Tao Te Ching: When Families Fall into Discord, Filial Devotion and Parental Love Appear

Tao Te Ching: “When the great Way is abandoned, benevolence and righteousness arise. When the six family relationships are in discord, filial piety and parental affection arise.”

This line really is brilliant, and very true to life. In families where people squabble and play, live happily together, and genuinely care for one another, there is no talk of filial piety, loyalty, sacrifice, gratitude, and so on. Friendship and love are a way of being. (Erich Fromm, *The Art of Loving*)

By contrast, families that lack genuine friendship and love dutifully act out the roles of the loving parent and the filial child. What is really there is formality, distance and boundaries, etiquette and role-playing.

But these families often breach that distance and then fall apart. Unless everyone is avoidant and maintains order through indifference. More often, though, there are repeated flare-ups of NPD, BPD, adults behaving like infants, and so on.

Wherever this culture of formality is made rigid and codified into rules, it inevitably becomes a technique of control. It is like “modern management” prescribing “a smile that shows eight teeth.” Can a smile be prescribed? Naturally, the smiles are all fake.

And those friends of mine who have children and are truly perceptive and thoughtful often tell me that they feel grateful to their children, that they feel their children have done them a kindness.

Tao Te Ching: “Only after the Way is lost does virtue arise; only after virtue is lost does benevolence arise; only after benevolence is lost does righteousness arise; only after righteousness is lost does ritual propriety arise. Ritual propriety is the thinning of loyalty and trustworthiness, and the beginning of disorder. Foreknowledge is the superficial flowering of the Way, and the beginning of folly.” (All those prescribed norms are merely the superficial splendor of the Way, the beginning of ignorance.)