Sunday, November 13, 2022

Really, For the Greater Good?

 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.”
                                    From Wikipedia
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 in Guelph back in November of 1960.  (https://vintageguelph.ca/2019/06/04/thecrownofdowntownguelph/)
 
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?
 
NOTE:
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.
 
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 and other hot beds of COVID-19 infections claiming that he was being racist. The reader should be mindful of the fact that no-one batted an eye when countries around world followed the then President Donald Trump’s lead of closing airports and boarders.
 
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 v. THEM position. The ‘othering’ of those who refused to drink the Kool-Aid reached as high as the Prime Minister of Canada along with movie stars or as some sort of celebrity by some other means. These purported shining lights of society demonstrated to the world those who were willing to wear the arm band, all the while demanding a tattoo be scribed on the arms of those ‘others’.
 
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:
  1. Timeline of SARS-CoV2 spread in Italy: results from an independent serological retesting.                https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.14.21260491v1

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