It discourages you from making friends (“family is the only good space”), which in turn makes you more dependent on your family.
To be more precise, it discourages you from making friends outside your family whom you do not incorporate into your family. But it also encourages you to make friends inside your family, and to incorporate friends from outside into your family. “Dependent” is not a neutral way of phrasing this. It would be better to say it makes you more integrated with your family, and less integrated with people and institutions outside of your family.
Certainly there are advantages and disadvantages to this pro-family heuristic compared to various alternative heuristics. But you both appear to tacitly endorse the “anyone of power is evil” heuristic, although that too has advantages and disadvantages.
I guess it depends on what counts as “family”, and how do people live. If there is a large extended family living close, so you can choose from a hundred people (and it is considered a valid choice to prefer e.g. your second cousins to your parents), that might give you enough options...
Not quite, since “making friends” requires higher than average trust anyway. Indeed, friendships in low-trust societies can be unusually intimate, relative to what we would naïvely expect. What it does clearly discourage is having a large network of casual acquaintances and loose relationships whom you can expect to successfully cooperate with.
It discourages you from making friends (“family is the only good space”), which in turn makes you more dependent on your family.
To be more precise, it discourages you from making friends outside your family whom you do not incorporate into your family. But it also encourages you to make friends inside your family, and to incorporate friends from outside into your family. “Dependent” is not a neutral way of phrasing this. It would be better to say it makes you more integrated with your family, and less integrated with people and institutions outside of your family.
Certainly there are advantages and disadvantages to this pro-family heuristic compared to various alternative heuristics. But you both appear to tacitly endorse the “anyone of power is evil” heuristic, although that too has advantages and disadvantages.
I guess it depends on what counts as “family”, and how do people live. If there is a large extended family living close, so you can choose from a hundred people (and it is considered a valid choice to prefer e.g. your second cousins to your parents), that might give you enough options...
Not quite, since “making friends” requires higher than average trust anyway. Indeed, friendships in low-trust societies can be unusually intimate, relative to what we would naïvely expect. What it does clearly discourage is having a large network of casual acquaintances and loose relationships whom you can expect to successfully cooperate with.