Respect or Fear, which would you rather have other feel towards you? How do you define the difference between the two?
I think basically it’s about liking or not liking. If you fear someone you’re likely to not like them. If you respect someone, you’re more likely to also like them.
But what about those that you love but also fear?
I myself have never had such an experience, I mean, I don’t remember ever fearing someone that I also liked. But I’ve known quite a few who did – with me.
For some reason I seem to evoke that doubleness, or ambivalence, in some people.
I’ll admit there’s a certain deliciousness about having people both love and admire you but also fear you and therefore be even more alert to your wishes, to how you feel and to what mood you’re in. They will tend to tip toe around you, and that in itself can be quite a nice sensation, I would be lying if I said I don’t enjoy being in this position. Much of what I do and say around people is structured with the aim for this as the outcome being the my first aim, but the motive goers father than that of course.
It is quite amazing what you can make people do when they want to please you, and it’s even more amazing what they’ll do when their wish to please is mixed with fear of what will happen if they don’t.
However, all this fear can backfire on you. Your enemies can use it against you, if they manage to make the person even more afraid of what will happen if they don’t comply to THEIR wishes, or worse still, make them believe they’ll never succeed in pleasing you and therefore might as well go right ahead and back stab you then and there, get it over with, and doing it under the protection of your enemies – cops, oppositional business folk, or whatever.
Then there’s the individual who, for one reason or others, sees himself overlooked once too often, think he deserves something he didn’t get because someone else did, and he decides you didn’t deserve his loyalty after all. All that energy he put into being afraid of you, in trying to step up his performance, all for you so that he might reap what he sow in the form of receiving personal benevolent appreciative looks for you and perhaps an extra tip or free drink now and then.
They’re often easily dealt with, but can at times turn out to be more of a pain in the ass than you bargained for. That’s when you have to turn a more ugly mask up your bag of inventions for that purpose.
That can have it’s fun side too, though. No doubt about that.
Finally I’m thinking of those times where people are so fear struck they get frozen and can’t move, can perform a single, simple task you give them. That, for some reason, can get the most ugly sides up in me:
When they’re afraid you and you never really meant them to be! All you wanted was some easy and swift compliance to get things done, and they just stand there, wide eyed and unable to think. It’s like time has stopped or something, they sit there like in a wax cabinet, and often when you really need them to move swiftly and do what you’ve told them so that you may get things done and get out of there as soon as possible for everybody’s sake, not only yours, but everybody’s. And what do they do: They hang on, do nothing of what is needed, nothing of what you tell them to.
I read a description in the book ‘Without Conscience’ by Dr. Robert D. Hare about psychopathy, where he desribes how an inmate tells him about how he doesn’t understand fear.
Hare asks him if he’s ever experienced fear, and the guy complies something like this: “Sure, I’ve experienced fear. But not like I’ve seen when I do bank robberies, f.ex. There was this woman, at the register, and I asked her to open it and empty it’s contents into a bag I gave her. She threw up all over the place! Can you believe it? I’d never do anything like that, I’ve never reacted like that. It’s not like she was dying or anything, as long as she did was I told her to. So I don’t get it””
Those are not the exact words he said (as Hare quote him in the book), but it was something to that end. And it’s pretty much how I see it too. It’s not that I don’t understand fear, it’s more the illogical, the irrational way that people let themselves get swallowed up by fear so as to let their emotions rule the way they react. It works against them, and it angers those of us who are less prone to that kind of fear, even more.
Some people like for others to feat them no matter where, when or why. That’s now how it is with me. I like people to fear me in some situations, but to be relaxed in others. And it’s when people fear in me in situations where I’d rather have them simply relax that it annoys me the most when they DO fear me.
