Family is the fundamental unit of society, and family dynamics are a very useful lens for understanding cultures, nations, and political-ideological differences across the world. People’s expectations and preferences for society are based in large part on their family experiences and relationships. Politics follows culture, and culture follows family dynamics.
The Five Questions
While there is always some variability within groups, the answers to only five simple family dynamics questions reveal cultural and national identities and outcomes with startling precision. Those five questions are:
1. Who chooses spouses?
2. Can close relatives be spouses?
3. Are multiple spouses allowed?
4. Do spouses reside with parents?
5. Who inherits?
The Eight Models
In his book The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems, Emmanuel Todd explained the large-scale social patterns that result from fundamental family dynamics. The eight family models are:
1. Communitarian, Exogamous (41% of world population)
2. Communitarian, Endogamous (10% of world population)
3. Communitarian, Asymmetric (7% of world population)
4. Authoritarian (8% of world population)
5. Individualist, Egalitarian Nuclear (11% of world population)
6. Individualist, Absolute Nuclear (8% of world population)
7. Anomic (8% of world population)
8. Unstable (6% of world population)
It isn’t difficult to see how the family dynamics of each model lead to stubbornly consistent ideological and political outcomes. The following summaries show key features and outcomes of each model related to the five questions above. If you don’t want to wade through all of the details, you can skip to the summary below.
| Model 1 | Nations and Peoples |
| Communitarian, Exogamous (41% of world population) | Russia and Eastern Bloc, China and Mongol Empire, Vietnam, Northern India |
| Dynamics | Family Outcomes |
| – Parents participate in arranging for spouses from outside the clan. – No polygamy. – Clan lives under one roof. – Equality of inheritance between brothers. | – High stress and tension from multiple families cohabiting under a patriarch. – High anxiety incorporating “outsider” wives with extended family. – Fathers dominate resentful sons who in turn dominate resentful wives. – Weakens individual development as parents choose spouses then live with them and provide them with work. – Female infanticide more likely, especially in agnatic subcultures (where brothers inherit over sons). |
| Social Outcomes | Notes |
| – Conformity valued over individual expression to maintain top-down order. – Based on assumed authority and dictatorship, leading to Tsars, Emperors, and Cruel Dynasties (worse with ancestor cult in China which retains ancestral authority beyond death). – “The Bad Emperor Problem”: society has progress limited by lack of accountability for leaders. – State worship normalized with communism as the dominant modern ideology. – Resentment against typical tyrannical father leads to atheism and rebellion and revolution cycles. – People seen as disposable/interchangeable. – Worst cultures for women in large societies (India and China). | – Nowhere in the electoral history of the world (even in these cultures) has a communist party succeeded in winning a majority vote. Marxism-Leninism always comes to power through an act of violence and immediately suppresses liberty and free speech. A system where the communist party wins 40 percent of the vote will form a communist state and oppress the remaining 60 percent of the population. This threshold is never reached where the exogamous community family is not clearly dominant. – In countries where exogamous community family does not exist, communism’s progress is blocked. When communism is imposed militarily in such places, it gets innately and violently rejected. Examples: the army replaces the party in Poland, the general secretary introduces hereditary succession in North Korea, the single party divides along the usual clan lines in Afghanistan, or it collapses in on itself (along with the whole country) in Cambodia. |
| Model 2 | Nations and Peoples |
| Communitarian, Endogamous (10% of world population) | North Africa, Middle-East through Pakistan (Islamic world) |
| Dynamics | Family Outcomes |
| – Marriages arranged by custom from within the clan. – Frequent cousin marriage (typically children of brothers). – Polygamy allowed but largely a privilege of the rich. – Clan lives under one roof. – Strict religious rules for inheritance that prioritize splitting the benefits to the clan. | – Socially conservative and rigid clan life. – Stable structure seen from within as nurturing rather than oppressive. – Literalism and certainty valued over independent thought. – Inbreeding keeps extended family close, but leads to genetic disorders and exaggerated peculiarity. |
| Social Outcomes | Notes |
| – Islamic rule and Sharia law dominate. – Clan-centric worldview with stronger clans leading nations. – The most large-scale implementations of slavery. – Often treat outsiders terribly. (If you live in a country that borders a Muslim country, you have twice the chance of being at war.) – Women treated third worst here after northern India and China. | – Bringing in wives from outside the community causes too much tension. – Female liberation unlikely here as women are integrated cousins to safeguard, not outsiders to accommodate. – This structure is antithetical to multiculturalism and liberal democracy. |
| Model 3 | Nations and Peoples |
| Communitarian, Asymmetric (7% of world population) | Southern India |
| Dynamics | Family Outcomes |
| – Marriages arranged within a caste/sub-caste with a preference for marriages between children of brothers and sisters. – Few if any affinity taboos leads to various forms of polygamy, – including among close relatives. – Cohabitation of married sons and their parents. – Sons inherit equally. | – Involves women in marriage decisions, making men work harder to impress them. – Main bond here is brother-sister rather than the brother-brother bond of other communitarian systems. – Relaxation of sexual and incest taboos leads to a wide variety of lifestyles. |
| Social Outcomes | Notes |
| – Hindu syncretism enables a diversity of belief systems to coexist under one overarching structure. Where brothers can share a wife, sects can share a religion. – The caste system divides people, but fraternal cohabitation and egalitarian division of inheritance unites them. – Politics subordinated to family and caste. – Stubbornly intractable passivity and fatalism. – Division and cooperation breakdowns between social groups. | – Women treated better here and female infanticide less common than in northern India. |
| Model 4 | Nations and Peoples |
| Authoritarian (8% of world population) | Koreans, Japanese, Germans, Jews, Gypsies, Scandanavians, Occitania, Celts, Scots, Bretons, Quebecois |
| Dynamics | Family Outcomes |
| – Marriages are strategically arranged to strengthen and consolidate ethnic, social, and economic status. – No incest. – No polygamy. – Cohabitation of married children with his parents. – Primogeniture establishes inequality of brothers through unbroken patrimony to the oldest / chosen heir. | – Only the oldest son inherits, so younger sons get nothing and have to fend for themselves and often end up in a priesthood or military. – Unequal treatment of children from the same family a baseline expectation. – Overbearing parents put intense pressure on their kids that result in a lot of neuroses and eccentricities. A good example was Sigmund Freud (a German Jew) who had theories about “hatred of the father” (daddy issues). – Stubborn and insistent preoccupation with maintaining ethnic bloodline identity and family legacy with a deep sense of history and borderline ancestor worship. |
| Social Outcomes | Notes |
| – Tend to view God and Government in the same way: an overbearing force that expects dignity and respect. – Ethnocentricity in various forms, and even typical superiority to and indifference toward “others”. – Tend toward fascism, nationalism, “democratic” socialism, and devout religiosity. – Social inequality is seen as a natural part of life – Can be defensive enough to commit suicide for the sake of tribal or national pride. – These systems aren’t as hard on individualism (especially individual achievement) as they are on conquered populations. They are relatively equal among themselves and have a strong middle class. | – Ancient Greek city states had this structure and didn’t tend toward unification like the more egalitarian Roman family structure did. – Hitler’s Germany, Imperial Japan, and Franco’s Spain all shared a social inequality worldview. – Japanese classical proverb: “a brother is the first foreigner”. |
| Model 5 | Nations and Peoples |
| Individualist, Egalitarian Nuclear (11% of world population) | Southern Europe, Ethiopia, and the white/mestizo parts of Latin America |
| Dynamics | Family Outcomes |
| – Choose your own spouse. – No incest. – No polygamy. – Married children live apart from their parents. – Brothers inherit equally. | – Children are encouraged to become independent and expected to form their own family. – Strangers and outsiders more welcome in marriage than in communitarian or authoritarian families. – All sons expect equal inheritance. – Only sons inherit, so machismo issues are common. |
| Social Outcomes | Notes |
| – Governments often lean toward socialist / redistributionist, but often alternate between redistributionist demagogues and meritocratic businessmen or aloof monarchs and military preening alpha-male dictatorships. – Ideology of this region could be thought of as “revolutionary liberalism”, a good example being the French revolution followed by Napoleon’s empire. – Ironically tend to have a smaller middle class because lands are split upon inheritance and families can’t feed themselves on smaller and smaller plots, which get bought up by the wealthy. – They prize equality as an abstract concept, but have a social code that promotes inequality, which causes regular revolutions. | – The Roman empire was the “original” egalitarian nuclear family group, which is why they were both good at assimilating others as well as devolving into military dictatorships. – Tension between freedom and equality, as the idea of all sons inheriting equally leading to expectations of equal economic status. This is encapsulated well in the French Revolution’s slogan “Equality, Liberty, Brotherhood” as compared to the American inegalitarian “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. – Ethiopia is an interesting inclusion here given the influence of Christianity and the oscillation between democracy and military dictatorship. |
| Model 6 | Nations and Peoples |
| Individualist, Absolute Nuclear (8% of world population) | Denmark, Netherlands, Normandy, England, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand (Anglo-Saxon diaspora) |
| Dynamics | Family Outcomes |
| – Choose your own spouse. – No incest. – No polygamy. – Married children live apart from their parents. – No precise inheritance rules, frequent use of wills. | – Fundamental assumption is that each individual is responsible for their own behavior and success. – Neither enforced equality nor enforced inequality. – Neither forcibly exclude nor forcibly integrate others. |
| Social Outcomes | Notes |
| – Dominant ideology is liberal capitalism. – Remarkably stable societies since they choose freedom over equality of outcome. – Typically protestant and believe individuals personally connect with God and should have religious freedom. | – Combines the pressure and discipline of authoritarian systems with the globalizing egalitarianism of the nuclear family. – Most successful model in history (see Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest people in the World for details). – It’s hard to export this culture to others who prefer belonging and certainty to “live and let live” libertarian ethos. |
| Model 7 | Nations and Peoples |
| Anomic (8% of world population) | Southeast Asia and native populations of Latin America (as well as the ancient empires of the Inca, Babylon, and Egypt) |
| Dynamics | Family Outcomes |
| – More of a lack of any consistent rules around sex or family structure than a coherent system. – Marriage of close relatives not uncommon and sometimes frequent. – Cohabitation of married children with parents rejected in theory, but accepted in practice. – Uncertainty about inheritance expectations. | – Lack of consistent structure and guidelines results in a “do whatever you want” ethos. – Often resembles a flawed version of nuclear family structure with undisciplined temperament. – Uncertainty about equality between brothers. – Egalitarian in idealistic theory, but “flexible” and unstructured in practice. |
| Social Outcomes | Notes |
| – Fragility of political system mirrors fragility of family dynamics. – Results in societies without clear principles or stakes where oppressive empires rule over disaffected peasants and slaves. – In modern times, this has resulted in “relaxed” military dictatorships like in the Philippines. – Buddhism emerged from anomic family culture as a theory of personality and its extinction: the effort to destroy the self and prove it does not exist. | – Anomic communities in South America were easily marginalized and controlled by the Spanish. – The development of mass literacy in South America is paving the way for significant changes in culture and politics. |
| Model 8 | Nations and Peoples |
| Unstable (6% of world population) | Sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora |
| Dynamics | Family Outcomes |
| – Unstable household structures where polygyny and divorce are the norms. – Incest is often taboo. – Powerful husbands are typically much older than their wives and underage marriage for girls is common and encouraged. – Each woman shares a hut with her children while men are mobile. – Inheritance can be from father to son, but also from older to younger brother when fathers are absent. | – Based on the fragmentation of the household, the primacy of the mother-child bond, and the absence of the father. – Typically large age differences between husband and wives. Women raise children in groups while men herd cattle or wage war. – Wives can be passed from father to son by inheritance. – Brother-brother relationships predominate over father-son relationships, resulting in lax attitudes towards weak parental authority. |
| Social Outcomes | Notes |
| – The least “rule of law” in the world as males seek prowess and power over integrity and responsibility. – Women are often viewed with condescension while forming the backbone of society. – Polygamy results in disaster as a large class of sexless young men live and fight and die together, which leaves young women dependent on older men for protection and the cycle is perpetuated. | – African societies do not respond well to discipline and self-regulation. The dominant force is the army, which controls 60 percent of Africa’s political systems. It’s also difficult to do business consistently and have schedule expectations of others. |
The Roots of Sociopolitical Dysfunction
Sociopolitical dysfunction is just projected family dysfunction.
In summary:
Forced association leads to oppression, resentment, and revolution.
Endogamy leads to isolation, fragility, and deterioration.
Polygamy leads to stagnant underclasses, desperation, and exile.
Promiscuity leads to paternity confusion, broken families, loneliness, and neglect.
Favoritism leads to zealous ethnocentricity and marginalization.
Authoritarianism leads to dictatorship and tyranny.
Absence of fathers leads to failure, poverty, and violence.
Exploiting vulnerability leads to abuse, infanticide, and demographic catastrophe.
Entitlement leads to idleness, envy, and dependency.
When Cultures Collide
Intercultural exchange and competition happen within and across political boundaries. Sometimes one group adopts best practices from another, like forbidding consanguineous marriage. Sometimes they peacefully respect each other’s differences, like accepting different inheritance traditions. Sometimes they fundamentally clash and simply can’t “agree to disagree”, like whether or not to prosecute rape, honor killing, slavery, and pedophilia.
Successful lifestyles and values can be imitated, but some cultural elements make adoption very difficult or unlikely. It’s not uncommon for cultures to elevate the inherited traditions of their forefathers to rituals and ceremonies, leaving true principles lost in the shuffle. For better or worse, family dynamics are perpetuated largely by affective momentum.
Politics often come to amplify cultural conflicts until a resolution is reached. Historically, irreconcilable differences have resulted in conflicting groups not sharing governance structures. Such a separation can happen by choice and agreement, but far too often cultural conflicts escalate to war and domination.
In modern multicultural democracies, the issue remains a contentious one as more tolerant majorities have increasingly become victims of having their own openness and agreeableness weaponized against them by intolerant dissenting minorities. Clearly, not all cultural elements in a “melting pot” dissolve and integrate under the same temperatures and conditions. For a high-trust society to work, it cannot be undermined by mutually exclusive standards. While reciprocity is abandoned, trust will fall to the lowest common denominator.