In recent conversations, yours truly tried to be kind while
being inquisitive. Of course things didn’t work out as intended and resulted in
disappointment for this author. The way this played out started with the setup
question, ‘you know how some people claim that gender is a social construct?’
That was followed up by asking, ‘is morality also a social construct?’ The
response to the first question, from the first responder, was an unabashed yes,
coupled with a – well duh – look, and the second question was also provided an
affirmative answer and that same – well duh – facial expression.
These two responses produced a hiccup in the left hemisphere
of my brain. There is an old saying, which goes something like – ‘if you are not
a socialist when you are young, you have no heart, and if you are not a
capitalist when you old, you have no brain.’ It seems to this writer that in
the last few years, the age of being young has been creeping closer and closer
to when people used to start their retirement.
Typically it is those on the left who make attempts to win
the argument by slowly shifting the meaning of words, thus confusing the rest
of society into acquiescence. Taking a deeper dive in to the term in both of
the questions, ‘social construct’ we will take the first step of looking up the
words and then if available, a Google search will be done against the two words
combined.
Social: From
Google Search
Adjective
1. Relating to society or its organization.
"Alcoholism is recognized as a major social problem"
2. Needing companionship and therefore best suited to living in communities.
"We are social beings as well as individuals"
Noun
1. An informal social gathering, especially one organized by the members of a particular club or group.
"a church social"
Construct: From Google Search
Verb
1. Build or erect (something, typically a building, road, or machine).
"a company
that constructs oil rigs"
Noun
1. An idea or theory containing various conceptual elements, typically one considered to be subjective and not based on empirical evidence.
"history is
largely an ideological construct"
Social Construct: From Merriam Webster
Formal
Social Constructionism: is a theory in sociology, social ontology, and communication theory which proposes that certain ideas about physical reality arise from collaborative consensus, instead of pure observation of said reality.
‘Class
distinctions are a social construct.”
(“Social construct.”
Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Accessed 5 Nov.
2022.)
An idea that has been created and accepted by the people in a society
(Accessed 5 Nov. 2022)
The game is now set for the discussion on both of the
questions above. It seems to this author that both questions hinge on the act
of and those who are in support of putting forth the narrative of
‘construction’; with little importance being given to the word related to those
things ‘social’.
There is some confusion, in this the current year, on how
one determines what one’s society is. Above, Google tells us that ‘social’ as a
noun is literally a collection of people with at least one commonality; the
‘construction’ is the noun in this exercise so the ‘social’ must be recognized
as an adjective.
When one participates in the building of something, in whole
or in part, that person is typically referred to as a part of the construction
crew or the person who constructed that thing. Alternatively, the person who
was part of the crew was labeled with what they did as their contribution to
the result structure in the end e.g. Italo was one of the three electricians along
with other workers who put up the crown in the center of St. George’s Square Guelph
With the building or construction of the things that can be
seen, the tangible if one will, sorted out we now have to consider the
intangible. The intangible has long been thought of as a domain reserved only
for humans. This author doesn’t hold that to be true as both cats and dogs do
appear to dream in their sleep; also parrots and raccoons seem to be able to
figure out some things outside of say what snakes can do.
Moving on… when using Google’s definition of the word
construct as a noun, it can be seen that a construct is all about the
intangible, the imaginable and the fantastical. Some might say, poverty is
tangible and it is definitely not fantastic, though it must be pointed out that
being poor is both subjective and relative.
The phrase ‘social construct’ raises the ire of this author
because it is a linguistic slight of hand. Ideas are exchanged by the words
used to convey them and once words, or a combination of words, are accepted the
idea will take root in the mind of many people.
The slight of hand being played by prefacing the word
‘construct’ while the word ‘social’ implies that at least a slim majority of
society agree thus causing most people to go along with what ever the topic at
hand the phrase is applied to. This is why the two questions where so carefully
chosen. The gender related position is being used to allow people to make a
non-empirical claim where they get to assert onto others something very
personal; whereas the moral related question asserts that morality is a group
effort where by people aren’t allowed personage. This forces the question upon
the social-constructionist, which way do you want things to go: a) individual choice
and the ability to assert that choice on others or do they want group-think,
thus allowing them to abdicate responsibility?
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NOTE:
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Some people in this world live with the principle of; when
I am weak and you are kind I’ll take from you for those are your rules and when
I’m strong and you are weak, I’ll take from you for those are my rules.
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At the end of the day, morality can’t be legislated. Legislation
can only inform people of the consequences that can suffered when a law is
broken. If morals can be defined by legislation then no punitive reference would
be required. Even the Ten Commandments are not laws for they are simply a set
of guidelines on how one should behave. For example, the 6th
commandment declares that ‘thou shall not kill’ yet personal self defense and
‘social-defense’ via war is permitted. Someone picked up on this point and
changed the verbiage carved in stone to ‘You shall not murder’ some years ago;
I guess in their mind God was/is fallible.
This brings this writing to a discussion not on COVID-19,
but the reactions to COVID-19. COVID-19
brought out best the worst in so many people; for a while the reaction to
COVID-19 became the number one global secular religion, temporarily pushing the
climate activists, the ‘WOKE’ and Black Lives Matter people to the back of the
bus.
Hubris, the abandonment of responsibility and a lack able to
look forward in time are the three main factors that resulted in the gross mess
that occurred with the handling of COVID-19 response. The effort of determining
if the results of these assigned traits were accidental or purposeful may arise
in a different writing.
The beginning of the problems began at the beginning of what
was called a pandemic. Blood samples collected in Italy and other countries
were tested and found that SARS-COV-2 antibodies were to be found in blood
samples taken from blood taken that predates the original recognized outbreak
in Wuhan China.1 Additionally, the source of the virus was a focal
point right from the officially recognized onset of the ‘pandemic’.
The impotent attempt to determine the source of the virus
occupied the news cycle in parallel with the publically noted incidents of
people succumbing to the effects of contracting SARS-COV-2. Based on the
concerted efforts by both the public and private sector bodies to squelch any
questioning of the SARS-COV-2 source many people started to look over their
left shoulder thus shifting their gaze away from the four lights of truth that
were being purported to be five lights.
The next flaw in the anti-SARS-COV-2 action plan was the
trust in the experts. The first unjustified trust was in those people who made
the models that were handed out to governments and media outlets. These models,
which described the number of deaths from contracting SAR-COV-2, provided for a
worst case scenario; though those models were presented to the public as the
expected outcome probably with the intent of avoiding the worst case. The
problem with this was that those who claimed catastrophe had to maintain face
in order to maintain the public trust in the moment and so a slight of hand was
played and those people who died of other causes with COVID-19 antibodies were
being counted as COVID-19 deaths. Think of it like this, a man just outside of
a WWI trench missing an arm and half of one leg has the antibodies showing he
was fighting pneumonia and the cause of death being listed as pneumonia.
I got a bit ahead of myself, and so I’ll backup just a bit.
For those on the frontlines in the battle for public opinion, mainly
politicians and media outlets had to gage their response to the news of
COVID-19 sweeping across the planet. Some people may still remember that calls
in Italy of a hug a Chinese
person day, and how Nancy Pelosi encouraged people to visit Chinatown in San Francisco ; additionally, many people accused then
President Trump’s decision to block flights from China
Of course, international boarders were not the only
boundaries that were shuttered by global Governments. Inter-state travel was
closed, private businesses were forbidden to open and the schoolchildren were
told to stay home. All of which was kicked off with the ever echoed phrase of
‘two weeks to flatten the curve.’ Approximately 720 hundred days later many of
those tyrannical mandates were still being enforced in many places around the
globe. The ‘safety measures’ previously described as tyrannical were so labeled
as they contravened the human rights laws laid out at the national and international
level.
Of course the politicians in power during this ‘pandemic’
were not stupid and proved this by frontloading an escape plan as they brought
in their own experts, the most famous in the Western world being Dr. Anthony
Fauci – the self proclaimed ‘Pope of Science’ and Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
of the WHO. To avoid any responsibility the politicians avoided making any
decisions and towards aiding those politicians in not having to be involved in
the decision making process, any and all dissenting experts were publically
silenced; thus leaving those named experts to be the fettered goat.
By the over subscribing to a threat of mass death with the
use of worst case scenario models, coupled with overstated infection numbers
and the perpetual guessing at the source all resulted in the masses forming a
COVID-19 based moral code under the tutelage of those high atop the social
ivory tower. Local neighborhoods were split into an US
The public’s reactions to COVID-19 showed why Plato wrote
The Republic as a foil to Socrates’ idea of pure democracy. The original
question of ‘is morality a social construct?’ has been answered and that answer
is a resounding NO!
That being said, based on the points that have been raised
and covered here, it has been shown that while morality is a personal, the actual
‘social construct’ is the group-think of the masses. There is an old saying ‘the
sum of the intelligence of any group can be measured by taking the lowest IQ
and dividing it by the number of people present’, or put more simply, ‘people
can be smart while crowds will always be stupid’.
The obvious next
question is:
‘Is a request for amnesty an admission of
guilt?’
Sources:
- Timeline of SARS-CoV2 spread in
