In this day and age, many people give soft commands formed as questions in an effort to be “polite”.
A concise, decisive command:
“Please take the trash out.”
A roundabout command formed as a question:
“Do you want to take the trash out after dinner?”
Commands formed as questions are confusing to the obedient follower, and encourage disobedience because they may think on the question and decide they don’t want to do that.
What a follower has to do in order to be obedient to a command-question:
- A command is given in the form of a question.
- The follower needs to realize it’s not a question
- Then the follower needs to unpack the question to decipher the command.
- Then the follower can obey the command.
Giving commands as questions stems from the follower having a headstrong and self-willed mindset: “Don’t order me around! Politely ask me and maybe, just maybe if I feel like it, I’ll get to it at a time convenient for me.”
So disobedience leads to the breakdown of commands, leading to more disobedience.