We are all aware of the politics within families and how they work; whether there is someone you have to treat well, someone with secrets you have to ignore, ways of being and traditions to follow. Even today there are countries where the strata of society into which you are born cannot be betrayed. One wonders though what people get out of such families and if there is real strength in always towing the line?
Look at what happens when we increase the scale and have fifty million families and the same dynamics are exposed though now on a countrywide scale. The same kinds of strata, the people you have to listen to, the same ways in which people are defined and designated a position and the same kinds of opprobrium heaped upon those who do not conform.
And the reason it matters is not the trite one, that there are some people who don’t want to work or want to smoke marijuana all their lives, but the far more terrible one that when people revolt there are those ready to kill them. Because everyone has a place it is easy to make that place one where they are killed, brutalized, demeaned.
You cannot rule a family without implications for your nation.