Archives for posts with tag: Berger and Luckmann

Knowingly?!?

June 20, 2023 //
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“As a man thinks, so he is; as he continues to think, so he remains.”
James Allen

Sometime ago – more than 45 years, when food was still plentiful in communist Romania – I heard for the first time that ‘many people dig their graves with their teeth’.
I was too young to understand the deeper meaning of this. That sooner or later each of us will meet the consequences of our previous decisions.

15 years ago I read a book written when I was a toddler. Almost 60 years ago.
The Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann.

“In it, they argued that society is created by humans and human interaction, which they call habitualization. Habitualization describes how “any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be … performed again in the future in the same manner and with the same economical effort” (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Not only do we construct our own society but we also accept it as it is because others have created it before us. Society is, in fact, “habit.”“

Nowadays, the social media is full of messages stating that the posters actually don’t care about what other people think of them.

What happened to “society is, in fact, habit”?

Have we become self-sufficient enough to live, each of us, on their own?
Really?

Do we really think like this?
Cocky enough to give the finger to everybody else?
Don’t we realize that we’re building a new pattern here? A new habit?

Will our children say that we’ve built the hell they’ll be living in by carelessly talking about it?

After all, the most dangerous enemy is that who worms its way from within.
Conceit cannot be survived!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Transparency, Trust

Truth, take one

September 15, 2021 //
1

What is truth?
Which is THE truth?
Is this true?

One word, three questions…

‘Truth’ is a convention.
You cannot understand ‘truth’ without ‘lie’.

Watch the video.
Go on, I won’t go anywhere!

It’s irrelevant for the current discussion whether the drongo lies consciously or has just developed an ‘ordinary’ skill. Equivalent to that of feeding itself by ‘fishing’ worms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwVhrrDvwPM.

It’s enough for me that both us and the meerkats are able to notice that the drongo did lie. And, at least once, did sound the alarm about a real danger.

Hence it is possible, for both us, humans, and the meerkats to tell lies from truths.
Again, I have no idea whether the animals do it in a conscientious manner.

All I know is that we, humans, did coin the concept of ‘truth’. And that of ‘lie’.
And we not only coined the concepts but also attached names to each of them.
We agreed among ourselves to name them truth and lie, respectively.

In fact, we have made an agreement. A gentleman’s agreement… About when to use each word.

And a subsidiary one. About when we must definitely tell the truth and when a lie is acceptable.

http://perflensburg.se/Berger%20social-construction-of-reality.pdf

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Trust

‘Me first’ versus ‘We, together’.

December 15, 2020 //
0

Socialism!!!

Yeah.. tell that to Otto von Bismark…

Why did I even mention his name?
Simple. He was the first secular – anti-clerical, to be more precise, political leader to consider a society as an ‘organism’.
He passionately hated the self styled ‘socialists’ yet he had treated the ‘working class’ a lot fairer than the future ‘popular democracies’ which revindicated themselves from Marx’s teachings.

But enough, for now, about Marx’s blunders.

Who among us has not yet read a personal improvement book?
And what was it about?
How to make yourself ‘better’?

How to ‘stand out’?!?

How many of you have read a ‘personal improvement’ book which mentioned ‘fitting in’ as opposed to ‘standing out’ at all costs?
Finding a place where your contribution will make a more significant ‘difference’ towards the shared well being versus making ‘your’ difference more noticeable to the whole world?

‘Do such books even exist?!?’

Yep!
And the first three which come to my mind – well, four actually, are:

– The Bible,

– The Wealth of Nations – coupled with The Theory of Moral Sentiments, of course,

– The Origin and Evolution of Species.

Also helpful would be
– What Evolution Is by Ernst Mayr and
– The Social Construction of Reality by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann.

I’d start with the last two though. And then jump directly to Adam Smith.

Happy reading!

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, In English, Intent, limited rationality, Mutual Respect, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust