to do this. There are only a few possible outcomes. One you end up getting sucked into their contorted world of irrational hate, mistrust and resentment only to end up mad. Or that you will end up committing some hedious crime and end up in the police station.

Either way it will not be a happy enterprise. There is no money there lah.

So the wisest thing to do is to completely ignore those who are rude and disrespectful to you.

You will find this will not only keep you mentally healthy, but since you have adopted a militant refusal to give these toxic people even so much as one molecule of power over your life – they are suddenly rendered harmless, benign and inconsequential.

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‘There are some people who whenever I think about them. I just want to reach for my parang and hack them to pieces. I don’t really care what happens thereafter. I care even less whether that is right or wrong. This is information that I would usually never volunteer for obvious reasons. But since I run my own enterprise and don’t work for others. My feel it’s worth sharing only because it’s serves as disclosure – this may seem odd to you only because Singapore is really a very safe place where if things get too hairy one can always call the police. Only understand this! Not everywhere else is like Singapore. In some countries you don’t even want to call the police as they are in cahoots with the rich and influential landowners – that’s life. So the buck stops there. It is what it is – and all that a man can do is work within those constraints – so I hope you understand why disclosure is necessary whenever we speak about the subject of disrespectfulness and how it may lead to violence.

Fortunately in the business world the people who bring out the very worse in me keep their distance. That’s to say to manage our irreconcilable differences intelligently, we have a tacit agreement, where they know should I attend this function, then they will probably give it a miss. So we alternate.

It’s not a perfect armistice, hardly a ceasefire, but nonetheless it’s a workable detente. A way to live and let live. Because the alternative is simply too horrendous to imagine.

Truth is I am not a forgiving man. The only passage that makes any sense to me in the bible is an eye for an eye….the rest I cannot understand.

This is why I can fully understand what happened in Paris recently. It doesn’t mean I agree with these people who killed the cartoonist. Not at all. It just means I understand completely how once perfectly well adjusted, normal and level headed people can just lose it all so completely when they are disrespected. Especially when they are pushed beyond their limit.

Unfortunately the killings in Paris have been politicized. I can understand why politicians and reporters prefer to see this as some great clash between Islam and the attitudes of the Western Hemisphere. But my feel, these people elide the obvious and it’s conceivable what we are really witnessing is just one group of people disrepecting another and how it all goes out of control.

Neither do I see the need to be coy about having to speak or write about violence with that usual air of detachment which we so often see in cultural leaders and the press corps. My feel is when these people speak along such lines – as if they’re trying so hard to distance themselves from that primal force to suggest its has nothing whatsoever to do with the human condition. To me that not only disingenuous, it’s dishonest.

Because IMHO it’s a fallacy to suggest anyone has that reserve of sagacity, forebearance and wisdom to keep it all together. People like that just don’t know themselves and others….they have no conception how to manage themselves and others effectively. Fact is everyone has a limit….you have one…they have one and so do I! And those who continue to insist they don’t have a ounce of violence in them. Well to put it in the language of the diplomat – they should consider themselves very lucky as they have never ever been pushed to that point of nihilism when everything just becomes a churning gyre of hell. So in my experience, it’s usually pointless talking to these bubble wrapped people about this subject, it’s really like talking about snakes in Norway…the bloody thing doesn’t exist!’