The true meaning of Family
Just like I wrote a few days ago about the word ‘sex’, the word ‘family’ also doesn’t mean what most people think that it means. Its true meaning shines a lot of light on the widespread slavery that we have all over the world today. If you are part of a ‘family’, or in the worst case are the head of one, it’s really not as positive a thing as you probably think it is; in fact it’s very far from positive. It’s nothing to be proud of.
“A Roman Slave Market” by Jean-Léon Gérôme
If we look at the etymology of the word ‘family’ we find that it derives from the Latin word ‘familia’ which means ‘the servants in a household’. The word ‘familia’ itself derives from the Latin word ‘famulus’ which means ‘slave, servant’. As the German philosopher Friedrich Engels wrote in his book “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” in the 3rd chapter titled “The Pairing Family”:
The word familia did not originally signify the composite ideal of sentimentality and domestic strife in the present day philistine mind. Among the Romans it did not even apply in the beginning to the leading couple and its children, but to the slaves alone. Famulus means domestic slave, and familia is the aggregate number of slaves belonging to one man. At the time of Gajus, the familia, id est patrimonium (i.e., paternal legacy), was still bequeathed by testament. The expression was invented by the Romans in order to designate a new social organism, the head of which had a wife, children and a number of slaves under his paternal authority and according to Roman law the right of life and death over all of them. “The word is, therefore, not older than the ironclad family system of the Latin tribes, which arose after the introduction of agriculture and of lawful slavery, and after the separation of the Aryan Itali from the Greeks.” Marx adds: “The modern family contains the germ not only of slavery (servitus), but also of serfdom, because it has from the start a relation to agricultural service. It comprises in miniature all those contrasts that later on develop more broadly in society and the state.”
So we see that the word ‘family’ actually refers to the collective slaves in a household, among whom the man is usually the head in most societies around the world today. This is consistent with what I discussed in my post “Why getting married is a very bad idea”, where we saw that the word for ‘husband’ means ‘owner of a wife’; a ‘wife’ was nothing more than the property (i.e., slave) of her husband, and this is still mostly the case today. The same can be said of children who are mostly treated by their parents as property — slaves who have to obey their every command or else suffer the consequences. Let’s also not forget that the head of the household used to trade his daughters with their future owners (AKA ‘husbands’) for other resources — an economic transaction that we know of today as ‘marriage’.
It’s important to realize that although the word ‘familia’ isn’t very old, the way of living that it describes predates the Romans by thousands of years. As I discussed with examples in my post “Why getting married is a very bad idea”, this way of living can be traced all the way back to biblical times, and indeed even much further back to the ancient Sumerian civilization.
Today most people attach a ‘composite ideal of sentimentality’ to the word ‘family’, as Engels noted, just like they attach ideals of romance and love to the word ‘marriage’, all while failing to realize the true evil origins of these related concepts. Again we see that history can be changed by simply changing the meaning of one word, fooling people into living in an alternate and fake reality — one where they accept slavery as completely normal and indeed even desirable. Both ‘family’ and ‘marriage’ ultimately find their origins in the policies of sexual suppression and repression which were forced on humankind many thousands of years ago, as discussed in my post “Sexual Suppression and Repression I: Definition and Origin”.
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