MC #8 – Membership and Discourse [2 pages]

As we have said, no marriage can exist in isolation because marriage is a social institution and not a private or individual one.

In addition, we live in a universe that is indifferent to our existence, which means spouses find themselves responsible for taking care of themselves and their families whether they want to be or not.

The way we take care of ourselves and our families is with communities of people who can help us with discursive knowledge to take care of the arrays of concerns life produces for us in order to avoid the pain, despair, failure and early death caused by not taking care of them.  Hence we rely on realtors to sell us our house, doctors to take care of our bodies, teachers to educate our children, etc.

And the way we organize, or arrange, this level of care for our marriages, families and children is by belonging or producing membership in different communities.

All marriages must belong to a community or set of communities that embody the discourses of care needed to take satisfactory care of our most fundamental human concerns, such as medicine, investing and engineering.  If we don’t belong, we will die, literally.

If we don’t belong to a powerful community or set of them, our capacity to take care of our concerns will be low, perhaps even too low, to sustain the marriage. 

If we belong to weak communities, or are not really welcomed into powerful ones, our marriage will be mediocre through a lack of shared thinking and practices that are powerful. 

Membership is fundamental to both spiritual and pragmatic concerns of human beings, families and marriages.

The capacity to act sociably/ethically in a community is a source of tremendous power for fulfilling an ambition.  It is a source of dignity and a virtue for couples with ambition.  The trick in designing our practices is to seek an ever-changing harmony in combining our need for autonomy and taking care of personal concerns with the need for belonging and gaining essential power from the community.

Sometimes we want and need to behave selfishly to take care of our concerns, or we will suffer.  Sometimes we want and need to behave altruistically to take care of the concerns of another, or they will suffer. 

To accumulate power for fulfilling our ambition, we need to learn to see how acting selfishly can also be altruistic at the same time.  We cannot help others if we are not taken care of.

We also need to see how being altruistic can also be selfish.  We cannot help ourselves if others are not obligated to help us after we help them.

Our ability to blend selfish altruism with altruistic selfishness is a fundamental and powerful consideration for designing action in a family or community.