My imaginary ideology: neo-familism - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Any other minor ideologies.
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#14625707
I think my imaginary ideology right now is a form of familism. It would be a form of democracy that works like this. Only members of a "cohesive family" are allowed to vote. This system is opt-in so by default, people don't get to vote. They need to apply first. If any member of the family breaks ties for any reason, everyone in the family cannot vote for several years. The only exception is when making a new family unit.

I don't really like homosexuals but for the sake of political expediency, the only requirements to establish a family would be to have two people serving as the heads of the family and the people under them are their biological or adopted children. The government would not actually manage the nature or rules of the family at all, it would simply check whether the people in it have maintained their declaration of cohesion. There would be a time limit on forming new families barring things like death etc.

The point of course would be to promote the traditional family by making sure that voters are part of a functional family. Like I wrote in another thread, some social liberals imagine that we should be in a form of brotherhood with each other and yet they assume we would not be in brotherhood with our own blood. I think such imaginings misunderstand human nature. If people can't get along with their own family they probably shouldn't be telling other people how to get along with strangers. Certainly there are exceptions to this but at the end of the day, not being able to vote doesn't have much of an impact upon an individual, it's the aggregate effect upon a large society that would matter.
#14625709
In all of this you fail to explain why the traditional family is important or should be maintained.

Who we are born to is accidental, why on earth should we be demanded to tie ourselves to them in order to receive political freedoms?

It amuses me that in the middle of creating your implausible system you still bow to the political expediency of allowing gays into your little traditional family.

I must say we truly have won the gay marriage battle if you can't even see getting away from it in your own hypothetical.
#14625714
You also misunderstand the origin of the modular nuclear family. It is a relatively recent innovation to accommodate the worker requirements of early industrial capitalism.
#14630926
To make family members stay together against their will, to make loving and caring for each other mandatory and deciding who can vote upon this principle is probably worse than everything ever implemented as a political system. Mussolini's Italy was probably more humane and free than a country that would base its system upon your idea. Being more totalitarian in nature than the founder of fascism, an ideology where the state is literally god, being omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent is something worth of notice.

However, totalitarian is maybe not the perfect word to describe this. This attitude is more tribal than authoritarian. Not my cup of tea.
#14630939
By essentially forcing people into family structures you are breaking down trust and altruism. If I remain in my family for political reasons rather than for reasons of love etc., I am likely to feel no particular attachment to the family. This breaks down the 'traditional' family structure which is largely maintained by biological feelings of altruism. You can't just shove people together and demand that they love each other.
#14630986
No one is forced into a family structure here. They would just need to be in a family structure to vote. Most people don't vote anyway. The idea is to great a mechanism that encourages people to connect family with government and the greater community at large.
#14631019
Although I support traditional family policies (it should be much harder to get a divorce than it currently is in most Western countries, especially the English-speaking ones) I think sometimes family cohesion is hard to maintain even when strong efforts are made. The demands of the capitalist economy and the concomitant individualism it creates means that families become less cohesive simply as a result of labor mobility and similar factors.

I think changes to the economic structure would need to happen along with any legal reforms to promote familism. For example, more emphasis on healthy local economies which would mean opposing globalization.
#14631040
Hong Wu wrote:No one is forced into a family structure here. They would just need to be in a family structure to vote. Most people don't vote anyway. The idea is to great a mechanism that encourages people to connect family with government and the greater community at large.


Correct, no one is sticking a gun to anyone's head here but that is not what I was saying. I said "effectively forcing". Your policy is an example of pseudo force, which is where someone is offered a choice between A and B but one of these options is so outrageous or harmful that any rational person would choose the other. For example, when offered a choice between your money and your life, if rational (if you had your real self interest in mind) you would choose to give up your money. In situations like this we would generally describe the person in question as "having no choice."

It is true that we live in an age of political apathy (however your statement that most people don't vote is incorrect in 57.5% (http://bipartisanpolicy.org/library/2012-voter-turnout/) of Americans voted and in 2015 66.1% of the British population voted (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general ... slide.html)) however any rational individual would choose to vote, as it gives you at least some power to determine your ruler (within the bonds of the capitalist system).

This policy of yours therefore constitutes pseudo-force.

Furthermore, even if we choose not to call this force it is still the case that families will not longer be based on altruism and love, but will instead be based on rational and political self interest. This will erode trust between family members.
#14631044
Left Behind wrote:Furthermore, even if we choose not to call this force it is still the case that families will not longer be based on altruism and love, but will instead be based on rational and political self interest. This will erode trust between family members.

Good post but I would contest this part in particular. Although I was probably hasty to say that most people don't vote, the right to vote is not actual a vital part of most people's well-being. Statistically, the vote of any individual (or even a small collection of individuals' votes, like a family's votes) are not significant in deciding elections. So the coercive factor here would be how it offends people's senses of shame and pride. No actual harm would be done so I would not call it pseudo-force and I don't think it would do anything to harm altruism and love either. On the contrary, when people have an incentive to try and make things work, the mind often finds ways to make it work. When there is an incentive to break apart (as essentially exists today, which Piccolo noted) they are more likely to find reasons to break apart.
#14631106
Hong Wu wrote:Good post

Thanks

Hong Wu wrote:the right to vote is not actual a vital part of most people's well-being. Statistically, the vote of any individual (or even a small collection of individuals' votes, like a family's votes) are not significant in deciding elections.

Yes, that is indeed a statistical fact. This is not a case of extreme pseudo-force, however in a choice between having no say in who rules over you and having some small degree of influence, any truly rational person would find it outrageous to pick the first option. It is a simple cost vs benefit equation. Thus there is a small degree of pseudo-force involved, equivalent to the choice between being punched in the stomach or given 5 dollars.

(It could possibly be argued that the property of significance of a single vote is dramatically increased when part of a larger set, perhaps the significance of a set leads to the significance of its members (votes). However this sounds dubious so don't take it too seriously.)

Hong Wu wrote:So the coercive factor here would be how it offends people's senses of shame and pride. No actual harm would be done

Even if we accept that the only harm done is to shame and pride, then couldn't this be considered real harm as well? Surely we aren't just talking in a physical sense, the emotional harm done to a racial or religious minority through segregation or the embarrassment which results from being stripped naked and hung from a tree is surely of some significance. Taking away someone's vote is taking away a sense of self worth, a feeling that you have a say in the governance of the country. This is a clear example of emotional harm, and would thus constitute some form of pseudo-force.

Furthermore, stripping a citizen of the right to vote (regardless of whether or not they will actually consider voting) could potentially lead to unrest. The right to vote serves to pacify the populace, by giving the impression that it is the populace who is ruling the country.

Hong Wu wrote:On the contrary, when people have an incentive to try and make things work, the mind often finds ways to make it work.

Interesting point, but I am unsure about this. This seems like an assertion. However even if your claim about the mind is accepted is there any way that an artificial compromise which "makes things work" could compare to 'the real deal' of genuine emotions? In terms of there being "an incentive to make things work" how would you measure whether or not a family was "cohesive" besides someone leaving?

On another note, how would you define what a family is if you do so purely on the basis of blood then aren't you ignoring the significance of friendships or bonds which are not biological?
#14631114
Left Behind wrote:Even if we accept that the only harm done is to shame and pride, then couldn't this be considered real harm as well? Surely we aren't just talking in a physical sense, the emotional harm done to a racial or religious minority through segregation or the embarrassment which results from being stripped naked and hung from a tree is surely of some significance. Taking away someone's vote is taking away a sense of self worth, a feeling that you have a say in the governance of the country. This is a clear example of emotional harm, and would thus constitute some form of pseudo-force.

I guess that is a form of harm but I don't think it's a type of harm that society needs to abstain from handing out.

Left Behind wrote:Furthermore, stripping a citizen of the right to vote (regardless of whether or not they will actually consider voting) could potentially lead to unrest. The right to vote serves to pacify the populace, by giving the impression that it is the populace who is ruling the country.

They would have that impression, so long as they are in coherent families most of the time. The loss of a voting privilege would be temporary and fixable.

Left Behind wrote:Interesting point, but I am unsure about this. This seems like an assertion. However even if your claim about the mind is accepted is there any way that an artificial compromise which "makes things work" could compare to 'the real deal' of genuine emotions? In terms of there being "an incentive to make things work" how would you measure whether or not a family was "cohesive" besides someone leaving?

It's just my belief, I think it's pretty well evidenced across many fields but I don't have sources that attempt to prove the theory on hand. It's also not necessary to decide what forms up a cohesive family or not, every family's situations and differences are unique. If they can't work it out amongst themselves well enough to maintain a declaration of cohesion then they probably suffer from severe differences.

Left Behind wrote:On another note, how would you define what a family is if you do so purely on the basis of blood then aren't you ignoring the significance of friendships or bonds which are not biological?

Yes, with the possible exception of adoption, other kinds of bonds are not as significant.
#14631120
I'm sure all the children getting abused by family members in any number of ways would sigh a deep relief when the state stepped in to give their abusers as much reason to keep them in their clutches as possible.

Some of the most horrific monsters I know of are regular voters.
#14631132
The Immortal Goon wrote:I'm sure all the children getting abused by family members in any number of ways would sigh a deep relief when the state stepped in to give their abusers as much reason to keep them in their clutches as possible.

Some of the most horrific monsters I know of are regular voters.

Thanks, I hadn't even thought of how it might discourage child abuse, which would in theory diminish the associated problems along with it.
#14631257
This is just idle fantasy. Universal adult citizen suffrage is the only game in town. Whether women vote is not that important in its effects. Of course it would be highly indicative of a society that they choose to exclude women. In modern liberal societies women are more liberal than men, but in Conservative societies women are more Conservative that men. So a Conservative society that chose to disallow women from voting would actually make the electorate more liberal and hence more likely to vote to give women back the vote. Universal male suffrage has really been the only game in town since the first world war. The fact that women didn't get the vote till 1971 is not really important to the underling pattern its universal suffrage or dictatorship all other options are off the table.

You can play around at the margins,excluding people in prison, people convicted of a criminal offence, but its not going to effect the result in major ways. Of course the problem with universal suffrage is that it may not give you the result you want, the result that you think is right and just, but the whole point about a voting system is that the losers accept the result as legitimate. Lenin tried to change the electorate to give the right result. This was the point of the Soviets, they excluded large numbers of people. They thought if we exclude the Capitalists and the aristocrats the right will get less votes. They gave Peasant soviets a fifth the weighting of Workers Soviets, but in the end it was just a farce. The Soviet union was in reality a dictatorship from the day it started. But modern Communists still want these fake forms of democracy.

Similarly with Libertarians, they don't like the results that democracy produces so they think why can't we change the electorate to get the result we want? Perhaps we could bring back a property requirement, that would mean the left would get less votes. This family voting nonsense is just another silly time wasting wheeze get the result you want. Because as I said the whole point of a vote is that the losers except the result as legitimate. There's no going back to the past, its universal suffrage or dictatorship.
#14631305
Hong Wu wrote:I guess that is a form of harm but I don't think it's a type of harm that society needs to abstain from handing out.

So the government can freely implement racial segregation and freely hang nude people from trees?

Hong Wu wrote:They would have that impression, so long as they are in coherent families most of the time. The loss of a voting privilege would be temporary and fixable.

True, that was a minor point I made.

Hong Wu wrote:It's just my belief, I think it's pretty well evidenced across many fields but I don't have sources that attempt to prove the theory on hand.

Well, without sources, we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one then I suppose.

Hong Wu wrote: It's also not necessary to decide what forms up a cohesive family or not, every family's situations and differences are unique. If they can't work it out amongst themselves well enough to maintain a declaration of cohesion then they probably suffer from severe differences.

So the method of deciding whether a family cohesive is them being able to make some kind of declaration, have you ever heard of lying for mutual self interest? In other words, in order to maintain their voting rights the members of any given 'family' will happily declare that they are cohesive. Even if they hate each other most of the time, this declaration will bring them together temporarily. Furthermore, in making such a declaration how are we to way up the opinions of children against the opinions of adults, such as in the case of child abuse which T.I.G mentioned. Surely a case like this would necessitate some form of government inspection which would of course necessitate the definition of a cohesive family.
Last edited by Left Behind on 10 Dec 2015 21:30, edited 1 time in total.
#14631313
Hong Wu wrote:Sorry but I stopped reading when you accused me of wanting to hang nude people from trees. Protip: put that kind of thing at the end of your post, not at the beginning.


Surely you understand that this is an example of the kind of policy a state could freely pursue if it didn't take emotional harm into account?

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