Family breakdown

Financial and professional success changed the relationship of time and space between family, friends and church congregations, and, by extension, with Divinity. The imperative of the obligation to numerically increase the bank account and personal assets, as well as the quality of externality – home, car, clothing, facial and muscle plastic surgery, travel, electronic communication equipment, relationships with celebrities, accounts on the most prominent social networks on the internet or personal blogs and channels – limited the presence of the individual holding these concerns in the religious community and sucked up the time previously dedicated to personal reflections. Interests in the material and virtual world have absorbed the energy of devotion, reflection, communion and relationships, leaving people more selfish, vain, individualistic, manipulative and skeptical. The growth of being in business is inversely proportional to the rise of family and religious relationships. The more a person expands their network of relationships in the professional sphere, the less time they dedicate to their family, meetings with friends, attendance at school or temple and personal communion with God. The effect of materialism on the individual’s life changed the meaning of family, church, school, friends and spirituality, endorsing the fall of absolutes, as predicted and desired by a certain French philosopher and psychologist.

If an individual does not offer time to their children, someone will replace them in influencing children, adolescents and young people who are still dependent or immature. The reference to this “individual” is directed to both the father and the mother. The obligation of education belongs to both spouses. When time is denied to children, another force tends to occupy space-time in the child, youth or adolescent universe. A door opens wide, leading to a very wide corridor, so that more astute, inquisitive minds that stimulate curiosity can approach the children. At this point, fear is born as a result of the denial of the generated being. It is an almost unconscious rejection. Almost, because there are deliberate cases of decision-making, choosing material interests above sentimental ones and maternal-paternal obligations. The separation brings suffering, tension, expectation, pain, discouragement, depression and even death. Death for earthly life and for eternity. All hope suffers the process of liquidation. Hence the shaking of confessional structures. Formerly leaders’ trainers, contemporary families, numbed by materialism and virtuality, discourage children from taking on the role of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. The melting away of the sense of mission of traditional families and the arrival of converts without deep or convinced roots into the confessional niche contributes to the disintegration of family society.

In the labyrinth of life, the doors wide open to unknown guardians affect the understanding of the meaning and importance of the family in the construction of society. Bonds are broken, norms rejected, questioned fundamentals, outrageous experiments take shape in the new laboratory. In this way, particularity is embodied as universality, appropriating the empty space left by parents. The conceptualization confronting particularity and universality was developed very well in the sociopolitical field by the Argentine Ernesto Laclau and the Belgian Chantal Mouffe. Transposing these definitions to the topic addressed, it can be stated that universality is represented by the predominance of values ​​that, at another time, were restricted to particularity. This is the particularity that assumes the dominant nature, occupying the universal condition. (Continued in Part 5)

Ruben Dargã Holdorf, Comm.Se.D