Bloodless Relationship

Plato’s Republic calls for common wives and common children, but it also instructs the rulers to trick their subjects into believing that everybody is related. What does this deception suggest about our true concern for others beyond the bounds of kinship? In our own age, which to my eyes appears to be the monstrous progeny of Plato’s intellectual seed, the word “family” is frequently used to create a sense of unity in what is otherwise a contrived or forced unification. But the last thing anybody wants is a society explicitly structured according to blood, for that would be hereditary, immoral, and highly unnatural.