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jkadlubo comments on Where is the line between being a good child and taking care of oneself? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Christian, you've met me in person, in Berlin... I live in Poland, more catholic than the Pope, as I often say. Poland, which mentally is still under 19th century partitions, so people are raised to believe that anyone of power is evil and family is the only good space in the world. It's difficult not to be driven by the culture in which I am living.
The question is not so much whether it's difficult but whether you want to follow those values.
I'm personally busy enough trying to live up to my own values, that I don't put that much emphasis about trying to live up to other people's values.
At the moment you are probably trying to live up to the general values of your culture because your upbrining left you with low self confidence.
Additionally it's worth thinking about if you get into problems with other people besides your family if you would cut contact with your mother and father. Start thinking about the unthinkable in detail to make it less scary.
Once you done that the next step is being open and then letting the chips fall where they may. If you act in a way you consider to be right, then other people can choose how to react, so that they get a outcome that's also right for them.
There's free right to move within the EU. If you don't like the culture of the place you are living you are free to go somewhere else.
Sounds like a pretty good heuristic.
It discourages you from making friends ("family is the only good space"), which in turn makes you more dependent on your family.
To be more precise, it discourages you from making friends outside your family whom you do not incorporate into your family. But it also encourages you to make friends inside your family, and to incorporate friends from outside into your family. "Dependent" is not a neutral way of phrasing this. It would be better to say it makes you more integrated with your family, and less integrated with people and institutions outside of your family.
Certainly there are advantages and disadvantages to this pro-family heuristic compared to various alternative heuristics. But you both appear to tacitly endorse the "anyone of power is evil" heuristic, although that too has advantages and disadvantages.
I guess it depends on what counts as "family", and how do people live. If there is a large extended family living close, so you can choose from a hundred people (and it is considered a valid choice to prefer e.g. your second cousins to your parents), that might give you enough options...
Not quite, since "making friends" requires higher than average trust anyway. Indeed, friendships in low-trust societies can be unusually intimate, relative to what we would naïvely expect. What it does clearly discourage is having a large network of casual acquaintances and loose relationships whom you can expect to successfully cooperate with.
It is a good heuristic in low-trust, tribalist societies - which probably account for most of the world's population. Southern/Mediterranean Europe and Latin America are well-known to be somewhat nepotist/tribalist (though not nearly as bad as the Middle East), so my prior is for Poland to be quite similar, overall.
I don't know if I'd call it a good heuristic. I would probably be comfortable calling it a "good bias to have", but taking it as an actual guiding principle seems unwise.
"Good cached thought", maybe?
One that obviously gives wrong answers in the present case.
I think it gives the obviously correct answer, but I'm not sure how duelling obviosities advances the matter.
It has advanced the matter by revealing a conflict between our beliefs. We can then proceed to giving our reasons for our respective beliefs. I'll go first.
By jkadlubo's account, her parents are not her friends and cannot be. Some people have the good fortune of having a close, loving relationship with their parents. jkadlubo has never had that, and it does not look to me like there is any possibility of creating it. The best that can be hoped for is distance and disengagement.
She doesn't mention how her relationship with her sister stands now or stood then. Whether there is any future in that relationship I can't guess. No other family members are mentioned.
You may be up against a logistical problem as long as you live in Poland, if there are relatively few people who are alienated from their families for you to form a chosen family with.