Disrespect through Aggression, Anger, and Belligerence

Disrespect is felt as humiliation. Humiliation is the violent or aggressive assertion of hierarchy. It is putting someone in their place, a place below the humiliator. Much violence, both that directed outwardly onto others and that directed inward onto ourselves, is a direct product of humiliation.

Disrespect through Aggression, Anger, and Belligerence

Aggression, anger, and belligerence send messages of force and fear.

They express the tensions that people feel and increase tensions in others. Fighters and those inciting conflict use aggression to build up their own energy and to bully others to join them, or at least not resist. When we engage in aggression and express anger belligerently we are doing the same: we hope to compel either compliance or silence.

Interestingly, aggression, anger, and belligerence also express fear. But the targets of these expressions are seldom those things that are feared. Instead, we too often express aggression at people close to us and unlikely to retaliate. Fear (and its expressions through aggression, anger, and belligerence) is a basis for suspicion and hence for disrespect, both within an organization and with those with whom they work.

This is one of the dark sides of power. This attitude is almost always displayed downward in a hierarchy. The aggression is meant to be threatening. It comes with the assumption that there is no cost to this behavior for the more powerful person. The target is meant to feel humiliated, being violently pushed into a place of lower status. Clearly this is counter to respect.

It is ok to feel fear and to be scared. It is not ok to take those feelings out on others.

The dividing mindset perceives that much of the world is threatening and responds by attacking. The best defense, it is assumed, is a good offense. We have to get them before they get us. Carrying this attitude, we proceed to attack everything that impinges on us. We begin to define all setbacks or challenges as attacks on us that must be responded to with aggression.

In some organizations, senior managers interact with their staff with aggression, yelling or humiliating them in other ways. In some cases, this grows out of the fear the managers feel from working in dangerous places. While the fear is understandable, the result is that they push their fear out onto others in unacceptable ways.

This behavior is a sign that the manager ought to go home.

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