Apostoic Venn: Blogcast Ep.40 - Respect in Ruins Pt 2

Respect is Not Agreement

Aug 02, 2026

By D.S. Cook for Apostoic.com

Welcome back to the Respect in Ruins series. If you’re just joining us now, do me a favor and stop reading. Jump back to part 1 and start there, lest my jabbering about Nominal Conquest Fallacy, Orwellian Newspeak, and linguistic fiat make as much sense to you as a wooden ping-pong ball. I left you with a stark bit of social physics, an unavoidable law of human interaction. To respect and be respected by all, you must choose all behavior. The probability that you actually respect everyone, that is to say, admire and wish to emulate their behavior, is exactly zero on the basis of social physics. The pipe-dream of being respected BY everyone is equally likely. For either of these to be true, you would have to be engaged in every activity simultaneously. You’d have to choose to be both a criminal and a non-criminal, a religious man and a non-religious one. If statements of universal respect have ever struck you as being, well, a bit off… it’s because it’s quite literally impossible.

But modernity doesn’t resign itself to the confines of possibility. Having run its physics tests on whether a man can jump to the moon, its shoes planted firmly on the ground again, modern thought does not conclude that gravity is an unbreakable law. When it discovers that the laws of physics stand as immovable obstructions from the desired social outcome, a new assertion of anti-reality must be made in classic Orwellian style. “Man can still jump to the moon,” it says, “if we but redefine ‘man,’ and ‘jump,’ and ‘moon.’ Foist new meanings on these pesky words, and we will find every man jumping to the moon and back each day before breakfast.”

Enter the first, and perhaps most aggressive, of the four Nominal Conquests of the word “respect” that we will cover. It is perhaps the most heinous example of Orwellian Newspeak being thrust upon us by the ideological actors in our society, insisting that the word “respect” means what they say it means, not what it always has meant.

NCF Version 1: Respect = Agreement

A man who wears a dress, takes pills, and gets numerous surgical modifications may consider himself to now be a woman. This person is in a position granted by HR departments and State equity laws to demand that you respect this belief, and he tends to police the respect he is owed with stringent rigor. You will respect him, or be cancelled. You will respect him, or lose your job. You will respect him, or become a societal villain.

But what is the “respect” that he demands so loudly? Is it your admiration and emulation in response to his virtue? No. It is your agreement he demands, or at the very least the absence of your disagreement. You must say with your lips “Yes. You are now a woman.” You must use the pronoun of the opposite sex when you speak to or about him, thereby confirming that what he says is so. Or you must say nothing at all, cowering in timid obscurity at your station. This second is only a temporary reprieve at best, because he will seek you out and make note of whether you refer to him by name or by feminine pronoun. He will pursue his quarry.

Any philosophical, ideological, or moral challenge of the premise or conclusion, even in the kindest form of argument, is a “disrespect” to the degree of injustice, or even emotional violence. To this person, respect is agreement, disrespect is disagreement, and that’s it.

This line of thinking is not only unintelligible and incoherent, but also entirely inapplicable. When I use the word “inapplicable,” I’m afraid that what you hear is “does not apply to this situation.” But I am using it in its most literal sense. It cannot be applied. If this is what respect is, and we are meant to embody a society that respects all individuals, we must change our mantra from “I respect everyone” to “I agree with everyone.” Even the greatest fool knows that agreement with everyone is a literal impossibility, and we must not be in the business of pursuing impossibilities. This ends with a society in which not one good person exists, because good people agree with everyone.

The Societal Outcome of the “Respect is Agreement” NCF

Let’s examine this meaning of respect on the basis of what it produces in a society. Who is the beneficiary of this respect? For whom does it produce a better life and less suffering? Is it only the self, or does it resonate outward and produce goodness for others and the greater community? Well, one person will get something. One person will gain the benefit of walking through life without having to endure the spoken disagreement of his fellow men. He will enjoy affirmation and the comfort of never needing to defend his position in logical argument. In this sense, his life may be more peaceful… marked by the absence of disagreement or debate, or any challenge to his thinking.

But, in order to gain these goods (if they are goods… a highly suspect belief), he must deny these same things to his fellow man. The other man must walk through life squelching his beliefs, denying objective truth, telling lies, and forfeiting his right to speak honestly. He must live in fear that he might be discovered as someone who disagrees, and lose his livelihood or worse. A decidedly less peaceful life. He must teach his children what he believes is right, knowing that he is condemning them to a life of suffering within a society that will villainize and impoverish them if they are discovered. While one enjoys freedom, the other lives in totalitarian fear. This is an increase in suffering on one side of the scale in exchange for a decrease on the other. The benefit is enjoyed only by the recipient of this false meaning of respect, and not at all by the community in which he lives.

Now, if the person who is trying to change genders also happens to exhibit some virtuous behavior, he may be due some respect for those virtues that he displays. But virtues are the attributes of God; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Virtues, generally speaking, produce benefit for others, and sacrifice the self. His attempted gender-change is in fact an anti-virtue, and does not merit admiration on that basis. Even supposing it to be a neutral realignment (which it is not), it is still no virtue. If I choose to exchange my blue shirt for a green one because I feel better in green, there is no benefit to you, and no greater alignment with God’s attributes. No virtuous act has been committed.

Conclusion

Respect is not agreement. In a reality in which agreement with everyone is impossible, we must be allowed to verbally disagree with one another and part ways in peace. If one man has the right to speak in a place, and can say “I believe thus and thus,” then another man has the same right to say “I do not believe thus and thus” You think so, I do not. Then, both men have the right to be unaffected and unencumbered by the belief of the other. Any other arrangement, on the basis of “respect = agreement,” deprives either one man or the other of the right to think, and the right to say what he thinks. Any other arrangement is a deprivation of the right to free speech, an imposition of which thoughts are approved by those in power, and which are determined to be thought crimes.

Respect = Agreement: Utter Nonsense

Coming Up: Respect as Envy: The Luxury Trap

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