Claim. In principle the downward love of the subject (parents, teacher, leader) is primary and necessarily induces upward love (filial piety, respect, loyalty) and horizontal love (sibling, peer, colleague love) by an inductive effect, whereas upward-first love only sometimes induces downward love.
Elaboration. Lee establishes a directional asymmetry in love’s flow (The Spread of Love). When parents truly love their children, children cannot remain still — love produces an inductive effect. Children are moved and naturally serve parents with filial piety (upward love); brothers and sisters in the same family come to love one another (horizontal love); eventually conjugal love between son and daughter-in-law also follows. Parents’ downward love is the most important love in a family because it generates the others.
The same pattern applies to teachers. Students who receive true downward love from a teacher will naturally respect the teacher (upward love) and will love one another (horizontal love among students). For managers: if a manager truly loves employees, they will not be satisfied merely with salary but will want to reward the manager; in difficulty they may even say “please invest a portion of our salary increase back into the company.”
Lee uses this asymmetry to reframe a contemporary problem: a Korean university incident where students struck a teacher. Newspapers blamed the students, but Lee argues the blame is misallocated. Primary responsibility belongs to the teacher (for failing to practice true love in the teacher role), secondary responsibility to the students. The students’ parents also share the blame — they did not give downward love at home, so no base existed for students to respect a teacher who occupies a parent-like position. The student violence can be read as a complaint: “why did you not teach us properly?” The full solution requires Three Great Subjects Thought operating across family, school, and society.
The asymmetry is theologically grounded: the origin of true love is God, and “everything comes downward from God in the first place.” Lee qualifies the claim — because there is inductive effect and reciprocal reaction, upward love does sometimes induce downward love (filial children inspire parents; loyal subordinates inspire leaders). But the guarantee runs only in the downward direction: downward love induces upward love 100%; upward-first love has no such guarantee.
This is a notable inversion of common moral diagnostics that focus on subordinate compliance. The claim that authority figures bear primary moral responsibility for the failures of those below them has both teaching power and obvious political stakes.
See also. three-great-subjects-parents-teacher-leader, four-great-realms-of-heart-grow-developmentally, twelve-directions-of-divisional-love