Welcome to From Insults To Respect.
From time to time, many of us find ourselves in a position of leadership. This may come about because we are a parent, or asked to plan a trip with some friends, or hired to be a supervisor in some business, or elected to some political office. Each time we take on the role of a leader, we also take on the risk, will we end up being respected or insulted. What are some suggestions for guiding us through the possibility of such turbulent waters? 
Perhaps I can find some sound advice by flipping through my copy of the Tao Te Ching.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Tao Te Ching, the title can be translated as The Book of the Way and Its Virtues. It’s designed to teach inner strength and integrity. The author is thought to be Lao Tzu, an ancient Chinese philosopher and founder of philosophical and religious Taoism.
Although I draw upon this book from time to time, I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m a strict adherent to that way of thinking or to any of the isms for that matter. Whenever I have a concern, or others ask me to address their concerns, I draw upon a variety of wisdom traditions, and the Tao Te Ching is certainly among the greatest of these.
As I personally deal with a concern, all of the wisdom traditions that I have learned about tend to get all mixed together as if they were in a multi-ingredient soup. Then, I throw into the pot a dash of my own creativity, and voila, I come up with my own unique concoction.
As I flip through the book’s pages, one of the poems catches my interest:
To be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear.
To take the body seriously
is to admit one can suffer.
What does this mean,
to be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear?
Favor debases:
we fear to lose it,
fear to win it.
So to be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear.
I think I’ll stop here for a minute even though there are still two other stanzas to the poem. I want to mull over what I had just read.
A few minutes pass. I think I’m beginning to catch its meaning. To be in favor, is kind of like what I mean when I refer to a person as being respected. And when I think about why someone who is respected might have some fear about being respected, I think about an old saying–“People like to cut down the tallest bamboo tree.”
When a person becomes respected, some people compare themselves to the respected person. If, in this comparison, they come to believe they are not as respected, this may ignite feelings of envy. Some of these people may seek to act in ways that harm the respected person in an effort to bring her or him down to a lower, less threatening, level. I wonder if President John F. Kennedy might have been assassinated because of this type of motivation.
Initially, it was hard for me to see what point Lao Tzu was trying to make here because I often admire people who are respected and try to learn from them. Of course, there are some exceptions to this. Apparently Hitler was respected by many in Germany many years ago. Despite that, I doubt that I would have respected him.
In contrast to my difficulty understanding why to be respected is to live in fear, I have no difficulty understanding why living in disgrace is to live in fear. Bernie Madoff, the former investment advisor who became disgraced for carrying out a massive Ponzi scheme, comes to mind. His disgrace led to him currently serving a lengthy federal prison sentence. People who act in a manner that leads to their disgrace certainly have good reason to fear some bad things will be the result.
Anyway, I guess I’m ready to move on to the next stanza of the poem:
What does that mean,
to take the body seriously
is to admit one can suffer?
I suffer because I’m a body;
if I weren’t a body,
how could I suffer?
That stanza reminds me of the first noble truth of Buddhism. Life is not ideal: it frequently fails to live up to our expectations. Human beings are subject to desires and cravings, but even when we are able to satisfy these desires, the satisfaction is only temporary. Birth brings about suffering, as does aging, illness, the approaching of death, union with what is displeasing, separation from what is pleasing, not to get what one wants, etc.
With this understanding, I guess I’ll move on to the final stanza of this poem to see what insight it might provide regarding leadership.
So people who set their bodily good
before the public good
could be entrusted with the commonwealth,
and people who treated the body politic
as gently as their own body
would be worthy to govern the commonwealth.
Hmmm? Well, I guess there are a few ways to interpret all of this. Here’s my take, and I would love to hear from others about their takes as well.
Upon finishing the whole poem, I remembered three additional relevant passages from the Tao Te Ching. The first says,
If my mind’s modest,
I walk the great way.
Arrogance
is all I fear.
The second phrase says,
He who strides cannot maintain the pace.
He who makes a show is not enlightened.
He who is self-righteous is not respected.
He who boasts achieves nothing.
He who brags will not endure.Accept disgrace willingly.
Accept misfortune as the human condition.
Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things.
Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things
The Third one says,
Working yet not taking credit,
Leading yet not dominating,
This is the Primal Virtue.
As I include these phrases with the poem, I find myself thinking that major virtues of the Tao Te Ching are to be kind, compassionate, and helpful. These are essential qualities, from the Tao Te Ching perspective, when we seek to do something virtuous for the public good. But, we must first take care to learn to care for our own body, noticing the fear, and then to act to deal effectively with this aspect of our body. 
To be aware that to be arrogant, or to seek to be more in favor than others, can be risky. At the same time, awareness that if we do act in ways that could lead to our disgrace, this too can be risky. Such awareness encourages the virtuous person to be humble, and this includes being humble when we make mistakes that lead people to view us as being disgraced.
How to utilize effectively the fear that comes from being in favor, or in disgrace? The virtuous person has learned that to be effective under this set of circumstances is to avoid being domineering and a braggart. By fully and deeply understanding this, he or she becomes worthy to be a leader of the commonwealth.
There are far more subtle lessons in the Tao Te Ching regarding being virtuous, but this is what came out of my recent visit with its thoughtful pages. I hope you find something nourishing to take away from it.
Before leaving you today, allow me to humbly express the hope that we all remain well as we deal with this wild and crazy world we find ourselves living in these days.
My Best,
Jeff
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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional and social intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.
There is something similar to this when it comes to how Americans feel about psychiatrists. There are many people who hold the belief that psychiatrists are enormously helpful to our society by relieving suffering while others believe that psychiatrists have sold out to the pharmaceutical industry, consequently leading to enormous harm.
We get to see and hear favorable positions for the psychiatric point of view from the numerous ads on TV, radio, and print media sponsored by the fabulously wealthy pharmaceutical industry, which has the biggest lobbyist group in Washington, DC (see 
Psychiatrists have become addicted to the enormous financial benefits of transforming human suffering into a language of mental illness and then convincing people that they need to spend the rest of their life on psychiatric drugs. The consequences to society of this mental illness/drug approach is an enormous increase in people becoming disabled due to the negative drug effects. There is also some recent research suggesting that when women on these drugs become pregnant, there is an increased risk of miscarriages, and if the infant is brought into this world alive, she or he is at an increased risk of serious health consequences.
In my opinion, one of the best places to obtain the arguments about the harmful approach of psychiatric drugs is at the “Mad In America” site that readers can access 
The latest version of what is viewed by psychiatrists as the most authoritative American text on mental illness is the DSM-5. It tells us that mental disorders “are usually associated with significant distress in social, occupational, or other important activities (APA, 2013, p. 20).” There is some additional vague wording here about also having a “dysfunction.” Although my focus here is on the suffering component of the definition, I will say a few words about the functioning part of the definition shortly.
n case this vague definition does not provide enough wiggle room for clinicians to label all people seeking their services as having a mental disorder and to prescribe a drug for it, the ICD tells the clinician, “When the requirements are only partially fulfilled, it is nevertheless useful to record a diagnosis for most purposes” (p. 8). This type of double talk is one of the reasons why many people view the mental illness construct as too vague for scientific purposes.
Now, lets get back to the “suffering” component of the mental disorder definition. According to Buddhist philosophy, the first Noble Truth is that to live is to suffer. According to Christian philosophers that I have read, suffering is something to make us think. It is a tool to get our attention and to accomplish the Lord’s purposes in our lives in a way that would never occur without the trial or irritation. In Judaism, the Talmud teaches us that the righteous suffer in this world in order to increase their reward in the Eternal World. Rabbi Eliezer, in the Talmud, welcomed his suffering, calling his pains ”my friends.”
If we look outside the religious teachings, we find that giving birth is accompanied by suffering, and yet it makes more sense to classify this experience as a natural part of creating new life rather than a pathological condition. When writers receive rejections from publishers, or a loved one dies, suffering often accompanies these experiences.
Add to all of this the problems one encounters when one tries to decide objectively how much suffering, beyond the “normal” amount that one experiences during life’s parade of disappointments, is required to ascribe a diagnosis. In the end, can we really determine if one’s “suffering” is really a symptom of a disorder, or just life being life.
In saying this, I am not seeking to encourage people to be disrespectful to people who choose to take psychiatric drugs. It is their life, and it is their right to make the best decision they know how to make, and I wish them well. At the same time, I believe suffering may best be served by exploring what it could potentially provide. In my own life, I have seen numerous examples of people growing from their suffering. And one of the hardest lessons I had to learn, when seeking to be of help, is that there are times when it is best to address another’s suffering not by trying to fix it, but to stand respectfully beside the person’s misery and sharing what they are going through.
Today, if your behavior, thoughts, or feelings begin to concern you or a family member, for a fee many doctors will translate your experiences into mental illness terminology. Synonyms for mental illness, are mental disease, mental sickness, mental disorder, and psychopathology. These terms, as metaphors for experiences someone doesn’t like, have been with us for centuries. When used in this way, it can communicate something about an experience that others relate to. However, when we move from using these types of concepts as metaphors to believing wholeheartedly that they are proper scientific terms, we begin to lose the respect of those well grounded in the principles of science.
Let’s consider The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, which William Shakespeare wrote in about 1604. This play offers its audience a magnificent tale of adultery, fratricide, revenge, and feigned madness by a protagonist. When reading Hamlet, we see how Shakespeare uses metaphors to vividly evoke in us the experiences of his characters. Thus, when Hamlet becomes dissatisfied that his mind keeps identifying flaws in his plans for action, he describes these plans as becoming “all sicklied o’er with pale cast of thought.” By extension, the reader senses that when Hamlet’s plans become “all sicklied o’er,” he, too, becomes in a sense, “sicklied o’er” with feelings of frustration, anguish, and helplessness.
Literature regularly uses this type of metaphor. Ralph Waldo Emerson, to take another example, once wrote:
I actually like Emerson’s disease terminology here because the context in which he uses it so obviously reveals that he is using it metaphorically. Notice how he cleverly uses diseases associated with childhood to evoke the feeling that individuals who worry themselves over problems of original sin and so on are acting, in his view, childishly. In this context, disease, to Emerson, was a metaphor for immaturity. If he were a man of science, in contrast to a literary personality, we would expect that he would use terms with clearly defined, objective meaning, that avoid value judgements.
At the time, medical writers were already heavily pathologizing a great number of experiences. Thus, James cited W. Griesinger, the author of The Pathology and Therapy of Psychological Illnesses, and T. S. Clouston, author of Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases. As James delved further and further into the experiences being pathologized in this way, he came to believe such terminology was “simple minded” and “superficial medical talk.”
Does it make sense to say that when people are suffering, they have a “mental disorder?” Well, consider the experience of giving birth. It is typically accompanied by suffering, and yet it makes more sense to classify this experience as a natural part of creating new life rather than a pathological condition.
When writers receive rejections from publishers, or a loved one dies, suffering often accompanies these experiences. Yet, we do not typically describe them with pathological terms.
For example, cortisol levels in saliva and heart rate variability has some connection with a person’s self-reports of how much stress they have experienced in recent days, while hair cortisol levels have some connection with longer term exposure to stressful experience. Other measures of stress utilize a list of stressors, such as the recent death of a loved one, living in poverty, etc. The person being assessed places a check mark next to each of the stressors on the list that applies to him or her. These check marks are then used to calculate how much stress the person has been experiencing.
Having indicated some of the problems of unambiguously, and non-subjectively applying the descriptors of suffering to the concept of mental disorder, we now turn our attention to the descriptor, “dysfunction.” As with the notion of suffering, the pathologizers almost never use the various scientifically validated measures of functioning to determine if someone has a mental disorder. A pretty good such measure is the Scales of Independent Behavior-Revised. It has norms for functioning in such areas as social interaction (communication skills, language comprehension, language expression), personal living skills (eating and meal preparation, toileting, dressing, personal self-care, domestic skills), community living skills (time and punctuality, money and value, work skills), and gross and fine motor skills. Rather than using measures of this type, pathologizers rely on their professional privilege to make a subjective estimate of dysfunction.
In the most current edition of the DSM, someone who is experiencing abnormal levels of distress might be considered to have a mental disorder. But the issue of the boundary between normal and abnormal experiences lies at the heart of the most contentious disputes in the field of psychopathology today. A major problem with using the term abnormal as one of the defining attributes of mental illness is that it leads us to forget the fact that natural to all organisms is substantial variability across individuals and within individuals. Having above average or below average functioning in various areas of our many areas of functioning is normal. Displaying rare behavior patterns that are highly valued, such as the great altruism of Mother Teresa, are not viewed as mental disorders. Psychopathology is applied when someone does not like a particular experience. Thus, a term that masquerades as a scientific term is really a value judgment masquerading as a scientific term.
Although there are some fairly well developed scientific measures of the three major factors (suffering, functioning, and abnormality) that the psychopatholgizers tend to claim are usually part of the mental illness experience, these measures are almost never used in their “diagnostic” determination. Instead, subjective indicators of these three factors are combined into an even more subjective abstraction called “mental illness.” This process is not scientific despite claims to the contrary.
Rather than a scientific concept, the mental illness concept has been very useful as part of a highly lucrative business plan for the pharmaceutical industry and medical doctors, which includes psychiatrists. This plan has doctors first convincing people that the experiences referred to as mental illnesses are scientifically real illnesses just like physiological pathologies. It then provides license for doctors, in as little as fifteen minutes, to declare that they have provided their patients a diagnosis, and to send them on their way with a prescription for pills. With this plan, billions of dollars flow their way.