The Questions · the collective · the collective soul
What builds that shared soul?
A family has something people are willing to call a soul. It is not sentiment that builds it, and it is not time served.
Duty.
The names inside a family — parent, child — are bundles of duty, and to accept the name is to owe the conduct it requires.
A person does not belong to only one collective, and you have only so much duty to spend. Where you spend it first is the truest thing about you.
What this settles
Which makes the soul of a family measurable by something other than what it says about itself. Duty is finite and it is spent somewhere. Watch where a household’s people point theirs and you have the strength of the thing — not in what it professes but in what it is actually paying for.
Not this question
So what holds against a lean?
Also in this footing, and a different question. That one is about the self inside the room. This one is about what the room is built out of.
Also asked as
- Is your family collective you, your spouse, your kids — a nuclear unit with its own soul and its own deciders?
Where this is worked out
Family Collectives — Parenting
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Nothing on this page is composed. Every sentence in the answer is drawn from the pieces listed above. Where a claim is compressed, it is compressed from one of them and adds nothing they do not say.
The family collective
What builds a family's shared soul, where its people point their duty, and what a self standing inside one holds against being leaned. 2 of the 3 here have been worked through; the rest are on the map and not yet walked.
- So what holds against a lean?walked
- Is a marriage one relationship, or many?answered, not written up