Political relationships, on the other hand, are problematic because they are not by nature wu-wei—the innate hot cognition of a minister does not incline him to trust or obey or love his political superior—but they need to be wu-wei* in order to work properly...."If you try to be filial, this is not true filiality; if you try to be obedient, this is not true obedience. You cannot try, but you also cannot not try; trying is wrong, but not trying is wrong" (quotes are from "the Guodian texts").

We don’t leave Anarres, because we are Anarres. But are we kept here by force? What force—what laws, governments, police? None. Simply our own being, our nature as Odonians. It’s your nature to be Tirin, and my nature to be Shevek, and our common nature to be Odonians, responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it would be to lose our freedom. Would you really like to live in a society where you had no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?”

For Sloterdijk, Christ is “God’s bastard,” the Father’s natural child, as it were, conceived and born outside all legitimate lines of inheritance and all licit structures of authority. .... At the same time, and by the same logic, a new order of social and political desire was implanted in human nature: that of “infinite egalitarianism,” a passage from the psycho-politics of command and obedience to one of equal self-determination, the transformation of vertical into horizontal difference.

The consequences of the shift extend well beyond increased parental stress levels. When it comes to the question of whose job it is to conform to whom, the sign has gotten reversed. As a teenager coming of age in the 1990s, I watched the tide turn on homosexuality. From my vantage point, a lot of the change seemed to be driven by acceptance parenting: those who couldn’t stomach rejecting their children rejected their own homophobia instead. As acceptance parenting takes hold culturally, we find ourselves speaking more and more about what it takes to be a “good parent” and less and less frequently of the virtues of a “good son/daughter.” The more we expect the parents’ acceptance, the less concerned we are with children’s obedience.