I've been married to my wife for three years now, and have been a part of her family since 2013. She has four siblings, one of which is a half-brother. Having spent so much time with her family, and their being so many children, it's been interesting watching the sibling dynamics play out over the years.
What I find even more interesting is how often greed and selfishness plays out between the set of siblings. Usually everyone's more or less supportive of each other, and in a life and death situation they'd have each other's backs, but when it comes to minor details I've seen theft, neglect, and in the worst case some pretty extreme expressions of selfishness.
My wife and I have spoken about this dynamic, and in the end concluded: if you can't even count on your brother or sister, who can you count on?
Beyond the parent/child relationship a sibling is literally the closest a human can be to us genetically. So what does it tell us that selfishness plays out even between siblings? And if siblings can barely co-operate with each other, is there hope of ever doing away with things like racism, sexism, and nationalism?
What's going on here? And how do we break through this dynamic? Is it something we can solve, or something we need to work around? And if we need to work around it, how?
What I find even more interesting is how often greed and selfishness plays out between the set of siblings. Usually everyone's more or less supportive of each other, and in a life and death situation they'd have each other's backs, but when it comes to minor details I've seen theft, neglect, and in the worst case some pretty extreme expressions of selfishness.
My wife and I have spoken about this dynamic, and in the end concluded: if you can't even count on your brother or sister, who can you count on?
Beyond the parent/child relationship a sibling is literally the closest a human can be to us genetically. So what does it tell us that selfishness plays out even between siblings? And if siblings can barely co-operate with each other, is there hope of ever doing away with things like racism, sexism, and nationalism?
What's going on here? And how do we break through this dynamic? Is it something we can solve, or something we need to work around? And if we need to work around it, how?