The Poisonous Impact Of Unconditional Affection For Family

Affection for family is treated by some as if it is the force that sustains human civilization, but an arbitrary love that is shown to family members simply because they are family members is actually a contributor to society's decay.  Any false or fallacious idea has the power to harm a given culture, of course, and a default affection for all family members, regardless of what they have done, has the power to deeply harm individuals without affecting society as a whole (such as when a person abused by his or her family is pressured to keep up appearances).  However, the poisonous impact of an unconditional affection for family that is embraced by default go far extend beyond this.

A gratuitous love of family can actually contribute to the intellectual and moral mediocrity and aimlessness in a culture at large.  Families are a part of society, and thus errors defended or assumed in the name of family have a potentially high chance to infect that society.  Perhaps not a single genuine rationalist needs to be told of the dangers of tolerating such errors, and only fools pretend like the vast majority of humans are anything other than intellectually incompetent or apathetic would deny it.  There is no evidence that the world as a whole was ever inhabited with a large number of rational people, families included.

In light of this, it should not be surprising that many parents believe or actively teach blatant fallacies--including the mere assumption that family deserves a sacred respect by default--and that their children are likely to tolerate at least some foolishness for the sake of maintaining superficial family peace.  If no ideas were evaluated positively or defended simply because family members believe them, some children who might never become intellectually autonomous on their own could begin to cling to the asinine ideologies of their parents.

Because of the idea that family deserves a special affection whether or not it truly deserved (an obvious contradiction), random irrational ideas go without criticism or refutation out of a desire to not offend a family member.  Children who grow into adults too stupid to forsake the idea teach their own children not to criticize them too harshly.  As a result, the cycle continues, and numerous families of fools contribute to an irrationalistic society that has no collective intention of either acknowledging its problems or resolving them--and thus many of the individuals that form a certain culture are vulnerable to ideological and personal harms they could otherwise avoid.

There is no reason--Biblical or strictly logical--to bestow a special love or respect upon parents or siblings due to biological connections that one has not chosen.  There can also be grave consequences when numerous families pressure their children into blindly perpetuating their own mistakes.  Anyone who wants a rational society must not promote any sort of default high regard for family, especially one that comes at the expense of just criticism and non-authoritarian reasoning.  It is never defensible when even a single family teaches otherwise, but a host of irrational families shielding themselves with positive assumptions about the nature of family is never constructive for any culture.