Furthermore, those who would demand obedience because they lack substance aren't living a life either. That is, if living a life was sitting on a porch, they're in the swamps running from their past, without even knowing a porch exists.

It's a really shitty thing to be dragged into the swamp by someone who is lost in it. But to acknowledge it's just this shitty thing, nothing more, like cancer or falling down the stairs, that just hurt and diminished you for no good reason and for no real good outcome, which kept you from what is rightfully yours -- yourself -- that is step one. It's painful and can be paralyzingly scary, yet if people could see how scarier what they're regressing into is, how it's just a dead end filled with pain, in comparison to the soundness waiting beyond that small scary threshold, they'd take it in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately, my first reaction to someone wanting to "sell" me abuse or obedience is anger. But it really should be compassion.. obedient and authoritarian people deserve better. Abused and abusive people deserve better. FWIW I didn't think much of China when I wrote this; people break in the same dozens of ways all over the world and all through history it seems. But compassion and giving it just one inch are still orthogonal, you have to balance between the feelings of those who are fucked up, and those they would hurt by virtue of being so.