Claim. Among the three subjects, the parent position is foundational because even university presidents and heads of state return home each evening to function as parents — proving that the school and the office are derivative of the home.
Elaboration. SMM gives a deceptively domestic argument for the structural primacy of parenthood. “Even the president of a university returns home as a parent in the evening and even the president of Korea returns to the Blue House… there he becomes a father, a parent” (1.3. The essence of the Three Subjects Principle). The phenomenology is meant to be self-evident: the school is based on parents and the position of owner is based on parents, because everyone eventually returns to where their parents are.
From this he derives the Confucian saying that “the king, the teacher and the parents are equal” — relocating its basis in the architecture of true love rather than mere social custom. He also makes the autobiographical move: “The Three Subjects Principle refers to me… I do not stand only in the teacher’s position or only in the owner’s position.” He has “the heart of a parent, the heart of a teacher and the heart of an owner” simultaneously, and members cannot leave him because of that integrated heart.
The rhetorical force is that political owners (“false owners”) and even university presidents are revealed as parents-in-disguise, while SMM claims integrated possession of all three hearts. “Among rulers there has been none who ruled with love” — a sweeping historical claim that no prior king-teacher-parent unity existed before true-parents. The argument’s weakest joint is the inference from “goes home at night” to “parental love is the metaphysical center”; the rhetorical strength is that ordinary readers experience exactly that homeward pull.