Valuing Someone vs. Respecting Them: An Easy Confusion in Relationships

I. Respect Should Be Basic, Yet It Is Rare

Respect should be basic and unconditional. Most people should be respected, and basic respect and equality should exist between people. Yet these are rare in interpersonal relationships.

This, too, is a manifestation of alienation in contemporary society.

II. The Hierarchy of Interpersonal Attitudes

Contempt < disdain < disregard < taking someone seriously < respect < esteem < affection and esteem < mutual affection and esteem—comrades, Marx and Engels.

People often confuse being taken seriously with being held in esteem. They mistake being taken seriously (with warmth and enthusiasm) for being respected. The core issue is still self-objectification. In other words, a lack of love: being taken seriously = being loved.

III. Objectification

Being taken seriously, but not being respected. The core issue is being treated as an object (a tool for someone else), rather than as a subject (an ordinary, living person).

For example, in romantic relationships, an idealized “goddess” or “god” is really just a projection, a tool, rather than the actual person.

Taking someone seriously without respecting them often manifests as crossing boundaries, judging, attacking, interfering, and so on. It shows no respect for the other person’s subjectivity, boundaries, freedom, or feelings.

People who objectify themselves lack their own subjectivity and cannot respect the subjectivity of others.

IV. The Importance Mediocre People Attach to Others Often Comes with Disrespect and Attacks

1. Dissolving the Importance Attached to Others, Envy, and Belittlement

People instinctively recognize that some forms of attaching importance to others are unhealthy and need to be dissolved. Envy, meanwhile, comes with anger, aggression, and belittlement.

Take the issue of educational credentials. People who feel inferior about their education “take seriously” those with advanced degrees, but the purpose is to belittle them. Many provincial bosses hire PhDs from prestigious universities, put them through all kinds of torment, watch them embarrass themselves, and then say with relief: What good are prestigious universities and PhDs? They are all bookworms. A degree from Tsinghua or Peking University is no match for sheer audacity.

Or take the issue of fair-skinned, wealthy, beautiful women. Newly rich men seek out highly educated women who fit this ideal and prize them immensely, but this is not love, only instrumentalization. Performing respect is not respect.

Similarly, many bosses attach great importance to their top salespeople and core technical staff, but feel insecure because of it, resorting to self-deception or psychological manipulation: Without my platform, you are nothing.

1. Fellow Travelers: Taking Someone Seriously Often Comes with Looking Down on Them

People who negate themselves cannot affirm others. For those who negate themselves, their attitude toward others naturally becomes one of “taking them seriously while looking down on them.”

Looking down on the other person becomes a natural explanation: If you are so important, why are you hanging around at the same level, on the same wavelength, in the same circle, or in the same office as me? At its core is self-belittlement.

Only when you leave them and soar will they truly “take you seriously.” People in many offices keep tabs on former colleagues who have left, hoping both that they are driving a Land Rover and that they are having a hard time. This is an extension of that relationship of “taking someone seriously while looking down on them.”

1. “Friends” Who Take Each Other Seriously While Negating Each Other

This kind of dynamic of negation is very common in social life. Each person negates themselves and the other. Yet they also depend on each other: on the occasional, deep affirmation they receive from the other; on the desire to conquer or persuade the other and prove themselves; on identifying with the other’s negation and projections; and on repeating poor relationship patterns.

1. Issues Among Peers: Comparison and Negation

Take issues among peers, for example.

Many people attach importance to former classmates without respecting them. They cannot let go of the past and need to address the “inferiority” they felt back then, so they have to prove themselves in front of their former classmates, flaunt their wealth and achievements, and conquer and torment them.

Mutual negation within families: A common situation is that some siblings are small-town exam achievers, while others are streetwise small-town people running small businesses. They envy and negate each other, eventually becoming antagonistic. Parents and children are often like this too.

V. Screening Social Relationships

Whether the other person gives you unconditional, basic respect is the most fundamental criterion discussed in the earlier article “Screening Social Relationships.”

With parents and children, leave aside for now whether parents give their children love: do they give them unconditional, basic respect? When they do, their children generally develop reasonably well.

The needs for self-esteem and respect appear only at the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. Only people who treat themselves as human beings can treat others as human beings. Only with their own subjectivity, a healthy worldview, outlook on life, and values, and their own aesthetic judgment can they hold others in esteem and regard them with affection and esteem.

Marx and Engels exemplify this kind of friendship: mutual affection and esteem, with each helping the other fulfill their potential.