Family egoism

Family egoism is a folklore expression for an earlier widespread attitude in the old settlements that thinking and acting are focused solely on one's own family. With this attitude, the other families are met with great distrust. The difference to egoism today is that family egoism is not about self-realization or self-liberation, but rather about the increased subordination of the individual to the family system.

In the old settlement area, community ownership is very important. Therefore there is a lot of joint work. Family egoism is destructive as it undermines the community. Usually, different family clans develop, which may be hostile to each other and also fight violently. This blocks the entire system and freezes it from within. As a result, changes are no longer possible. To this day it is an important cause of economic structural weaknesses in rural areas.

literature

• Werner Bätzing : Small Alpine Lexicon: Environment • Economy • Culture (=  Beck'sche Series Knowledge . Volume 1205 ). 1st edition. Munich 1997, ISBN 3-406-42005-2 .

This article is based on information from the Small Alpine Lexicon , 1st edition from 1997. Please only remove this note if you have revised the article to the extent that the text reflects the current state of knowledge on this topic and this is proven .