The value of obedience

It's not a submissive and passive gesture. But a demonstration of responsibility and freedom. From which dissent arises.

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value obedience virtue politics family ability to listen1
When we have to to obeyAnd what value does this gesture have? Obedience has become an opaque word, both in personal relationships (especially family ones) and in relationships within the community. We do not recognize, with obedience, the obligation and value of vaccines. Just as, in the family, the father no longer has the status of a parent to be obeyed, but has transformed into a Sunday buddy. And at school theteacher he is mocked and sometimes even insulted by the students' families, those fathers and mothers who instead should impose the dimension of obedience. At school and at homeEven in the religious sphere, obedience, which by its nature is an act of faith, has become a relative gesture of our belonging to a community of believers. We obey à la carte: if, how and when it goes.

OBEDIENCE

Yet without obedience there can be no solid and lasting relationships. A community cannot grow. A child, like a citizen, cannot develop. A man of faith cannot live his relationship with God to the fullest. Obedience, which involves one's body and mind, is at the same time a value, a behavior and a gesture of confidenceIt absolutely cannot be confused with submission, conformism, opportunism, passivity, or blind discipline. Obedience is an active choice; it has its own flexibility and depth, which can also lead us to its opposite: disobey.

DISOBEY

Obedience and disobedience are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary. First of all, every time we obey someone, we are disobeying others. In religion, it's the easiest example to give: the choice is always between God and the Devil, as Jesus teaches when he faces him head-to-head in the desert. But also in civil life, in politics for example, you can disobey if you have the right papers, and at that point it is the voice of your conscience who speaks and wants to be heard. And not the opportunism of those who refuse to accept a law simply because it doesn't suit them. You can challenge taxes as excessive and unfair, but in the meantime you pay them. The freedom to obey, as a responsible and full act, is what authorizes us to disobey.

VALUE OF OBEDIENCE

The story of a Padua restaurateur, Antonio Ferrari, who offers a generous discount to families with well-behaved children has gone viral and has struck a chord with internet users. Rightly so. The feeling is that the topic of good manners , albeit slowly, is gaining traction as an indispensable requirement for a better lifestyle and better community relations , not just within the family. Very good, I'd say. But good manners are a goal, often complex and certainly tied to various factors (including social, environmental, and anthropological ones). Among these, I'd like to include the need for a compass—not a magic lamp, which unfortunately we don't have at our disposal, neither as parents nor as citizens—that also includes the cardinal point of obedience. Obedience is the key to becoming well-behaved , not out of deference or a surrender to authoritarianism.

THE IMPORTANCE OF OBEDIENCE

Obedience becomes a virtue again . In the eclipse of the long cycle of the self, when for decades we have thought we could do without the "we" and decide everything ourselves, even the rules of morality, the value of obedience is being rediscovered . A very energetic Pope demands it when he dismantles, piece by piece, the disobedient centers of power of the untrustworthy Roman Curia. And moreover, the most significant biblical figure on the subject of obedience, as Pope Francis himself recalled, is Abraham, of whom we read that "when called by God, he obeyed." Abraham does not object to God's word, and does not behave like Adam, who, after eating the fruit offered to him by Eve, "hid himself from the Lord God among the trees of the garden."

Obedience is essential, both in political parties and in government. Without discipline, without rules, and therefore without the minority's obedience to the majority's positions, politics crumbles and becomes merely a relentless and self-destructive power struggle. This is precisely what happened in the Italian center-left, after the liquidation of the PCI and its constant metamorphoses of its members, where the ruling groups became cannibals. Each was ready to devour its internal adversary, thus leaving the field open for the center-right to win. And the need returns for a family in which, without authoritarianism but with the authority that belongs to parents, and especially to the father, obedience is a shared rule . And not the object of daily negotiation between parents and children, with mutual exchanges. Costanza Miriano, who leads a community of four children while working two jobs, wrote about this topic in a bestseller containing valuable advice, Obbedire è meglio (Sonzogno editions).

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OBEDIENCE AS THE ABILITY TO LISTEN

Obedience in Italy has suffered several mortal blows. First, fascist rhetoric ("believe, obey, and fight") transformed it into a farcical slogan; then the rhetoric of '68, starting with Don Milani, who defined obedience as "the most subtle of temptations," and finally, the hyper-individualism of the 1980s onward, which erased obedience to make room for the domination of the ego. And among these blows is also the lexical, rather than conceptual, error regarding the very meaning of obeying. Which does not mean being cowardly, not having a straight back, or giving in to opportunism. On the contrary. In Latin, the act of obeying does not at all coincide with silent and fearful acquiescence, but rather derives from the verb ab-audire . And it means the ability to listen , and to distinguish what one should listen to from what one decides not to listen to. A choice of healthy humility, in times of rampant narcissism, and effective openness toward others, while we are often surrounded by autistic people. Two things, humility and openness , that we greatly need.

OBEDIENCE FAMOUS QUOTES

  •  Solone

Command is an art, as well as the exercise of a profession. And discipline represents one of them
essential component. The wise Solon understood well that if you cannot obey, you cannot
You don't even have the ability to command. You lack knowledge of a mechanism that even has psychological aspects.

  • Massimo Cacciari

Obedience is not blind, but always moves with eyes open, and implies the ability to
to relate to others, and therefore to listen, and to be responsible. As a man and as
citizen. Once the value of obedience is recognized, one automatically gains the
freedom to exercise it, even in its opposite direction. Disobedience.

  •  Francesco Petrarch

It took a great poet, in his synthesis, to sculpt in a single sentence all the infamies
environmental issues that we have to deal with today. Petrarca was not a green person, he didn't go around
preaching sustainability, did not have to deal with the climate emergency, but one thing, eternal
and universal, it was very clear to him: nature demands obedience. To its rules, to its balance, to the
beauty and the life it grants to everyone.

OTHER VIRTUES TO REDISCOVER:

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