I think part of what is scary about the family is that it is so strong. It’s much more self sufficient and self contained than other social arrangements. It needs all forms of government less, needs less social and legal intervention, needs less assistance, less provision, less medical and psychological care. It provides for itself more than any other social arrangement. It makes us less dependent on technology, businesses, government, military, law enforcement, education, medicine, therapy, social workers, hired help, and so many other institutions.
Not that I’m knocking these things; they all have their uses. But the family makes us less needy, less dependent, because it gives us so much in itself. It contains the germ of all these things, the source. It contains within itself the most precious and useful of human technologies. The family is self-generating, like an independent, productive state.
It’s nice to have all those other things, but the family doesn’t require them. It predates all of them, and it will outlast all of them. And that makes it a threat.
That’s why utopian schemes have almost always included the disruption of the family. It’s too strong a competitor, too divided a loyalty. And you can’t have your ideal state existing at the pleasure and largesse of some other, higher, more durable institution. That would defeat its reason for being. So it has to go. You have to prove that the family isn’t needed; make it a product of government and technology and education, rather than the reverse.
The family has a certain unforgiving, implacable harshness to it. It doesn’t respect our desire to be independent from it. It’s a product of selection, forged in the fires of limitless biological time and imprinted into our very natures. It was born out of the chaos of a billion generations of death and struggle.
It is an ancient and powerful god, a hidden power we prefer to keep buried and asleep and safely under our social control, even as we mine its energy to feed the fires of the technological superstructure we’ve built atop its slumbering titanic shoulders.
We fear anyone who openly invokes its primordial name and stirs the restless beast. It isn’t polite, it isn’t politic, and it spreads uncertainty and unrest through all that we have erected as a castle above it to prove our superiority.
It endangers our godhood, our Olympus, when someone invokes the ancient creed and stirs the depths of Tartarus. People should be frightened to be in the presence of something like that.
Making Nobody Happy 