Making the Change; The Philosophy of Poly

The hardest part of being poly is trying to find out what a family is as well as your place in it. I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked, “Is this a family, and if so, am I a part of it?” 

Those are valid questions and to me, both have a simple answer. Answering the former, “Are we a family?” is difficult because the answer is so unbelievably subjective. It seems impossible to answer because everyone has a different idea of what a family is, based on their own experiences. So what a family is, let alone a poly family is supposed to be can vary wildly. 

To me a family is a group of people who self-identify as a unit and whose primary social desire is to be with each other. This hearkens back to the traditional Bantu saying, "I am because we are." For a family to form, all principals involved must form a communal mindset; that begins with this simple idea: “I am because we are." 

For the individual to recontextualize his/her identity within a group is not hard—in fact, most of us have been doing it since we were born. Look at your given name. Your first name marks you as an individual member of the family group, which is signified by your last name. This not only tells us who you are and from what group of people you come, but also reminds you that you have a place among a group of people. But it goes even deeper than that.

If you've ever played a sport where you were designated a number, then that number signified you as an individual while you also had the team name colors and all the dogma, history, culture etc,. that came with that it. So a family begins with individuals who identify as a group and who have share a vested interest in the success of the group, or more simply put, "I identify as we." But once a person has developed that plural mindset and begins to self-identify as “we,” the issue becomes how the individual gets others to see the individual as one of them, i.e. as part of the family.

I like to take Berkeleian poinhich is in my opinion the true essence of poly.t of view on this. Berkeleianism, created by George Berkeley, the Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop, posits that existence consists of the condition of being perceived or "esse est percipi.” I feel much the same way but I have a slight spin on it. I believe "To be with family is to be perceived as family" (quod genus cum in familia percipitur). Again, to be perceived as a member of a team, group of people, dynamic, organization or relationship is often acceptance, which means that they see you as one of them. To me this is very important to any family wishing to bring every individual into one overarching dynamic, which is in my opinion the true essence of poly.