The Family:

>The family has the mission of helping individuals to mature, which entails saying “no” to bad choices in order to promote better choices — “no” to bad taste in order to promote better taste — “no” to clinging to childishness in order to promote growth. The market encourages individuals to pursue rational self-interest ...<

>The things that make the family unique — namely birth, childhood, and parenting — cannot be understood in liberal terms as the rational, self-interested choices of autonomous individuals.<

>Secular weddings, easy divorce, and childless unions all undermine the attempt to meld autonomous individuals into a whole that is greater than themselves.<

>[Love] seizes us from behind, or from within. It humiliates our rationality and autonomy.<

>You can’t replace your parents or children like you can replace a plumber or a veterinarian, even though relationships can get so bad that you want to try.<

>Liberalism’s ideal is to replace all unchosen relationships and obligations with chosen ones. For the liberal, if you don’t choose a relationship, if you don’t consent to it, if it is not voluntary, then it is illegitimate. The only legitimate relationships are consensual. Liberalization is equivalent to making all of society into a marketplace, because market transactions are the model of liberal relationships.

But there is a downside to making all relationships consensual. Consent is mutual. Both parties must agree. Which means that both parties must get something out of the relationship. What happens when a relationship no longer works for one party? He can always exercise his right to withdraw. But is this always a good thing?

You might be pleased to have such rights, but your partners have the same rights in relation to you. Thus as social relationships become increasingly liberalized, your status becomes increasingly conditional, i.e. increasingly contingent on the judgments of others. But contingency here is just another word for insecurity, specifically dependency on the choices of others, which ultimately means: dependency on their good opinion of you.

If freedom consists in exercising choice, then liberalizing society certainly creates more freedom, but at the cost of making everyone’s status contingent on the free choices of everybody else. Thus the freer a society is in the liberal sense, the more insecure everyone is about his status. Thus to secure one’s status, one must please others.

... This is the paradox of liberal individualism. By making an idol of autonomous choice, it makes one’s status entirely dependent on the decisions of others, creating a society in which insecurity is rampant and conformism highly incentivized. Hence the need for a haven, a realm where you are secure enough to relax and simply be yourself.<