"We're Like Family"

One might hear the words as a representative for a company tries to make their business seem like an appealing place to work—"We're like family."  There might be positive intentions behind this, even if the idea does not match the real nature of a specific organization, but there are also sinister reasons a company might be accurately or falsely presented as a "family" of sorts.  Biological family bonds are not even in themselves anything to defend or crave or regard highly at all, for family relationships, other than those created by consensual marriage or procreation, are utterly involuntary.  Short of literal forced labor, one has a degree of freedom to enter or refrain from entering a workplace, making this somewhat different from true family already.

It is also that family does not deserve loyalty or praise simply by virtue of being family; they have to be rational and righteous to deserve anything more than the bare minimum required to honor their human rights.  Now, a corporate employee using the words "We're like family" had the chance to realize that family is not by necessity a positive thing and has perhaps considered this possibility, albeit probably not as a rationalist and thus only in the grip of assumptions rather than true knowledge.  Perhaps they did not.  Either way, as I like to point out, family of an immediate or extended kind can be one of the greatest sources of misery in this life.  It is possible for biological family to be positive, negative, or neutral, but in a world filled with mostly non-rationalists, it is always more likely that it will be negative.

The same is true of coworkers, managers, and employers for the same reason: it is always more probable that a given person will be irrational than not, perhaps expressing their stupidity in egoism, hypocrisy, and so on, because it takes initial effort to go from making assumptions to aligning with reason.  As long as rationalists are a minority, it will not be commonplace for biological family, which cannot be chosen outside of marriage or procreation, or coworkers, who can somewhat be "chosen" in the sense that a prospective employer can be rejected, to be worthy of deep personal respect or friendship.

A given company might still have workers and/or leadership that truly do foster relaxed, close, or otherwise positive relationships between the organization's members, not that being rational is the same as being genuinely friendly or inviting.  This might be what is meant if the phrase "We're a family" comes up in a job advertisement or interview.  There is nothing impossible about this being true since it is consistent with logical axioms.  However, these words can also be intentionally or otherwise (by idiots who believe it when it is false) used to make a company appear far more incredible than it really is or manipulate people into putting in more effort than their jobs require or deserve.

Perhaps financial desperation or personal willingness to tolerate bullshit long enough to get through a shift will bring someone who sees right through many uses of this phrase to accept a job offer anyway.  There is not anything inherently irrational about this.  It does not change that many businesses using this phrase likely have not at all thought rationalistically about the nature of family or are only trying to present an exaggerated or outright maliciously deceptive image to interviewees or new hires.  Family can be refreshing or family can be oppressive; a workplace can be pleasant without being explicitly like family and can be like family in all the worst kinds of ways, neither of which is likely what it is hoped that interviewees will focus on when the words "We're like family" are used in this context.