Amongst the benefits of modern infrastructure, free trade, and extreme interconnectivity, millions travel and change their home each year. Need a job? Hit the road. Go to the West Coast, Texas, East coast, Florida, find a factory job in the Midwest. All of this has been described as not only a helpful option but a Good thing. After all, we need more money and opportunity if we are to keep the economic engine churning and burning. This is surely a great benefit to driven and ambitious entrepreneurs and professionals. However, as they cast their lives to the road and another home, what lies before them?
If one presupposes that making as much money as possible is the highest aim in life, then the thrifty task rabbit or skilled professional should simply find the highest income to cost of living ratio. If one lives in South Dakota making $70,000 a year and pays a much lower rent or mortgage on average, then wealth growth is inevitable. Over the course of one’s life, a decently skilled budgeter could retire incredibly comfortably without the worry of Medicare or Social Security being relevant. Yet, life is much more than dollars, and a place is much more than getting and spending.
As a person, married or single, lands in a new community, there is a great opportunity as well as a great loss. The Immigrant narrative often shows this with great clarity thanks to the distinction and difference between cultures. An immigrant from overseas or South America landing into the United States has economic mobility available to them that is a rare boon in our world. At the same time, their culture of what they consider to be normal has been left behind.
Even though diversity zealots would like to imagine we are a society of “many cultures,” there is a sacrifice that must be made for every new arrival. The land is more than a geographical place in time and space; it is also its people. Just as your hometown has made an indelible mark on your perspective on many aspects of life, your state, country, and all of its history also informs its identity. A people have tradition, which is the distilled wisdom of generations past. This does not merely pass over us like the angel of death in Exodus. Modern sensibilities are not some kind of proverbial lamb’s blood. We belong to a people, ethnicity, history, religious tradition, moral outlook, and aesthetic that we cannot move beyond without losing a part of our own identity.
Perhaps you are one of these people who have left their hometown recently or many years ago. You have found a happy community in a city, town, suburb or rural backroad to call home; there you have made many friends, maybe you’ve joined a club, church, or found a local hangout. These are all good things. Like any newcomer to a community, you must adapt to it, not it to you. You need to adapt because you are marked by your history and you belong naturally to another community. You must learn to curtail your preferences should any of them provoke difficulty with your new community.
The coping skills required to adapt bring a traveler and new immigrant many benefits. There persists a kind of “home is what you make it” aphorism amongst the transient population. One mostly gains from leaving home under this view--especially for financial reasons. There remains another kind of cope that tends to rear its head here. Leaving home seems to be treated as the natural and good thing to do.
The alternative perspective, one that still persists in several cultures, both here and abroad, considers one’s home and family to be of much higher value. Giving the financial argument for why geographic fluidity is popular helps to differentiate this alternative view’s value. What if instead of scattering a family’s human and financial capital abroad to collect their own small fortunes, there was a cooperative, even favoritest mindset for one’s familial assets? Surely, this is some kind of non-Western value system? Ah not so as you will soon see.
Take the New York Times as an example: the Salzburger-Ochs family has run the paper since 1896. This company is run as a hereditary monarchy essentially; this kind of governing structure more accurately reflects a familial style of rule. The tyranny of busybody middle management has done harm to controlling the direction of the paper, but for generations it has pushed the message and influence of the Salzburgers. Berkshire Hathaway, Samsung, and Facebook, while operated by others, are still majority owned by the founding families of the corporations.
Note: I do not mean to say these corporations should be emulated in their praxis of business.
While the vast majority of families possess nowhere near the wealth and influence of these, there is gain in children learning the trades of the fathers and forefathers directly, if, of course, increasing generational power, influence, and wealth is an interest. Too often, people fear the word “nepotism” when considering such things; this should strike a historical thinker as rather shallow and uninteresting. Is it not natural that a man should seek to carry on the wealth, accomplishments, and ambitions of his family if they are Good things to do?
Our modern educational ethics have shifted towards favoring homeschooling recently, largely due to the visibility of the classroom during the distance education fling coincident with the pandemic of 2020. This may open up opportunities towards actually influencing children to consider other paths outside of the school to college to job (unrelated to familial endeavors) pipeline. After all, children are incredibly memetic and, if surrounded by the passions and interests of their parents, may gravitate in that direction rather than towards the modern traditional model.
There is an ethical and moral component to leading progeny in a particular career path, though not an ultimate part of it. Primarily, it should be treated as pragmatic. If a carpenter’s child has no hankering for carpentry, then there are a great many things he may do instead. Does the family business need a financial, legal, or business mind? He may have several options available to him if he wishes to remain a part of the familial endeavor. Multitudinous paths offer themselves to the daring.
My own family works in creative design, they have worked hard to develop a business model that works well. However, I have gone off on my own and I now pursue an orthogonal career to theirs. It would please me greatly as I continue down the many paths of life to find new ways to enhance not just my own but my family’s success. All of the things we do should be to the end of living a Good life. Aiding family in success does not keep wealth in a hermetically sealed chamber, rather, it enables those with a sharp mind and good will to do that much more to be a help to those around us.
Consider how much more atomization we wish to normalize as our society presses onwards.