Former presidential candidate and New Age profiteer Marianne Williamson tweeted today: "No we should not run this country like a business, we should run it like a loving and functional family."
That's a nice huggyface kissybear sentiment, but it collapses under the slightest scrutiny. To begin with, who is "we"? "We" implies that "this country" is something other than those who run it, though that may be partly a feature of language.
However, a family is a hierarchy. Running a country like a family means someone would be the husband/Father, someone else the wife/Mother, others the children, another the dog. It's not a model for a country to emulate. Citizens aren't the children or pets of those who run the country. At least in a family, children eventually grow up and take over their own lives. What would be the analogy to that in a country run like a family?
Monarchs have often styled themselves the loving parents of their subjects. The United States rejected that model, and even though the founders failed to eliminate all the hierarchies, the ideal was a society of equals. We're still working out what that means and how to implement it. The founders were ambivalent about capitalism, recognizing that it constituted a threat to freedom and equality. But so does modeling a country after a family.
This has also been my response to cultural feminists who wanted to restore matriarchy. We need to be adults, not children. We need parents (or adult guardians) when we're children, but parents of either sex shouldn't rule our lives when we grow up. I don't know if there's a word for a society that's neither patriarchal nor matriarchal; I think we need one.
Many of the commenters under Williamson's tweet, whether they agreed with her or not, assumed that capitalism and paternalist charity were the only two options for running a country. There are others, democracy or anarchism among them, which don't involve hierarchies. They're hard to realize, but so is every system. Williamson cheats by positing a "loving and functional family"; but who will keep the parents loving and functional? In real families, parents often (usually?) struggle to be adults, balancing the needs of their children with their own fears, insecurities, and limitations, trying to protect the children from knowing what is going on. In a society, adults should not be protected in that way. A lack of transparency always leads to problems in the long run anyway: it is not for the citizens' own good to be lied to, and politicians who lie are really concerned with protecting themselves, not their constituents.
At times in the past couple of years, in her role as a political figure, Williamson has said some things that were quite sensible, but she always relapses into the mush-brained New Age platitudes that made her famous. That's what she's doing here.
(Williamson is the founder of something called Project Angel Food, a food charity. The name is unfortunate, reminiscent to me of Damon Knight's sf story "To Serve Man" -- "It's a cookbook!")
