About human nature and the family
An opinion from the Internet about human nature and the family:
“As someone who has studied human society cross-culturally, I can tell you that human nature hasn’t changed a jot in 10,000 years.
BTW, there is no such thing as a classical family. That is an ethnocentric notion. The nuclear family is a peculiar development that arose in the West with economic mobilism. The extended family model that came before it is a culturally relative product of a post-renaissance European agrarian take on it.”
You are right that human nature has not changed. We have always been selfish, egotistic, subjective, and individualistic. The insatiable, exploitative human ego — that breaks out of the Natural balance and homeostasis for serving itself at all cost — is the only thing that separates us from other animals, most notable from other developed primates.
But this human ego has been growing, intensifying through history, driving us from the original hunter-gatherer communities to today’s totally separated, narcissistic segregated humanity.
We have the whole human history with its recurring vicious cycles to demonstrate how the growing ego changes human culture, society, interconnections, trade, and everything we do, nothing else drives, changes the processes but the ever-intensifying ego.
Unique empirical natural scientists — that have been studying human nature in contrast to Nature’s balanced system describe this and they also describe the reason for this, what the evolutionary purpose of the ego is.
Regarding the “classical family,” it has nothing to do with the West or earlier human civilizations. The “family model” comes from Nature, we can see it in animal societies, it is simply a self-support unit for propagating the species, to nurture, educate, develop the offsprings, the next generations.
Originally this family supported, encompassed the whole tribe, community, today “my family” means “me”.
You can still observe how the original, natural, instinctive family worked, was built by observing indigenous people, even within Western societies like for example seeing the “Whanau” concept of the Maori in New Zealand or how multiple generations still live together, support each other in nations like India — until the growing ego will destroy their families as well, opening the state of needing to relearn, rebuild the family and in general mutual human interconnections above and against our inherent nature.