Black Widow

One of the oddest points I remember from reading Plato's Republic, was the theory that children could be taken away from their parents and raised communally without them.

When I pointed out the egregious error Plato had made by suggesting something so abhorrent (I had grown up with other people and it was clear the majority loved their families), I was reprimanded for not taking the point seriously, perhaps having encountered pedagogical psychosis, or a walking breathing idealogical textbook. 

It's always seemed self-evident that most people want to raise their children, and even develop a special bond with them, known universally, in less extreme times, as love.

When the time is right there are instances when poverty and youth require alternative options, but it's not as if such a decision is easy to make, imagine if the impoverished people who chose to keep their children weren't met with so much hostility, and were treated honourably for the tough decisions they've had to make.

There are still those who can't love, however, their lives a meaningless sterile indignancy, many of them manipulating the feelings of people who do, to achieve solipsistic ends.

Adoption, the creation of new families, is a feature of a truly advanced society.

Monstrously perverted by the villains in the haunting Black Widow.

 

Family without love, conviviality, or amicability. 

Rather, an antiseptic society attempts to cleanse itself of feeling, wherein which formula and calculation attain cultural cohesion as opposed to love.

Wherein which you're terrorized if you truly love things (such a burden to be sensitive), by other people who also love, but don't want to be terrorized by emotionless leaders, who see personal attachment as an inherent threat.

In Black Widow, a tyrant preys on orphans whom he subjects to extreme tests, those who pass eventually becoming spies, those who can't, never heard from again.

He turns the spies into fierce international soldiers spreading malice around the world, their loyalty unyieldingly guaranteed, by advanced psychotic brainwashing.

Unfortunately, such ideas persist and haven't faded into history, the cultivation of family and friendship much less amenable to absolute power (on the left and right).

If people argue loving your family is indeed an extreme position, they're clearly fucked in the head, and it's best to swiftly tell them so.

Families can be composed in so many ways with so much distinct unique variability. 

It's a shame things don't always work out.

But that's no reason for categorical dismissal.