Week 17
Alienation and estrangement hurts the elder person more, and that’s why it should not be imposed lightly or at all.
Motion: THW cut off ties to one’s family and kin if they misbehaved
Role: Deputy Leader (opp.)
The Economist reported that a record number of people are cutting their ties off to family (or relatives) due to differing views on major issues, such as children, culture, economics, lifestyle, politics, religion and worldviews. One of the reasons is that people have grown independent of their relatives, as they get their income, perks and purpose in life from the digital sphere, nation-state or workplaces. The social fabric created by family and relatives has grown insignificant and thin. Typical of today is that if people travel to their relatives, they may stay overnight at a hotel instead of their relatives. That is how much standards of living have risen since 1981.
Conservative Parents Raising Liberal Children
The most obvious case of estrangement revolves around children who turn liberal during their college years and who turn their backs on their conservative parents. That’s what happens all the time between people who vote for Democrats or Republicans. It is probably less common that conservative children turn their backs on their liberal parents, but that could also happen apparently. In Europe, where the partisan system is more florid and patchwork (displaying different political colours), this development is less pronounced, but it can happen in Europe, too, as parties are wont today to form either leftwing/rightwing blocks or Con vs. Lib blocks. Anyone may end up in the “wrong” block. Populist parties provide a reason to disown their voters, but if their collective adherents now count in the millions, they cannot either be dismissed today as “rightwing extremism”. Extremism per definition involves less than 1 % of people.
Another big watershed is heteronormativity vs. other leanings in people’s reproductive lives. If a child is gay and a parent is straight (straight obviously for having born or sired the child in the first place), it may cause a rift in the relationship, if the parents are overly critical of the lifestyle of their offspring that does not focus on settling down, for instance. In its own right, I do not think that a bigger percentage of children born today are gay, but the figures are comparable with the past. It is just that the LGBT+ community has become far more vocal than what it was in the past and that may cause some friction.
Other Breakable Relations
Relations to aunts, cousins (once, twice or thrice removed), siblings and uncles are not frictionless, either. The same reasons that break up filial–parental relationships may cause breakup between horizontal relatives. Another layer is breakups that follow from breakups. When one family member breaks up ties with someone, the whole family may follow that example and cut ties to all in that other family. Which is wrong, of course. When we have a criminal in society, we only send that one person to a penitentiary and not his or her kin. The same should go for rifts between individuals. The only type of relatives that ends up unscathed is in-laws. They are usually protected by the fact that there is a relationship between two people with their respective families and that sends a protective “magnetic shield” over most members of the other person’s family.
A fairly good depiction of different family ties was in the TV show The Sopranos, where a lot of the Italian families had different kinds of feuds, fondnesses or frictions with each other. Tony Soprano did not get along with his sister Janice or mother Livia. Made men were often each other’s cousins or uncles. If someone died, all the others turned up for a funeral. The roots of all of that ran deep, all the way to the time when the families’ founding fathers had first immigrated to the US.
The Dance of Disinheritance
Like our leader on our side said, it is not like parties in estrangement are toothless. Cutting ties is a drastic measure, often given without prior warnings as a one-off punishment, and therefore it is inherently unjust. People cut off ties to each other easier than they would be, say, sacked from their tenure or workplace. There, their treatment would be much more clement. For these reasons, we do not see it unjustified that a parent who gets cut off – and cannot get back what once was severed, after several attempts – is entitled to disinherit his or her children due to the other one’s unilateral unjustness. Just like alienation and estrangement send a passive-aggressive signal, disinheriting a relative sends a countersignal.
How disinheriting goes about is another matter entirely. In some nation-states, disinheriting is far easier by the law than in others. But everywhere it is possible to bequeath or will at least a part of one’s fortune to someone else than family or relatives. Sangios crassior aqua, and that’s what people seem to have forgotten. With family and relatives, we need to have a thicker nose and skin than with others, because they’re the only ones we’ve got, as opposed to the myriad possibilities in other human relations.
Perustelu(t)&puolustelu(t): Kokemuksia ja mielipiteitä jakavassa aiheessa pidän sukulaisten puolta vaistomaisesti. Edelläni kulkeva puhuja voi hehkuttaa perhe- ja sukulaisuussuhteiden hyviä puolia ja jäljessäni kulkeva voi hehkuttaa edelleen perinnöttä jättämisen helppoutta, mitä en itse käsittele kovin tarkasti. Näin koko puolen paketti on valmiina.
Polar Ice Standpoints Society 