Channelknight Fadran

"Society is just a constuct"

...

...yes?

What are you trying to prove with that statement?

Are you trying to refer to some kind of zombie-like trance that you see "trends" and "fads" and "norms" follow? Because I have an xkcd for you:

"Society is a construct" is a self-destructive phrase in the sense that it's tautalogical. It's supposed to sound profound, like a sort of 'step up' from the primitive thought machine of all other people. Are you trying to say that "society" is inherently wrong? That it's incomplete? Inefficient? Perhaps if you had been put in charge, everything would be different? "Society is a construct" is a selfish phrase, and that's why I don't like it.

The concept of Emergence has baffled scientists for eternity as a seemingly completely unintuitive phenomenon of non-normalcy. All things are supposed to tend towards entropy in the end, but here we have random things coming together to form a grander, more ordered thing. Somehow just by existing together, a group of bacteria become a colony, a school of fish becomes a defense mechanism, and a colony of ants can run the most diverse and complex resource and development networks ever studied in the animal kingdom. This is not normal. It's not supposed to happen, but somehow the basic laws of the universe decided that small things working together could somehow become greater than the sum of their parts.

"Society is a construct" belittles that. It strikes down the most complex form of communication and interaction ever observed or conceived into some kind of program, whose creator has fallen asleep and missed several important error readings and updates. "Society is a construct" makes society shallow, it makes society unintuitive, it makes society arbitrary - it is none of these things.

Why else would an entire branch of study exist for anthropology? If society is so basic and unevovled, why not simply include it in some other degree? Instead you have entire swaths of individuals who dedicate their minds and lives not even to the study of society as a whole, but to individiaul sects of human cultures to most succinctly define just those. These theses and papers and entire journals are not written to be bullet points of notable values and taboos from each culture to be tallied away and locked into some database. Instead these researchers become intimately aware of every aspect of these cultures and just how intricately they weave into every other aspect, until they wrap around to a whole new aspect again and again and again for years and years to create a master tapestry the likes of which no one else could ever hope to recreate, when even then the tapestry is a mere reflection of the living, breathing world that is the culture they studied.

"Society is a construct" does not deconstruct its every layer as nothing more than some preprogrammed setting. The only thing you're proving is shallow, incompetent, and thoughtless is your own mind by deciding that this phrase was good enough idea to say in the first place. You have defended an opinion - instead of defending it properly by logic and rhretoric - by simply claiming that everyone else is wrong, asleep, and unthinking.

*panting*