Why We Should Abolish the Family (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Why We Should Abolish the Family (2022)

currentaffairs.org

14 pointsmsravi30 comments

I read this and... Sometimes there are opinions I don't agree with but they are thought provoking allowing me to expand my world view with alternate ideas. This was not one of those times. The more I read the more it seemed like this deserves, more than anything I've ever read (including 4chan posts) of the Billy Madison response.

"Mr. Madison, what you have just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

This vector of paragraphs (I struggle to dignify it as an “essay”) at its most charitable suffers from the “‘Defund the Police’ doesn’t mean to ‘defund the police’” problem.

“Everyone can support family abolition, even those who feel there is nothing wrong with their family. Family abolition is not about breaking up individual families but about radically changing the society that makes the family structure necessary,”

If you don’t want the government spending money to encourage stable families, we can have that discussion. If you want to change inheritance taxation, we can have that as well. If you want people to be able to live in non-family arrangements, we can have that discussion as well, though it will likely be short since, we’ll quickly realize that they already can and no one is seeking to end that.

If you start with “we shouldn’t have families”, I’ll adjust my estimation of your rationality and tolerance of others’ choices based on the data you’ve given me.

This article seems to be an attempt to justify various behaviours to the part of the population that isn't on board with it.

But why? You can do whatever the fuck you want. Whatever the fuck you want might not be the best thing long term, and I might not like whatever the fuck you want, but I mean, it's you, not me.

A lot of people seem to be unwilling to allow these two ideas to exist in their mind independently.

Either something is OK, and it's allowed and celebrated, or it's awful, and it must be banned. It has to be fully 100% accepted by everyone or fully 100% despised.

The whole thing to me speaks like really there's just a tremendous lack of self-confidence. You can just own the fact that you're weird, most of us are weird in some way.

The problem revolves about having somebody who is dedicated towards supporting you.

Take a mother with two small children - a conservative biological norm. Who is going to stick around and help her financially and with their time? Would your hippie anarchist commune provide for her? Or a female partner biologically unrelated to her children? All of these arrangements may work for a time, but they are much less durable than a nuclear family overally, because raising a family is hard work.

Mother and father of children are likely to work. Mother and her parents living together would likely work (that may be the actual future of family). Mother and father's mom may work. Mother and her sister may work. Mother of two and a random person who enjoys elaborate sex with her, would likely NOT work. Possible but not likely. These arrangements are made for enjoyment not for chore.

I think your "hippie anarchist commune" (aka "society") is the closest answer. They say "it takes a village to raise a child". Very young children need at least one dedicated caretaker, it is true, but by age 5 or 6 - around the time we start sending them to school - they are independent enough, and low-maintenance enough, to be reliably looked after by other adults. By age 10 or so they are more or less ready to move through the world autonomously and without supervision, and at this age the relationships with the adults around them begin to shift from "babysitter" to "friend". We aren't meant to be helicoptered by a single parental unit from birth to age 18 - we're meant to engage with society, from pretty early on.

So if we imagine a world where we aren't so damned estranged from each other - doesn't have to be a hippie commune, could be a cozy urban village like Sesame Street - the durability of a family unit probably experiences diminishing returns as the child exits infancy, provided they still have access to at least one parent. And it wouldn't be at all surprising if the fabled "7-year itch" was a biological reflection of this.

I don't believe that's going to work. Unrelated people's families living together leads to huge amount of toxicity. There's no housing or legal framework to support this, but more importantly, people just don't and can't live that way, en masse. Add to that the financial question which turns out hard even for nuclear families.

It becomes better when they're all relatives of each other, but still quite toxic so in the end, people are dying to get their own home with a locking door, even at consderable expense.

It's all been tried in the Soviet Union with its housing shortages and shared apartments.

I'm talking about villages, not hostels. Villages are not toxic.

> Villages are not toxic.

I highly highly doubt this

> Villages are not toxic.

it really depends on a lot of things, first among which "how do you define toxic".

you can't really make that generalization, your argument is invalid.

You're ignoring the fact that raising kids in the US is a huge financial investment. Who pays for clothing and food?

Who is going to pay $200000 for university, if not the biological parents?

Also, how they are going to divide inheritance and parential support, on which the youth happen to depend more and more? You are either going to launch these community kids essentially naked into the hostile world when they came of age, or figure out who specifically has to cough out the cash to support them in early adult life.

If there is an entangled group of children, but only one of them is inheriting the house since it happened to be one biological parent's property, it's going to get ugly.

"People should have more friends and relationships and support networks IN ADDITION TO their family."

That's my improved version of this article. I don't get why they spent thousands of words on the negative side. Basically all this article argues is: "We should not NEED the family as a support structure"

Now the big question is: How? I mean most of us are pretty busy with work. And it's not like western societies make it easy to meet new people after university ...

Getting rid of the societal live-to-work attitude. Probably through a combination of business initiatives, modest regulation, and private citizens changing the behavior of public society by example.

Indeed, child farms are better economically and environmentally. And we are already halfway there with schools. We just need to extend them to the rest of the day

I hope you are joking because you make Hitler and Pol Pot sound like having comparatively decent political programs.

Don't worry, the children will be grass fed.

Or fed to the grass, who knows

The kibbutz made a serious attempt to do this. Children were raised communally, and saw their parents only on occasion.

Results were mixed. Many reported significant psychological scarring. Others see it as strong predictors of achievement and independence.

In any case there is no more communal child rearing in any kibbutz today.

In a few years we will see headlines like "young people without a close family suffer from mental health problems, why?"

And any answer will be accepted other than the obvious correct one.

Seems like another provocative branding choice. Will this get spread because it it suggesting to "abolish the family", something that it documents at length is already a meme the right uses against the left.

And then people will point out that many of the things it asks for are pretty basic, like universal healthcare so you don't need to be on your parents health insurance.

> And then people will point out that many of the things it asks for are pretty basic, like universal healthcare so you don't need to be on your parents health insurance.

And then the other side will use this article to make their case that those things are gateway policies for insane communist radicalism.

Some say that "there's no such thing as bad publicity", but I think this article is a proof of the contrary. If you want people to take your reasonable ideas seriously, it's probably best not to dress them up in deranged clickbait.

You can have universal health care as many countries do, but even then, being a single mom is still very hard. This is something you may pull off but will try to avoid in advance.

I assumed the point for that was that people fall out with their families for a variety of good and bad reasons. Being pressured to stay on your families good side to retain health insurance seems barbaric in the same way forcing people to remain married, even when their partner is abusive is.

It sounds so bad, I can't quite believe its true, but maybe it only affects a small number of people catastrophically and the rest just struggle by.

Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

If you find yourself taking notes from 1984 and saying "that's a great idea", you should pause. Perhaps take a step back as you may have crossed the wrong line.

When I read this article, I get the impression that I'm watching a mass psychogenic illness unfold in real time

Not a metaphorical one either, but a real MPI

> I think that a revolution—a socialist revolution—will break down the family structure as we know it now. The woman, being freed from her menial position, either as the lowest-paid worker or as household slave, will be out of the home more. -Denise Oliver, Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971

"Will break down"? Why the future tense? China's Great Leap Forward took place in 1958-1962, and by abolishing the family and raising children communally, it "freed" their women to work more in the fields. How fulfilling that must have been.

> As professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies Kathi Weeks has written, the family, characterized by privatized care, the (heterosexual) couple unit, and biologically related kin, is “legislatively declared, legally defended, and socially prescribed” in the United States.

Just in the US? Not in Italy, France, Egypt, Algeria, China, India, Brazil, Canada, Russia, Mexico..?

It never ceases to amaze how these advocates of various revolutions are able to tactically ignore history and other countries.

> It never ceases to amaze how these advocates of various revolutions are able to tactically ignore history and other countries.

I think this has more to do with the difference between a good and a bad essay.

There is an argument to be made for and against the role of the family as an institution and where the modern American family stands in an historical and political context. Amusingly, modern families have weaker ties than ever before. The American vision of the nuclear family was already relatively exceptional with most having only weak ties with their extended family and often living very far and that was before the current high rate of divorces and separations.

This article is just failing at making an interesting point.

> It never ceases to amaze how these advocates of various revolutions are able to tactically ignore history and other countries.

So far I've observed that most "thinkers" (left, right, center) in the USA think as there is only the USA.

Is this satire or an April Fool's joke?

If not, is part 2: "abolish community and theory of mind"?

I think some writers push extremist utopian/dystopian ramblings as outrage bait to squeeze out ad $$ rather than contribute to prosocial, productive insightful discourse.

The editor of this magazine gives me strong Elsworth Toohey vibes.

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id...

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