 Some of our associations are voluntary, such as a typical friendship. Others are non-voluntary, such as the childhood family or institutional environment in which we are born and raised. Some of our associations offer lasting connections with specific people, such as, usually, our parents, children, spouses, and colleagues. Others are looser affiliations with people we may not know directly, based on common identity, history, or ambition, such as a national club, a student union, the “Republican base”, the “American people”, the Jewish community, and Christians. Some of these latter affiliations stretch the notion of an association into a metaphor, but they highlight that associations are defined by people having a common purpose. That common purpose is sometimes the association itself: many of our intimate associations exist for their own sake, that is, for the sake of associating with one another. Other times, the common purpose is a further, independent goal, such as financial success, worship, recreation, achievement, joint self-expression, or political control.