>>3641
Any prescriptive rule is dogmatic, unfortunately. To truly communicate such a concept you need to either know the person well enough to predict how your lessons are going to come off, or you need to 'circum-ambulate' the topic, approaching it from many different angles, applying it to as many varied situations as possible, so as to triangulate a center point from so many tangents. This is necessary because people will always hear what they want to hear, and look for how your points (or the show's points) reinforce or oppose that. If they take an interest, whether positive or negative, in these points, you can lead them along through the maze of misinterpretation by showing them a thousand ways they answer questions that were previously left blank. If you can't, then well, you need to work on your own understanding too.
For example, friendship and harmony is easy to tout as the 'light side', where everybody is working together to better themselves and the world, and people without it are the bad guys. But what about friendship and harmony among bandits, slavers, oil conglomerates? From the limited perspective of 'the good guys', the first instinct is to say "in these situations friendship and harmony are bad, because they create real personal danger to us", and relative to the conflict of good guys vs. bad guys, maybe that's correct. So friendship and harmony, to be useful at all, must be applied in a more specific, nuanced way, otherwise the principle *becomes* dogmatic, and fuel the us-vs-them mindset. It must be applied irrespective of boundaries and borderlines.
Well, what if your compromise with the bandits and oil barons means that shit is still gonna suck? Bandits will still steal, oil barons will still pollute the world. Friendship means loving them and forgiving them as they do it - but how can we be friends with people who hurt us? Now you must find a deeper, more complex friendship and harmony; you must learn to love and forgive *yourself*, because yourself will always fight back against injustices. You are interrupting that bandit or that oil baron's entire life by enforcing justice; you must be able to feel their pain even as you inflict it, if you ever hope to understand them and reach harmony with them.
On an even more abstract level, your actions must be in harmony with your soul. If you aren't friends with your deepest self, then the only relationship there can be is *conflict* with your deeper self. Conflict means inefficiency, it means both sides expending energy in a fight, that could otherwise be used to further a common goal. You cannot be an effective person if you have great levels of internal conflict. Furthermore, any contribution you make to an external harmony will be marred by your own internal dissonance, like a single instrument in an orchestra slightly out of tune.
And so on. Harmony is virtuous, but there is no virtue so pure as to be uncorrupted by the bluntness of language.