The Importance of the Family Unit

Let’s talk about the importance of the family unit. From a familial unit perspective, liberal capitalism ultimately erodes family values and liberalism seems to often erode the family unit itself through consumerism (and over-work), as Žižek has alluded. This is what Aldous Huxley warns us of in his Brave New World. Classism becomes genetically ingrained in this dystopia with no social mobility available, something which is a very real threat as we are on the precipice of a bio-fracturing of the human race based on class positions with the advent of biotech and nanotech human (or ‘posthuman’) advancement and enhancement. In this Brave New World the family unit becomes utterly usurped by ‘hatching’ humans and then subjecting them to psychological (classical) conditioning and manipulation methods for rearing new members of its five-tiered caste system for its (dystopian) society and culture.

Consumerism, as a form of market-based conditioning through ubiquitous advertising saturating social space, is the prioritizing of material possessions and worship thereof, and tends to supplant people nurturing friendships based on mutual intellectual and emotional growth whether they be familial, platonic or in intimate relations. It is also sociologically closely tied to over-work, since people work more to consume more, at the expense of personal and social development (which – individual and collective personal and social development – has positive externalities in society).

There seems an incongruency particularly in U.S. Republican ideology, where commendably they are for protecting and nurturing the family unit, with strong Christian values, but with the promotion of liberal and conservative capitalism, which often leads to a disintegration of the family unit through consumerism and socio-economic stressors.

There is the threat to state-consecrated sexual and emotional monogamous marriage (not downgrading legitimate polyamory here). Some left-wing politics assuages fantasies of polyamory in child-rearing as the only option available and the destruction of the family unit (as some strains of Marxist thought has indulged). We should strengthen the family unit, and seek to protect it. This can co-exist peaceably with LGBT rights and emancipation, where the site of reproduction is the nuclear family between two consenting adults as parents (couples). Most couples would be heterosexual (as they are the majority), and non-heterosexual couples would be a liberated minority.

The family unit should be reconceived in that each individual adult should be granted freehold ownership of a parcel of land with housing on that land. Couples could still live together, but individuals could retreat to their own abode at their will. That is a lot of houses, but population should be managed (not by the state, but by the citizenry’s consciousness) around this political and ethical dictate. This will select for greater individual autonomy and independence, whilst simultaneously strengthening the hetero and non-normative nuclear family.