Our Social Construction of Reality
The Social Construction of Reality was written in 1966. It took the stance that our world is not simply given, natural, or revealed. It is made of and made up by humans. It assumes that understanding, significance, and meaning are not created within the individual but in coordination with other beings.
It looked at the question: How does anything come to be accepted as real?
As a human, a product manager, and as someone deeply invested in seeing cryptocurrency be accepted, on a large scale, as real, I often come back to this.
Dr. Dennis Hiebert does an incredible job of describing the three phases we go through to accept something as real:
First, humans bring something into the world. We create it (externalization). Or, in the case of nature, we enculturate it (like putting a tunnel through a mountain). Then, we pretend that which was brought into our world by humans is being imposed on us (objectification). Lastly, it is internalized in our institutional order (internalization).
Externalization, the creation, is clear. Objectification, how we, as a species, allow these creations to become embedded in ourselves is interesting. Internalization is a common action in our world of unconscious assimilation.
Focusing on objectification, there are four ways we objectify our creations:
- Institutionalization: occurs when meaningful behaviors become routine.
- Historicity: as generations come and go, the institutional world “thickens” and “hardens.”
- Legitimation: meaning is given a cognitive and moral basis that will explain and justify it (e.g., Religion)
- Language: meaning becomes embedded in language
Language is an objective social entity living outside of us. It is an entity created by us that we then become bound to. Think about how often language limits you, how experiences can’t always be described in words. And when an experience can’t be described with language, we often act as though those experiences are less relevant.
Language is a human construct, we invented it, and it is limiting. Remembering that can empower us to more often say, “oh, I don’t have the words”; not because we aren’t capable of the words, but because the social entity of language is limiting.
The rabbit hole of our social construction of reality ends in reification, also known as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. We treat the products of human activity as if they were something other than human products — such as facts of nature or results of cosmic laws.
“Reification implies that humans can forget their own authorship of the human world, and further that the dialectic between (humans) the producers and (their) products is lost to consciousness” — Peter Berger.
To me, the idea of reification was empowering. It gives me the chance to see that humans actually invented most of what limits me. Treating my world as a concrete entity is a fallacy I have control over. Time, money, monogamy, religion, are all social constructions.
Of note, the more abstract the social construct, such as ‘freedom’ the more rules and controls go into it. Hammers, much less abstract, have a lot fewer controls than freedom or marriage.
Bringing back to our consciousness that we authored this world empowers us to open up the dialogue between us and all the products we’ve created, which is, essentially, everything.
