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I don't define it in precisely the Confucian way, but there is a lot to this as implementation of Kindness, yeah. Where I would part from these recommendations is that I don't think family can be the root of Kindness. Humans have in-group/out-group instinct, and if you train yourself to be kind to your family only, you might accidentally wind up training yourself to be loyal to your in-group no matter what, without getting any closer to being truly kind to your fellow man in general. Call me a Westerner, but I'm looking for "good Samaritans" (in the original sense of the man who helps a member of his out-group without a second thought), not just good family men. Still, the skill to be kind to your family is certainly a necessary one if you want to live your life Kindly, just not a sufficient one, and if you find yourself having trouble being kind even to your relatives, you're in trouble. I'm just not sure that you're home free and need only extend the line outward once you've mastered that much.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. There is indeed a danger on "overtraining" Kindness on family (and by extension kin and friends) if one takes the Confucian idea of family being the root of Kindness. I think the metaphor still holds: a tree sapling that has healthy roots but fails to grow is a failed tree.
The advantage of training in Kindness on the people you actually know and interact with is that it gets quickly apparent why Kindness is a hard virtue to achieve. Especially in the original sense of virtue as a moral force, a form of personal excellence that is actually useful in accomplishing something. If your father is eating himself into an early grave, what's a Kind way to dissuade him? If your teenage daughter is driving herself insane with social media, what's the Kind way to wean her off? Is it even Kind to meddle into their affairs? Are you sure of the superiority of your judgement? These questions get much harder, the nearer the people are to you.
Whereas if I train in Kindness on strangers, the typical failure mode is that it devolves into simple politeness.
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