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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

> 3) in the past social, family and intimate stability were probably a lot more important than today

Many past societies did not have atomic families like we do today.

In fact, even couple-marriage is not _that_ old (several thousands of years)? I remember reading about this stuff in "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", which, while somewhat dated (125 years ago or so?) is quite interesting. Matrilineal societies, group marriage (i.e. being 'married' to all people in a certain category so that if you travel to another village you have people in your 'family' or 'marriage group' there even if you've never met them) and other arrangements.

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Even without the social contract. First time I held someone in my arms I had visions of life long companionship. Not everybody is wired this way but it's often programmed deep down inside of us. Marriage is just the social incarnation of that feeling IMO.

Also some people say that a lot of animals have similar emotional/biological needs. It's not just a matter of homo-* history it seems.

I'm not saying that there isn't something biological or authentic to it, but you probably saw a bunch of Disney movies and a bunch of other cultural messaging when you were a child that helped prime you to have this response.

Reminds me of this image:

https://i.redd.it/lr5rfu3paen61.jpg

I always have a big problem with this argument. To me the social protocol take roots in the emotional thus the biological. It's not really propaganda, it's self amplified reflection.

> Even without the social contract. First time I held someone in my arms I had visions of life long companionship

I would assume you were brought up in a modern cultural environment. That means your view of the world, your values, your expectations, your fantasies - are shaped by that upbringing.

So, your feelings are not good evidence that this is "programmed deep down inside of us".

Are you claiming that a desire for companionship with another human being is purely a modern social construct?

That seems a … bizarre opinion. Until industrialization, human relationships were directly tied to survival.

I claimed no such thing...

And, in fact you're making the point even more strongly, in that you seem to identify lifelong, formal, monogamous pairing with the potential for human companionship.

>In fact, even couple-marriage is not _that_ old (several thousands of years)?

Cities and written language and written laws and such are not that old either...

What was the case in some earlier societies shouldn't be a yardstick...

> "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State"

By Fredrick Engles, known most popularly when associated with his co-author Karl Marx. Who among their many philisophical ideas advocated things such as

- "All history is class warfare"

- Dialectical materialism that proved to be so wrong no one even knows about it anymore.

- Or my personal favorite that the communist revolution would come first to the most capitalist countries, when in fact the only countries that fell to communism were backward feudal societies or those that had communism forced on them by the Soviet Union.

My point if your source of information is Engles then I'd suggest checking out some resources from people haven't been quite so thoroughly eviscerated by actual reality when their ideas were put to any sort of test.

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