Command without Control: The Politics of Anti-Authoritarian Leadership TPS-0119

I want to give a bit of a life historical and talk about some lessons I've learned being deeply rooted in various anti authoritarian movements, very extreme anti authoritarian movements. It wasn't just nihilism or empty and negative rejection of power and authority, rather it was in the context of fighting for causes within movements or within small groups.

Our mission and purpose was to fight for or against one or often many things and try to organize without coercion, without intimidation, and at best, without manipulation, but most importantly, without authoritarianism.

There was great effort put into identifying and dismantling hierarchical systems of thought and leadership and influence of all kinds.

The primary objective was to accept the limitations of what could be accomplished within the context of making authoritarianism a taboo.

Only the most shadowy, subliminal aspects of being a type-a personality or a natural charismatic leader...those traits would emerge and they would rise within groups within communities within campaigns and often there was enough pressure from a sneering peanut gallery of people who did not wanna see the opportunism of what you might call predatory leadership...people who are doing it for self-aggrandizement and with an excess of egotism.

So it was always an attempt to find a healthy balance between looking up to people and mentoring people and taking on responsibility and being founders and starting projects and inviting people into them, but doing so in a way that had self critical awareness about not taking it too far and not taking too much of the spotlight.

I think for the most part, it was effective, and it was good training, but it was always a trade off.

By giving up control there's only so much you can do when you are in command.

That's the way I wanna frame this is commanding without control.

What that has meant in my life, what the trade offs have been, and when, and where that's ideal and where it fails.

It's been pointed out before that consensus decision making, where everyone has an equally powerful vote and anyone can veto, essentially, because if you've made a consensus to only make decisions collectively by consensus, then you're gonna spend a lot of time in meetings.

You're gonna spend a lot of time politicking with each other.

The value of that, of course, is that negotiation and compromise has to occur to the point where everyone is equally satisfied at the outcome.

Because if anyone can be the stinker who derails what would otherwise be the majority rule, then someone who's having a bad day or just has a bad attitude, or is the one who constantly blocks things to get attention, which often happens you're left at the mercy under that system of the most pathological people.

I've seen that work, I've seen it be problematic.

What I'm interested in is developing the skills to practice leadership.

Certainly natural leadership, meaning you didn't go to some leadership training camp, you just happen to be a more sociable, outgoing, charming, charismatic, articulate, passionate individual, who other people are inspired by and maybe look up to.

You're just confident, whether it's with a clipboard, a bullhorn, or just being creative and having the time and the energy to initiate interesting endeavors and have people understand and want to join forces.

A lot of people are shy. A lot of people are introverted, but they have gifts, and they wanna share them. They just don't wanna be in the spotlight.

For me, in my journey, it's been a lot of discovering wisdom pathways within rebellion, so you're not replicating the systems that you're trying to dismantle.

I've had experiences where my leadership and my command was very organic and very intrinsic to the fact that I was taking on disproportionate responsibility, financially and legally, logistically, everything, all the above, just being the project lead or the team leader, people would defer to me.

I would make final decisions because I had raised the money, or I was in charge of the budget. Even though I would be very open and flexible and inviting to input and feedback and collective decision making, there would still be a deference to my taking the lead, the times when I was the most responsible.

There have been a number of circumstances where, whether it's just leading a training workshop for a day or a weekends, for me at the scale of booking and financing and organizing always with help and always in the context of teamwork but taking on very disproportionate responsibility for things like a number of national tours around the US.

Mostly in the form of playing music to raise funds, raise consciousness for political, social, ecological issues.

So having a very purpose driven, very purposeful narrative and theme and gathering people together. What would otherwise be an outlet for cathartic aggression, entertainment in that kind of music genre that I was in for most of my life, but developing it and organizing it so that at a concert...let's say you've brought people there early and do a little film festival and have training, skill shares, workshops, distributing literature and movement building within the context of being a touring musician.

That's what I did for most of my life.

It wasn't like proselytizing or even preaching to the converted. Most of the people in those more extreme music scenes were very much on a warrior path, and we're very receptive to learning things and being serious about do it yourself skills.

So it was just for those who were serious about fighting back, whatever that meant, we just had a voracious appetite for information and certainly for solidarity and for fighting back and having each other's backs while we do it. Building skills and enhancing our abilities and fighting through a lot of drama, a lot of internal fissures and sectarianism.

With that as my main sort of background experience, yes, I've run nonprofits, I've run for profits. I've done things alone, but most of the time, I've done them in groups and in teams.

Sometimes I've been voluntarily under the command, but not the control of other leaders, other natural leaders, in their projects, where I would be volunteering on behalf of what they started and what they're in charge of.

I learned a lot as a volunteer about the dynamic of not being able to be bossed around, because if you're treated poorly, you're leaned on or you're pressured, and you're not even getting paid, you're just gonna leave.

So there's a lot to learn both leading groups of volunteers and training for that responsibility and that power by doing a lot of volunteer work.

That's probably the best pathway to develop the skills that I'm exploring here.

There's a lot of gratitude, a lot of the social skills of expressing gratitude and reading people, understanding what their gifts and what their limitations are, and bringing out the best in people in a manner that makes them feel valued and makes them very much invigorated to be showing up for what you're doing.

I've been blessed because for so many years that I took on leadership roles and was looked to for instructions and direction in that anti authoritarian sense, it was a form of command.

But I did not control anyone, because although I have hired people, mostly later in my life, having a budget to hire people...most of the time, we all did what we did on a shoe string budget, if with any budget at all, very seldom was there ever any excess funds, other than just what it took to barely show up or barely pay rent on a space, community space and whatnot.

There wasn't that temptation to say, oh well, I'm paying you so I can treat you poorly, and I can vent and project and do all the things that bosses do in their shadow.

I've had great employers who brought out the best of me and made me respect more than fear them, so that I knew when I wasn't giving my best, and I police myself, and I commanded myself because I wanted to remain in good standing, not just to keep the job, but more importantly, to keep the mutual respect and friendship of employers who I believed in and who I didn't want to let them down.

That's been a blessing I certainly had. I don't feel like I resent any of the people who I have worked for and that's a blessing that I feel that way.

They're on a continuum, but I've been proud to serve a number of employers. I've had people who brought out the best of me and people who just made me turn into what they call a clock watcher. Somebody who just wants to get through the day and does not wanna give extra effort.

I know I've had my fair share of knowing the difference in having that contrast of what it means to be a leader who brings the best set of people by showing them respect and with very subtle...hopefully not passive aggressive, but having the tact to have the conversations that are critical around the wood shed.

Meaning avoiding humiliating people when they make mistakes in front of others. That's probably the most damaging thing, because I think we could all take being yelled at in private better, even in a calmer sense, than being humiliated in front of others.

There's something far more damaging and wounding to the psyche and self esteem within a group when there's that kind of shaming. Certainly that happens a lot in more cult like environments.

But I think every hierarchical situation is a cult by the purest basic definition. It's definitely my fear.

There are people who have said to me at times where I was in those leadership roles, the people who were nihilistic about anything being organized.

I would say I was unfairly judged at times because of taking on leadership roles.

But I still took that to heart. If that criticism was right, I wanted to know how and why and what I needed to do to course correct.

I know there was one incident that I regret where it was a little bit too Tyler Durden-ish, in terms of judging someone's behavior and they really meant no harm.

I feel like I was excessive in my reprimand to something they did that was an honest mistake.

But that was rare. It was rare for me to do that.

But if you do that even one time, that's what you get remembered for, because all eyes are on you. I don't wanna say it's like crabs in a barrel, but I'll say, if you're from where I come from, where leadership is often frowned upon, and some people would rather just criticize other people for trying to lead, because they're comfortable with the status quo of being in the ghetto of their political ideology...which prides itself on being anti authoritarian, but doesn't get much done because of that.

So there's haters and hecklers in the Peanut Gallery and whatnot, and I'd say they have a role, because whoever was looking in from the outside, they probably heard hyperbolic tellings of stories where I was leading at my worst, which I would like to think wasn't often.

But that's what happens. You ask for that extra attension, and you better be ready for it.

Some people, they bite off more than they can chew, and they end up being eaten alive by their own. They eat their own, the cancel culture. That was the thing before social media, back in my day, people had a voracious appetite for bringing down their own heroes.

They would take twice as much delight in tearing apart the same person or people that they helped build up. That's my form of cynicism, sadly, you try to please everyone, you try to make everyone feel included. But those who feel for some reason marginalized, whether it's your fault or their fault or someone else's fault, it's the leaders who get blamed for the dysfunction of people who are not in the spotlight.

If you were from the communities I came from, we believed in flat organizational political structures, meaning no bosses, no commanders, other than ourselves showing up to fit in how we see fit and give no more than we're willing to give and be ready and prepared to walk away if we don't one hundred percent agree with the direction of every decision, minute by minute.

There's pride to be taken in that. But again, something that was said that makes a lot of sense is, you don't want the fire department to show up to put out a fire at your house and for them to sit down in a circle on your lawn and have a consensus meeting about how they're gonna fight the fire.

No, there has to be a chain of command in high stakes, life and death situations.

And that has to be based on a word that that I felt kinship with, which is meritocracy, meaning there's room for certain forms of earned authority and certain types of hierarchy where it's not dynastic.

It's not who's got the most money and who's got the most social capital.

It's not about nepotism. It's not about tyranny, dictatorship.

It's about people look up to people who have more experience in a field and who have the credentials to back that.

That's a very healthy and very natural form of you might call eldership.

It's not always true that elders within a group have the most experience.

It could be the most highly trained could be the youngest person, depending on the situation.

Certainly, in medical situations, if you have an elderly person who is not a first responder and a young person who is a first responder, it's obvious what that meritocracy looks like.

So I'm very comfortable acknowledging that and working with that and framing organizational dynamics within that meritocratic system.

I know people who come from my background who have become first responders. They would be able to speak directly about what it's like to fall into a chain of command without having your ideology chafed because you respect the importance of the risks and the dangers.

In the leadership roles that I've taken, I've gotta be not just aware of myself, but aware of the safety and risks of others that I'm taking responsibility for.

It does require sacrifice and selflessness to be aware of others needs and be aware of what you were asking people to do that could be dangerous.

I spend a lot of time when I do workshops and teaching...I've done a lot throughout my life, not so much over the last few years, where it's been very much a lone wolf operation.

But my M.O. has had always been to go to a lot of workshops and do a lot of volunteering, and then apply that training to be able to organize groups...to do tasks that could be very dangerous, require a lot of care, whether it's working with tools and equipment, sharp objects, heavy objects, tasks that require care with cadence so people don't injure each other or themselves, having to be a conductor of a job site or a project site, administer first aid, and make sure people's safety needs are our front and center, running facilities and having first aid kits and making sure people are have plenty of shade and hydration and are doing the task in a safe manner, that they're aware of the hazards of the site.

I've done the due diligence to create liability waivers, not just to cover my own liability, but to give people informed consent about what hazards are involved in the activity.

Often, when you're working outdoors and doing permaculture training, a lot of things can go wrong. One time one of my best, most loyal volunteers, unfortunately, was more than any of the rest of us, extremely susceptible to poison oak, and got it just all over and it travels.

You could get it in one place, it could travel through your body on its own.

Not that it's sentient and moving consciously, but because it's oils are so absorbent by the flesh that it'll travel through the body's natural systems.

It got everywhere on this poor fellow.

Certain things are beyond your control. Certainly, if anyone gets injured under your command or your watch, it's harrowing to say the least. You'd be lucky not to get sued a lot of the time.

That's what those waivers are for, the litigiousness of people who, even though you have your best intentions, if you are responsible for some kind of negligence, someone gets hurt there, that could end your entire career.

That could destroy your reputation. That could destroy whatever wealth you've been trying to build.

Most of my life, I had no wealth. All I had was my reputation. I did care about that, but it would have been futile to sue me, because I had no assets. Now that I have my own land and a couple of assets and a little bit of savings. I'm very risk averse, it's all about less is more.

If I teach and train and have responsibility for and command without control anyone else, probably for the rest of my life, it's gonna continue to be under a new paradigm for myself. I wouldn't do what I used to do, which was a lot of open to the public meet ups, where there would be a list of dos and don'ts and a list of what you need to bring and there would be liability waivers.

But it was always rolling the dice. There would be people who were meet up trolls before social media made it so that you didn't have to come out and do anything.

But back in the early days Web 2.0, if you will, there would be meet up trolls, and they would come to project hostile vibes and be hyper-critical and just be negative.

It was a whole skill set to manage that.

I would say I was lucky that I wasn't exposed to much of it, but it does happen.

You had to roll the dice because you had to be a teacher, you had to make a little bit of money, you had to pay some bills, and you wanted to let people in on a sliding scale as well.

I was always trying to be down to earth with prices and whatnot, to not price people out.

But then you have this paradox where if you price people out and you charge more than you get people who are probably a little bit more successful in life, and therefore probably have a lot to lose, or something to lose to where they're just less likely to be a menace.

Whereas you get the riff-raff, which I'm one of, but I'm a well behaved member of the riff-raff sector.

But those who are not, if it's cheap enough for them to get in and they can come in and troll, they can come in and turn your event into a dating game meat market.

That's another problem. They're not necessarily trolling anybody, but they could be there and they could be making women uncomfortable because they're hitting on everybody. Then you have to intervene at some level. You can't turn your back on the responsibility. You have to keep people safe from each other within groups. That's an awkward dynamic, for sure and you don't wanna take that too far. You want people to socialize, you want people to feel romantic about what they're doing.

So all this nuance is very delicate. There's some branch of social science which deals with the idea that when you're adults, working with other adults, even if you are clearly the leader or commander.

At least in certain cultures, definitely in what you might call Western culture, although I don't like that word that much.

But the idea that even if you technically don't have to, we kind of do all feel obliged to say our pleases and our thank yous when issuing direction to other adults.

It's definitely more effective. I think we all know to respect someone's humanity by saying the please and thank you.

It's interesting, once it's all adults in an environment, no one wants to be commanded without those buffers. There's lots of interesting nuance to that.

I remember I was an independent contractor working for a client. They're not your boss. You're the boss because it's your own enterprise. They're the client and there's a different, much healthier dynamic there. They can get mad at you, they can yell at you, they can tell you when to do things. But at least, you know, I'm the boss.

I can fire my client and work with other clients but it's about being independent.

This one gentleman who was my client who I was contracting for, he had his vision and he knew what he wanted to direct me to do but it was charming and enduring how he would always find a way to leave room for my input by saying maybe we should do do this, maybe we should do that. There are ways to be very passive aggressive about it, like in when a boss says, maybe I'm gonna need you to come in on Saturday.

It's like this shmuck, shmooze kind of passive aggressive way to flex your authority, and really, you're not giving an option but there's an insinuation of that. It's just kind of twisted in a way.

But for people who are tactful and well intentioned, like this gentleman I'm referring to, there was a tone of curiosity about how I would feel about the task. If I had a better idea there was room in his mind for that to be expressed. He may choose to veto it, but he's not gonna just automatically assume that I don't have an opinion about it. He would respect me as a peer within the field and defer to me when he wanted advice, hey do you think that this is the best way to do this?

If so, maybe you could do what I'm imagining.

And he wasn't all shy. he's making eye contact and being a clear leader in clear command. But our mutual respect made it possible for there to be a teamwork dynamic where you almost felt like you were helping your friend do a project at their house.

They're gonna go out of their way to maintain friendliness and not singe the good feelings. They're gonna value and appreciate you.

And because of that, the work dynamics are gonna be better. If you're an honest person you're there to help, you're serious about it. You're committed to it. Then you harmonize and the job site is safer. It's more effective.

We know that about training animals. In my understanding and in my experience, it's all about positive reinforcement, not negative reinforcement.

It takes wisdom to learn that. We need to learn that for the geopolitics of the world.

The point of me getting into this material is that, if we are serious about tactical permaculture meaning training, building, designing systems of organization so that permaculture projects can be deployed into dangerous areas.

I've done my fair share of permaculture in very dangerous areas that I would call war zones. civilian war zones is what I would call them.

If you include law enforcement as civilians, there's a bit of nuance there...there's obviously military combat zones. There's paramilitary combat zones. There's places like Haiti right now, where the war is mostly among civilians, but some of those civilians have come out of the military or law enforcement, and therefore they have superior technical training and experience.

But the war zones that I've done permaculture in, places like South Central LA, that's probably where I've done the most, East LA and South Central LA Where I was the white guy or one of very few white guys doing what a green beret would do to "train up the indig" to empower the locals to build resilience through permaculture design.

Whatever percentage the real green berets, spent time training with automatic weapons and grenades, close quarter battle and all of the boom and bang stuff...

To my knowledge, it's about training leadership and organizing groups and figuring out how to sort out the skill sets of people and to help them build resilience beyond just the crudeness of violence, but on deeper levels.

I was not hired by the state to train people to use gun powder based weaponry, for the most part, but more a volunteer effort to bring ecological empowerment to folks in need who are living in a war zone.

Chicago has played a big role in my life as well, I haven't done as much work out there, but I have been on missions of delegation out there a number of times.

I have very strong connections out there, or have had very strong connections over the years.

If some of them faded at this stage of my life, but at my peak in my prime, Chicago was very much one of the most powerful important parts of my network, not my network, but the network that we shared.

It's interesting to hear veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars comparing the the body count, Chicago is a deadlier war zone than a lot of the places that US soldiers were deployed in the Middle East.

That is humbling and makes you think a lot. One of my former Green Beret mentors, every chance he gets, pays respect to law enforcement officers, always saying the, the sort of sentiment that for soldiers, you go out and you do your mission, or you do your tour of duty and then you go home, you're still employed, you're still in the service, but you get rotations and you get breaks.

But for he says, for cops, for law enforcement, it's everyday, and that's a whole career. You don't get a lot of rotations and breaks in your combat tours of duty, and often times it can be a more dangerous war zone to be in.

On top of that, you're not just trained to engage the enemy and basically kill anything that moves all intents and purposes.

So he would say also that it's got to be a hell of a lot harder to be a cop, because most of what you do is restrain yourself from deadly force.

Whereas in the military, it's not supposed to be carte blanche, but in effect, in the heat of engagement in combat, you're there to do a job.

There are obviously rules of engagement in ways that policies will tie the arms of of soldiers behind their backs and limit their maximum potential to do the job with force of violence.

But that's an interesting nuance to think about. While the urban drug warfare and even urban environmentalist warfare, ecological warfare, both of those wars I fought in over the course of my life.

I have a lot of confidence in the power of consensus decision making, the power of direct democracy, where, if there's gonna be a vote, it's gonna be directly voted without delegates. The people who are affected by something. if they're gonna agree to a majority rule, it's not gonna be through any form of delegation.

That would be direct democracy. So I'm a believer in that, believer in small groups, believer in commanding without controlling. That is a social skill.

There are times and places where barking orders is all you can do. I'm humbled by what I'm aware of in the experience of soldiers in combat. Their commanding officer could be taken out, then someone with very little or no experience has to replace them immediately, and people can barely hear each other, if they can hear at all after all of the boom and bang.

It would make sense in that context, for the Alpha people to take over, and for them to be very unapologetic about having soft power has to be very direct and I get that outside of that context I think they also would would acknowledge, that in training and in skill development the more tactful and respectful and flexible they can be as leaders the more of that natural respect versus fear that they can generate and then When it comes down to push and shove, their people, their team won't be filled with resentment and hostility and disdain.

Another thing that that green beret mentor said was that the leaders, the commanders, they make it a point, whether by written rule or unwritten rule, not to hang out and not to get too close, to spend a lot of time, not to recreate or party or go to the bar with their command-ees.

Because all it takes is for you, the commander to slip up once, to step out of line once, to break the rules, or to be unbecoming with your role. Then that will be like I was saying earlier, that defines you and whoever you're trying to command.

If they know that you break the rules and you don't practice what you preach, and they see you let your hair down and get crazy...

It's better they perceive you as somewhat stoic and always exemplifying the highest standard, because if you lose that, you lose everything as a commander.

Basically, there's a place to fraternize, as it were. There's a place for relaxing and being social, of course.

But I understand that as well. For me, it wouldn't be about not bonding and not being close to people. It'd be about bonding and being close. But definitely, you said the standard.

If you are hypocritical, everyone is gonna know that. Because, believe me, if you're the leader, whoever you're leading, whenever they get together and you're not around, they're all talking about you and how they feel about you.

One time, I had an experience with an extremely type a CEO founder, who is just always in a frenzy. He knew how to really get the most out of people. But he did it in a way where you wanted to impress. You wanted to deliver. You wanted to be the teachers pet.

You wanted to get the reward of having them be satisfied with your work.

They knew how to reward not just with money, but with acknowledgment and encouragement.

So one time, not like we would come in late or that we would disobey our own policies...It was only me and him for a while in the early days of founding a company. While he was the founder. I came in later as an employee. I was about 24 at the time, but it was just the two of us running the business.

So I had a lot of very close, as they say, on the ground floor experience, working with a very experienced executive who did work for Fortune Five Hundreds and knew how to raise venture funding and became very successful.

I was part of that in the very early stages my music career which is what kept me from staying at that ground level with that company, because I'd have to go on tour and I'd have to kind of phase in and out of that company.

The story that I wanted to share about that employer was the fact, because we were the experienced sort of day to day keeping the ship afloat and moving in the right direction. We knew between the two of us what we could get away with that was kind of cutting corners on the policies.

It was okay because we kind of had that understanding that we wouldn't let things get too slacked up, we would give each other some good graces and whatnot.

I called him out before I said if this was my company I would fire you right now for how you treated the customer and he would tell that to venture capitalists who would come in and say that's the kind of character that this guy has.

He's not afraid to call me out. That's how much he cares about what we're doing. We had that bond in that dynamic. We cared about the mission.

So when a new employee came in, he didn't scold me, but he took me aside, and he said, just make sure now that we have this new employee, that you just shore up whatever you can think of, that you might be doing that's kind of lax, it's not a problem, it's not a deficiency. It's just the standard operating procedure by the book that we created says, to do this thing this way, which technically, you can do it in three steps, but really, it should be done in five because one in a hundred times if you did four out of the five steps, or three out of the five steps, something's gonna fail.

Don't let those habits define what the new employee sees.

You've gotta take responsibility, realize you're gonna set the standard for this person coming in and however you set the standard, it's always gonna be slouched on to some degree.

If you know someone is chronically late, you tell them to get there, you tell them that the event starts an hour earlier than it does, knowing that they'll show up an hour late, and then they'll be on time.

There's an art to that, it's not even cynical. It's just just the way it is.

Settling down into a slightly slouched position from the most erect posture that you could possibly have doing things by the book that you even created...every time a new person comes into an organization, there's an opportunity for everyone to, even if it's not forever, but at least in the early stages, we salute each other as it were, whatever that may mean. We check things off. We use the forms that we created and we don't just skip over things.

You go anywhere and they'll have you breeze through very serious, legal, binding, contractual agreements, all the privacy policies that we don't read, but even renting something, they say, oh, you can skip that. And oh, you don't have to worry about that. And oh, I'll do that, and just let me do. A lot of what's on the form is formalities that don't always apply, so you just sort of get in that habit.

It's just interesting to think about leadership and the potential that we have to help people build confidence as members of your organization, joining forces with you, and your vision to help them feel a strong bond and a strong sense of loyalty without being cult followers. Build them up to have a lot of pride and confidence in doing tasks where you set a high standard and you're very cautious about your demeanor.

Then that flows down stream so that as the organization continues to grow. If that's the culture, that's the mentality, then it can go up to 95% adherence to doing things by the book, and avoid dropping down to under 50%.

There are a lot of documentaries about police departments where it's just dilapidated, everything's out of date, nothing works. It's totally corrupt. That's terrifying to think about, not just growing up in an underfunded school system, but being policed by an underfunded department.

I don't wanna get into the politics of that, because there's a whole defund thing, which is a conversation I'm not gonna have right now. I will say that the last thing I want is a police department that is underfunded, such that their computer systems fail, or are chronically falling off line and falling over and being hacked to where I don't get my speedy trial and I don't get my due process, and I'm just rotting in a jail cell because they're underfunded.

That is the unintended negative consequence of ideas like defunding the police.

If anything, I would want more funding for them to be tactically trained by combat veterans of the elite units, because they're gonna have better aim.

They're gonna shoot themselves and each other less, and they're gonna shoot innocent bystanders less.

That's something where I would be down for extra funding.

How about less blank check surveillance, and more training and upgrades to computer systems for security and for efficiency, so that I can get my speedy trials and due process.

I will gladly pay those taxes and I'll be a cooperative law abiding citizen ten times out of ten when dealing with with LEOs.

I hope you build an archive in your memory of the experiences you've had where you felt valued and honored and respected, and you needed maybe less direction, or at least you earned the respect that was necessary for the direction.

You got to be much more respected and therefore more effective.

If the movements I came from haven't really accomplished much in the world, at least they'll always be a force of some form of influence towards sharing power with mutual respect, that's probably the best way to put it.