Defining Reality

In the middle of the night, as you stare into the darkness of your room and hover on the edge of dreaming, it may seem plausible enough that your world is an illusion. Overly philosophical minds might even take that into their daylight hours in conversation with friends or park-bench poetry. When the moment stops being right, however, it is an idea from which is easy to walk away.

So I'm going to take a moment to discuss some "real-life" instances where reality has been shaped by the people in power. I will do this with ideas blatantly ripped from discussions in my sociology class!

Have you ever heard of the term 'reification'? It means thinking of something as a concrete object that really isn't a concrete object. Like 'society'. I've heard people say that "society tells us to do" this or that, even though it doesn't really. Our parents tell us to do this or that, or we figure it out by watching specific people in our daily lives. There is no such thing as 'society'. It is just a term used to abstract the way things currently are. Making it into a concrete thing, though, makes it seem a lot more unchangeable than it really is.

When we reify things like occupational positions, it can have severe impacts on the identities of individuals. As Randall Collins says in his 1979 essay "The Political Economy of Culture", 'the term position is only a metaphor (although it is widely accepted and taken for granted) for the seemingly object-like immutability of a collection of behavioural patterns'. A doctor has a particular set of duties, but those duties don't always have to be grouped together into one occupation. And who decides what credentials you need to be a doctor, in any case?

Things aren't the way they are just because things happen that way. At some point, someone had to define what a doctor was. How they are defined, and what credentials you need, and how the financial system works in relation to your job, keep some people out of the occupation and make it easier for others to get in. Things like this create some of the class identities and individual identities that sometimes we consider unchangeable.

All you have to do is look at different places around the world to see that these identities don't have to be one way or another. The powerful are powerful because they have "the capacity to form alliances and to impress others with a given definition of reality" (Collins) that favors themselves.

If you think about it, various 'cultures' themselves are different ways that reality can play out. Yet we take cultural constructs for granted as if they were unchangeable, taking the words of 'society', of those parents and individuals I mentioned earlier who say this or that.

You know why doctors are the way they are? Because that's how lots of people define a doctor now. We uphold culture. We create reality. It doesn't have to be as disorienting as Inception. Everyday, we are being manipulated into thinking of something as 'normal' that doesn't necessarily have to be that way.

Want to be powerful? "Form alliances" and then form your own "given definition of reality". The possibility to change things is a lot more plausible than we often think.