The central thesis of this essay is that we owe a profound appreciation for the sacred bond of family, not merely as a social construct but as an existential debt that can never be fully repaid. The obligations we owe to our immediate biological kin are not burdens but rather sources of profound meaning and grace, for it is in the impossibility of ever fully discharging these debts that true love and loyalty reside. In contrast to the atomized and transactional nature of modern society, we must see the beauty of embracing the particularities of familial ties, eschewing the hollow generalities that erode genuine human connection.
As part of an essay on why I’m monogamous that I’m in the process of writing, I stumbled across an example from European literature I felt was poignant enough that it deserved an essay of its own. That is the contrast between the 1812 work by Johanna David Wyss and the 1719 novel by Daniel Defoe; “The Swiss Family Robinson” and “Robinson Crusoe”. In particular how these two books act as useful symbols for the importance of family.
Both of these novels follow very similar plot structures where a ship crashes on a deserted Island due to a storm. In both novels, the ship is left broken and the respective “families” are left alone in nature, with little but what they could rescue from the ship to begin the process of restarting their own version of civilization. However, the differences in narrative tone and theme could not be further from each other. In fact, despite on their surface sharing many similarities they are fundamentally different stories. Where “The Swiss Family Robinson” is at its core a story of a family coming together in the face of adversity and creating a life worth living, “Robinson Crusoe” - or at least the part where Robinson is alone - is a narrative descent into madness; Robinson goes so far as to name the island he is stranded on “The Island of Despair”. The purpose of this essay is not to write a comparative literary critique of these two books but instead to highlight what I think is a common theme in both literature and much more importantly my own life. Humans are social creatures, we are not individuals striving against the uncaring universe on our own. In reality, the closer our lives get to that of total individual freedom the more lonely and hollow they become. Any worldview that places the lone Human individual above everything else risks losing sight of one of life's greatest pleasures. Family.
Because family is at odds with a framing of life as the search for ultimate freedom. At least freedom as someone like Ayn Rand - and in my opinion most of the world - would conceive of it. “Freedom: To want nothing, to expect nothing, to depend on nothing.” - taken from her 1943 novel “The Fountainhead”
Instead family is a reminder that although freedom is necessary there are other similarly deep biological/moral necessities to life. To expect nothing and to depend on nothing means to be totally exposed to the insanity of existence with no comfort but what you can bribe from your fellow man. Instead, family is a source of immense conflict and obligation where others' wants, expectations, and dependencies all constrain our actions and color life with meaning. You cannot, easily, invent a new family because at its core what makes our families so important is the ironclad nature of their bonds. These obligations are created at the moment of our conception and cannot ever be fully repaid. My mere existence as a human is evidence of my dependency.
The necessities of modern industrial life have withered away most of our other binding obligations and replaced them with faceless commercial exchange. As I articulated in my essay on one life materialism I’ve accepted as my religion the weight of future generations and the only way to live up to this belief is to push for humanity to expand across the Universe. The deeply particular and personal nature of the pre-capitalist world could never create the coordination of millions to accomplish this goal. But I’m equally committed to trying to retain what scraps of meaning can survive this higher purpose.
I do not want to paint too much over the details by discussing the general, for millions of people their families are not a source of meaning but instead suffering. There is abuse and betrayal of every kind, as Tolstoy wrote in the opening lines of “Anna Karenina”: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." A fundamental goal of mine is to focus less on the multiplicity of misery and more on the singleness of purpose and joy. I, like most people I know, have been blessed with a wonderful family. As I approach the stage in life where my future wife and I will be creating our own family, I'm beginning to realize more and more what a miracle that is, and how essential it is for everyone my age to nourish and grow our own families as we age.
Economic Growth and Depersonalization
As the details and complexity of life have grown, relationships have shifted from being ones of perpetual bond to ones of transactional exchange (see Durkheim for a useful perspective on what I’m talking about). The need for the ability to balance the book on obligation is essential. When I go to the store, for example, it would be beyond frustrating to have to maintain a close personal relationship with the cashier to secure myself a good price. What I want is a faceless automaton whose job it is to efficiently and correctly charge me for my goods. But the need for faceless, nonobligatory interaction for our economic survival does not mean that it is a source of human flourishing in our own private lives. Instead, I believe that it is at the heart of real human misery.
This will almost certainly come as a shock to anyone in my circle but I find many of the ideological and philosophical underpinnings of Liberal-Capitalism to be deeply dehumanizing in the sense that they in a core way reject what Humans are. I identify as both a Liberal and a Capitalist because I think that atomized economic exchange is essential to economic growth - and thus population growth since fundamentally a population can only grow so far as an economy can support it - but I do not think they are useful ways of living your personal life.
Modern society is fundamentally one of atomization, individualization, and standardization. I do not inherit either the crimes or accomplishments of my parents. To see the degree to which as a society we view ourselves as completely sovereign individuals I recommend you read either of these two essays I’ve written. Even the concept of following in the footsteps of your parents has developed a new term “Nepo Baby” because the idea of intergenerational correlation in anything is deeply uncomfortable.
Nothing we consume was created by a single person and is instead the process of an extremely complex supply chain where even if someone wanted to they could not construct everything themselves. Milton Friedman famously made this point about a pencil but I prefer this person who attempted to make a sandwich from scratch on YouTube as an example of how complicated and necessary a sort of faceless Capitalism is to our existence.
Before I dive into the rest of the article which is a defense of favoring the particular over the general I want to explain why modern society requires faceless corporations and emphasize that nothing I’m writing here is a rejection of that need. The scale of human suffering if we turned to a society of boutique artisans would be staggering. Famine on a scale the Human race has never experienced would send us millennia back in time and possibly doom life in general.
To highlight how useful both atomization and standardization are to our lives, I want to give the example of shopping at Target.
When I walk into Target the store is lined with mass-produced items. In fact, stepping into any Target in the US you will see an almost identical collection of goods at nearly identical prices. I push an identical red cart around the store and can place any of the items on the shelves in my cart without having to negotiate with any employees. In reality, I could be hated by every single person who works in the store and they will simply smile at me. The only restrictions on what I can buy are imposed by the wage I collect from employers who do not even know the stores I shop at. Once I’m done shopping I can check out without having to consider who is my cashier - increasingly there isn’t even a cashier - and they will accept my dollars from one of a host of replaceable financial intermediaries without any problem. Even just the dollar as an idea represents the ultimate form of standardization because, in its simple real number form, I am able to capture a host of complicated value ratios automatically. Changes in the price of one good are able to silently and with little noise capture the real opportunity cost of that good.
In his famous 1945 academic paper, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” Friedrich A. Hayek expresses this idea beautifully. This quote is quite long but I believe the idea deserves enough space.
“Fundamentally, in a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coördinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coordinate the parts of his plan. It is worth contemplating for a moment a very simple and commonplace instance of the action of the price system to see what precisely it accomplishes. Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say, tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all his without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all.”
In short: There are huge gains from specialization and only a faceless system such as the price mechanism allows for sufficient coordination. The result of this over the last couple of centuries is that society - and thus philosophy which is fundamentally downstream of culture - has been making a meandering path towards a belief in Humans as at their core autonomous creatures. If you go on sites like Reddit or read the news it won’t take long to come across people attacking what remains of our interpersonal obligations. Ideas like national loyalty and religious identity are replaced by more vague and thus less demanding concepts like internationalism and humanism not because people care about the philosophical failings of Catholicism, for example, but because the obligations that are required to be a Catholic simply do not jell with the way they would want to live their lives.
I have often fallen victim to exactly this line of thinking. The most central reason that I stopped being a Mormon had nothing to do with the truthfulness of its theology but instead directly with the huge time commitments it required of its members. I talk about the obligations we owe to the future in this essay but I don’t think it stops there. Because while we are alive these obligations exist as well. What I may have missed in that essay and something I want to hammer home is the degree to which these obligations are a thing of beauty and that by abandoning them you are not only doing something morally wrong as I argued but you are also inviting huge unhappiness into your life.
Paradox
But I do not believe we are autonomous creatures at heart. Humans are evolved social creatures as expertly explained by the biologist Edward O. Wilson in his 2012 book “The Social Conquest of Earth”. As I mentioned in the introduction, a non-academic and deeply intuitive way of seeing this exactly is by comparing the stories of “The Swiss Family Robinson” and “Robinson Crusoe”. The major distinguishing characteristic between those two narratives is the existence of a community in one and isolation in the other. It is no wonder that as community has declined our lives have become empty and hollow. A major driver of this is how chaotic and terrifying social interaction in real life is; I have no idea how what I say will be interpreted and I cannot simply turn the TV off if I become suitably uncomfortable. Many young people today spend so little time with people in real life they have basically no idea how to navigate conflict. Even as the internet has unleashed a torrent of interpersonal hate, in-person conflict seems to be trending downward - at least anecdotally. Language is increasingly centered around trying to reduce tension as much as humanly possible. When conflict does emerge it tends to take the form of spasmodic and irrational release, almost like a damn breaking or overflowing.
Counter-intuitively I don’t think the decline in conflict is good for people. Conflicts can never be reduced to zero and learning how to navigate a person screaming in your face is something that people should simply master or be at risk of being broken at any moment. If we fill our lives with sanitized media which we can always turn off we condition ourselves to feel overwhelmed when we cannot do this with reality. I cannot even begin to count the number of times I’ve heard - or even expressed - the sentiment of “I’m just going to try and ignore them to avoid having a fight”. Ghosting is deeply symbolic of this since we know that there are no bonds that connect us with the people we date. There is little downside to simply blocking a person's number and effectively deleting them from your Universe.
But this style of living sucks, most obligations don’t exist because we arbitrarily decided they do. Obligations exist because there is a person on the other side who wants or needs something. I’m loyal to my fiance not because I believe God has told me I should be, or even because I’m afraid I would face real repercussions, but because I know being unloyal would hurt her. This stretches across all of Human society. When you break an obligation to a person, an institution, or even a nation, you are not committing some victimless crime. That obligation existed for a reason and was often the most efficient solution to a real problem. Every plan you flake on or person your ghost is an unseen disappointment. The problem is that these bonds each individually suck. Of course, my life would be better if everything remained the same but I could behave however I want!! But wanting to live in a society like that is deeply childish. I need a multitude of people to quietly and thoughtfully fulfill their side of the social contract to live in this world. Being asked to participate in our collective survival is not unfair; it is almost the platonic definition of fairness. Thus, we live in what I think of as a paradox where we require both individualization and communalization to survive - let alone prosper.
Family as Debt
The ultimate form of this obligation and the one that I believe in most firmly is the bond that is owed by one blood relative to another. In particular, the immediate nuclear family. This is controversial as the belief that families are built not born is widely popular. Maya Angelou for example is quoted as saying “Family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs. The ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile, and who love you no matter what.” I don’t think she is wrong but I believe an attitude like this is almost always a recipe for disaster. It is, of course, possible to build a new family but it is always at risk of imploding because what binds it together is a mutual interest, not a mutual commitment. I’ve seen enough “families” in my life collapse due to the smallest squabbles. I have even lost people I thought of as almost family over the dumbest fights imaginable because there was nothing real binding us together. Our relationships were one of convenience and not obligation, meaning the moment this new synthetic family became inconvenient it died.
In Chapter 3 of his enormous tome “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” the American anthropologist David Graeber quotes the Satapatha Brahmana: “In being born every being is born as debt owed to the gods, the saints, the Fathers, and to men”. It’s this debt, which we can never repay, which binds us to our parents and our family. I know the lengths I would go to in order to ensure my parents ate and I have no doubt they would reciprocate the same for me. I exist only because my parents chose to have me and repeatedly throughout my life they chose to favor me over everyone but my brothers. It was the debt my Mom owed me that obligated her to not put me - a fat baby - down and pick up one of the starving orphans from war-torn Mozambique. There is such beauty in this love of the particular which is lost in the glorification of the general. I simply cannot repay this debt, no matter how extravagant I was because everything I have is to an ultimate and irrefutable degree owed to my parents and in some deep sense theirs.
I think a lot of the anxiety around the centrality of family has at its center a terror in the stakes at play. If my framing is accurate and blood families owe a sort of infinite debt to each other then failing to live up to this obligation is deeply morally wrong. Families experience abuse, collapse, betrayal, and a host of other crimes every day across the world. Parents let down their children as children let down their parents and there is a broad hesitancy to rub in the face of someone who is struggling with a truth that they already know. Elites are slow to even articulate that ideas such as having children within wedlock are good, not because they don’t think it is, but because there is almost no point. Why make a person who is struggling feel worse? Why punch down? But I believe the truth should be spoken irrespective of who it stings. Biological family is unique, the fact this bond can be betrayed only speaks to the sacredness of this obligation.
There is only one way to expand this loyalty and that is through childbirth. Because when two people have a child what they do is both metaphorically and literally become one person. In Mathew 19.5 Jesus, quoting the Jewish Law, says “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”. I think there is deep truth in this. If I have a family with only one woman we become one person in eternity. There is no biologically separable entity of myself and my wife, instead every descendent of mine is as much her as it is me. In a sense, our selves are fused, together as one person, we echo in eternity.
This is what separates “The Swiss Family Robinson” from even a book like “Lord of the Flies” where the characters are not alone. Each member of a biological family is part of a tightly woven braid and their success is at its core my success. I think this idea makes us uncomfortable because it is in tension with the type of worldview required for faceless modern capitalism and thus the wealth of the developed world. I don’t want my banker to be stealing money to feed his parents. I want him to function as a replaceable cog and in exchange I will do the same. No resolution to this tension exists, other than for each of us to just live inside it.
Debt as Grace
Later in the same chapter, David Graeber quotes the British sociologist Geoffrey Ingham “In all Indo-European languages, words for ‘debt’ are synonymous with those for ‘sin’ or ‘guilt’”. The full book can be found here and if you are interested in a deep examination of human society I highly recommend it - in particular the first and last few chapters.
A fear that comes from the infinite obligations of the family is that this debt is in some way a sin; It is something that we should redeem ourselves of. Quoting Graeber quoting the Rig Veda, “Let us drive away the evil effects of bad dreams, just as we pay off our debts”. However, I think sin is a more complicated idea than we tend to credit it for. Even if what we owe is some original sin that no amount of good deeds can repay I don’t think we should fret. Because it is exactly here that grace as I understand it lives. When something is forgivable there is no need for grace. Only when an obligation is so enormous you cannot hope to fall short is it needed. I have had my share of conflicts with my family and I will continue to fight with them right up until the day we are all dead. But this changes nothing, I love them more than I love my own life or the lives of anyone else.
If I succeed they succeed and if I fail I know they will be there to always have my back. When I look at people like Andrew and Tristen Tate for all of the disgust I hold their worldview in, I cannot deny the love the brothers hold for each other. Loyalty to your family is a virtue of the highest caliber.
This isn’t an essay where I present any solution, just merely a love letter to the family I was born into and the family I’m excited to create. A call to appreciate the ultimate obligation and a realization of our ultimate inability to ever live up to it. In its simplest form, this essay is a recognition of the power of grace when met with beautiful sin.
Peter Banks
