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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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People tend to forget that social constructs are very very real things that can have major material impacts on our lives. Those who don't understand this use “it's just a social construct” to dismiss the importance of certain concepts or abstract ideas. But most of human's reality is made out of social constructs.
For another very clear example, money is a social construct. But people live and die by the hands of it.
These constructs are often based on something concrete at their core as well.
Money, or currency in general, is a social construct that was built on top of the basic idea of trade or exchange. Reciprocity is a very basic behavior found in all kinds of animals, especially us primates.
Likewise, social constructs like "crime" tend to be tied to ethics, another social construct, but that too can be tied back to some basic ideas like harm, which, again, is something animals often form their social norms around.
So, yes, social "constructs", but that doesn't in anyway mean society constructs them out of thin air.
I don't know if you completely understand the criticism. Social constructs aren't decided entirely by laws of physics meaning they a malleable. No one is arguing social constructs aren't real but only that they can be changed if society would let them. Especially if we all collectively agree they are wrong and unjust.
Holy shit that was a great explanation.
Money is made up but the suffering the lack of it causes is very real.
They're not saying it isn't real, just that it being made up doesn't matter.
That suffering isn't because of a lack of money, though. It's because of a lack of means to secure the things you need. You would not suffer from a lack of money in a world where everything was free.
The social construct is the idea of currency: a physical (or digital) representation of value for the purpose of trading, but it has no inherent purpose or meaning if you remove it from the society that constructed it.
But what that money represents is a resource. All beings on earth need resources. Whether it's money to pay for medicine or berries to eat in the forest or water to drink in the desert, everyone has resources they need and must manage for survival. The social construct are the layers of abstraction added between you and how you secure the resource. With no social constructs, you gotta go hunt your dinner. With them, you can buy it.
I'm on the same page as you but understand this reply because this thread is full of people who think social construct = made up, frivolous thing that isn't important.
The made up part is true, the rest of that isn't. Many things are made up, but their impact on people is indeed very real.
The important part, and I think what the OP seeks to illuminate, is that it matters, but it's not some law of nature that simply must be. It's social, and thus can be redefined.
Quite the opposite. It's kind of a weird accident that money came to both represent wealth and currency, when money is actually meant to represent debt. It's the mechanism of mediation for an untrusty society. An artiluge to create common ground with strangers who you don't trust, replacing it with a concept, currency, that you know that someone you do trust will take. So create an anonymous common to bridge trade. Unfortunately most societies chose precious metals to trade with, and this conflated currency with wealth. So accumulating currency became a thing we haven't been able to shake, but it's not mandatory for currency to work.
Now none of that was rational or intentional, it just sort of happened that way. But in reality, money (specially fiat money) is worthless, you can come up with any number and any unit to represent resources. Valuing stuff on a monetary number is a fool's errand, what you're actually quantifying is collective trust on the monetary system. And we have plenty of examples in history of currencies that collapse in value even though the amount of resources in the society remains stable and sometimes even plentiful. But when trust on the institutions that uphold the currency collapses, they are barely useful as kindle to start fires.
It being made up very much matters. It being made up means it can be changed. That's what this post is saying. Not that crime doesn't matter and the consequences aren't real because social construct, but that crime and the punishments therein aren't immutable laws, they are social laws, and thus can be changed.
Yep! Like gender. It may be a social construct but obviously that social construct is very important.
The only reason I can think of to remind people that something is a social construct is to help them remember change is possible and entirely within our control as a society.
Your last sentence is 100% the point. None of the consequences or limitations or expectations created by our legal system are founded on some fundamental, unchangeable, thing. They're all just what we've agreed on, and we can change that agreement
Amen!
The very real use of Force - sometimes of the deadly kind - of this specific "social construct" should make it painfully clear it has real - often life changing - consequences, to even the greatest of fools, but apparently it doesn't.
The point of saying that something is a social construct isn't to say that it doesn't matter, it is to show that it isn't some immutable requirement of nature. It's something we decided to do, and most importantly, could decide to do differently if we all just pulled our heads out of our asses. It's the reply to people who say "it's always been that way" and look at you like you are crazy for suggesting we do something different.
Precisely. The point of the post is to remind us that it's a social construct, not a law of nature, and thus can be changed.
A) they are literally imaginary, but agreed upon.
B) why are you following the imaginings and rules that were created out of thin air by sociopaths and psychopaths
C) why do we continue to ignore the societies set up by the other sapient species? They are millions of years older than us, and the basic rules of their societies took us till the 19th century to understand as basic principles.