Welcome to the podcast Life Unscripted, where we dive into the depths of how our perceived
realities shape our lives and the world around us.
I'm Alan Stafford, your host and guide through the often-invisible, yet profound influences
that perception wields over our daily existence.
Today, we turn our focus to a compelling topic that impacts every aspect of our social lives,
the social construct of reality.
This concept reveals how our collective beliefs and the norms we follow are not merely given
by nature, but are constructed through the interactions within our society.
In this episode, we'll explore how social constructs like gender roles, racial categories,
and even the concept of money are created, maintained, and sometimes challenged.
We'll dive into the mechanisms that societies use to construct reality from the language
we speak to the media we consume and see how these constructs influence everything from
our personal identity to the broad structures of power in our communities.
As we unpack these ideas, we'll start by defining what we mean by the social construction of
reality and discuss some key thinkers who have shaped our understanding of this theory.
We'll see how this plays out not just in theory, but in the very fabric of our daily lives.
So let's begin by exploring the foundation of this fascinating perspective on how it
helps us make sense of the world we live in.
Welcome, welcome, welcome, folks.
Listen, this is a very tough concept, I think, for a lot of people to understand, and that
is the social construction of reality.
I think, specifically, if you're religious, you're going to believe one thing for sure,
that is whatever your religion scripture is created the world and therefore everything
in it is a result of that scripture.
But unfortunately, for the rest of us, we have sociology and philosophy to blame.
I don't even know if we can say to blame, really.
These are the idea of social construction or social construct of reality is really a framework
for sociology and philosophy.
And basically, the premise of the theory of social construction affirms that our perceptions
of reality are not directly shaped by the objective world around us, but are constructed
through social interactions and cultural contexts.
So in essence, I mean, it's shaped by how we think and believe based on the community,
the culture, the society in which we live in and grow up in the moyes, the rules, the
regulations that they put forth for living in that society.
Let me give you an example here.
And then we're going to get into the characteristics of collective beliefs, and then we'll continue
on.
But let me give you an example, a tree.
No, it's not the old adage, if a tree falls in the forest and you're not there to listen
to it, does it really fall?
No, it's not that one.
But we can describe what a tree is, right?
We can tell people what a tree is.
At least we can give it some sort of definition, but different cultures might see it as a resource.
For example, in the Amazon, a lot of the culture down there is in the destruction of the Amazon,
not to destroy the Amazon as much as it is to cultivate, to cultivate the wood, the trees,
for profit, basically.
So we can describe a tree, but different cultures might see it as a resource, as I just mentioned.
A sacred entity, as some cultures view trees, or a piece of property, which is, this is
my tree.
Basically it illustrates a variant realities based on social context.
And really it's the society that dictates how the perception of that tree is.
So there's nothing objective about it.
It's purely subjective, which goes back to the construction of reality by the society.
So before we even get any further, let's talk about the characteristics of a collective
belief, a belief based on our social reality, our group, our society, our community.
First off, there's a shared understanding, right?
Collective beliefs are commonly held ideas among the members of a community.
And I'm sure you can identify multiple different types of communities that share different
ideas about how things ought to be, right?
I mean, we could go right to politics or right to religion, because those are very prominent,
and dictating how life should be, or how people should be governed.
You have different ideologies, which are shaped by the societies in which they are from.
For example, in the Middle East, Islam is big.
In the West, it's Christianity.
In the East, it's, or Central Asia, it could be Buddhism.
And then you have varying degrees of different religions, both monotheistic and polytheistic
paganism.
So those are dictated by the culture, the society, and they represent a common understanding
or agreement, whether explicit or implicit.
And these beliefs are often transmitted culturally through generations.
I mean, these are handed down from generation to generation via socialization processes
involving families, educational systems, media, and other mediums of cultural perpetuation.
Educational systems are big.
They teach, I know that in some schools in the Middle East, they teach that the West
is evil, that America is evil.
You know, we're the great Satan, and they hand this information down.
You have history books which omitted classes of people, or races of people, and they taught
only one race in their accomplishment.
And what about family traditions?
I mean, is there any family traditions that you have that your family clings to, any ideologies
that are different from your friends or peers or someone else that was handed down by your
family?
You go, well, my mom and my dad taught me this, and my grandparents taught me this.
It must be true.
Well, I wouldn't say it must be true just because they taught you that.
But what I'm saying is they're shaping your reality, right?
And again, there's influence on behavior, right?
Collective beliefs significantly influence individual and group behavior.
And they do this by setting expectations and norms that dictate acceptable conduct within
the society.
We have, why do you think there's so many cultural clashes in the United States?
You have different cultures that have different sets of expectations on how to behave.
They bring it here to the United States, even in Europe.
The same problem exists in Europe, you know, or Canada, where you have people coming over
and they bring their cultural backgrounds, their ideologies, their beliefs, and they
try to influence their offspring within that new country.
And there's a clash of that, a clash of ideologies within that culture.
But I think it was in the last podcast, we talked about identity and the one of the characteristics
of a collective belief is that it forms, helps form an identity.
People need some sort of identity, right?
I'm a Muslim, I'm a Christian, I'm a, I'm a Buddhist, you know, whatever it is that
you identify with, it helps form that identity, making individuals feel connected to their
community through these shared values and common perspectives.
If you've ever traveled somewhere and you didn't expect to see somebody from your country,
and you connected with that person, you said, oh, hey, you're from Canada too?
I'm from Canada.
What part of Canada?
You guys create this automatic bond because you have shared culture, shared heritage.
And this is what I'm talking about as part of a characteristic of a collective belief.
You can now bond with this person in a foreign country because you have a shared common belief,
at least in theory you do.
I don't know, you might be from different diverse groups in Canada or the U.S. and share,
have something completely different, but I'm just making an assumption here.
But in theory, you would gravitate towards that person.
The same thing as if you're, if you're Italian, you know, and you come to the United States
and you meet another Italian and you haven't seen Italians for a while in the United States
and you like create this bond.
I mean, in the U.S. every, they have everybody.
So it's going to be hard not to see another Italian, but you know, you create that automatic
connection, especially if that other person's here visiting just like you are, then you
really connect that bond because it's, this is not your host country.
And you're like, oh, let's stick together just to drive the point home of collective
beliefs.
Let's give you a few examples.
Democracy as a governmental system is a collective belief.
I mean, the belief in democracy as an effective system of governance is widely held in a lot
of societies, which influences political structures and citizen engagement.
And what do we do in a democracy?
We try to push that onto other societies, try to sell them our collective belief, which
I don't always think works and it shouldn't work.
But we try that human rights.
Human rights is another example of collective beliefs.
Those who are so in tune with human rights won't buy into that ideology.
That is a collective belief, but it is because not everybody subscribes to the ideology
of human rights.
Take a look at Israel.
Israel violates human rights.
Take a look at the Middle East.
They violate human rights.
And again, this is predicated on the fact that we have an understanding of what human rights
are and agreed upon understanding.
And I don't think we have that either because to them, human rights might mean, you know,
punishment or death.
If someone does something that's, you know, that we don't perceive in the West as serious,
but human rights is a collective belief that has shaped, or as I said, tried to shape other
countries' belief systems, you know, as far as giving people certain rights and dignities,
you know, within their life.
But then again, who are we or who is one country to say another country should do that?
I don't know.
It's just a question, but it's a valid question.
I personally believe in the rights of all humans and that everybody should be free to
go about their business without persecution.
However, not everybody agrees with me.
And I don't think we're ever going to get anybody, everybody meaning to agree on the
same thing to be objective about it.
It's just not possible or probable.
I guess I should say the possibility exists, but the probability does not.
Economic systems, capitalism, that's another, that's another example of a collective belief
system.
So the Middle East, extreme Islam, they don't believe in a capitalistic society, although
maybe the leaders do.
They just don't want their people to believe in it.
Socialism, we have a big problem in this country with socialism.
Not that we are socialists.
However, we have this perception that the Democrats want to make the United States a
socialistic country, which is somewhat ridiculous.
However, you have the right always opposing that ideology, even though as though it's
some sort of satanic or devil thing.
I think some socialism is good.
We have some socialism in the US, just like other countries do.
I think we're too big to manage a country based on socialism, but in any event, you
don't have that agreement across the board.
And that's another construct of a collective beliefs.
And again, how societies organize and distribute production and goods and stuff is all collective.
It's all basically based on a society's belief in how they want to operate.
And there are people within that society that don't want to operate that way either.
And when you get enough of them, you have an uprising, right?
These beliefs are another collective belief example, you know, different religions.
We have the freedom to believe in what we want to believe.
That is my my stand, but you'll have some countries where one religion dominates all
other religions and they don't want that ticket, for example, for example, the Middle
East, you know, they Islam is Islam to them.
That's it.
They don't really, while they might preach, it's okay to be a Christian.
They really don't like that.
They don't want that same thing with Israel as well.
You know, they form design a state where the citizens of Israel are not Israelites, but
Jewish.
And one other concept, which might blow your mind a little bit is scientific consensus
is also a collective belief.
Yes, folks, beliefs and scientific principles and trust in scientific methods are really
collective beliefs that influence educational content, research funding and public policy.
Like for example, homosexuality.
It is biologically scientifically proven that there is a, I would say, and pardon my ignorance
on this concept, but there is a biological reason, a scientific reason for homosexuality.
However, some cultures don't accept that scientific research.
They debunk it.
You know, I know Russia is one of them.
The Middle East, another one, even Christianity, a lot of them, not every one of them, but
a lot of them.
It's a complex world, folks.
I mean, just try navigating.
I guess that's why it's easier to just think.
I mean, not to think, but just to accept what you hear and align yourself with like-minded
people and just live your life.
That might be the best approach than having to think this hard.
Sometimes I get tired of thinking.
I literally, from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed and in the middle of
the night, I'm thinking.
And I find it fascinating to think this stuff, to really understand the root of our existence,
our thinking, our humanity, culture, just our behavior.
But I want to touch on two individuals, sociologists, social scientists, I should say, social psychologists.
There's social something, right?
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, who were basically pivotal and pole and popularizing
this concept of social construction in their book, The Social Construction of Reality.
I mean, their argument was that all knowledge, including common sense, which to me is not
always that common, about the world is derived from and maintained by social interactions.
That's people connecting with one another.
Human beings construct their reality socially as they engage in the world around them is
what they said.
Which is true.
We create our reality when we engage in socializing with people around us.
What do you tend to do when you go to a party?
You tend to find or seek like-minded people.
You might be new in this unconsciously, so to speak, but you gravitate towards people
who confirm your biases and kind of think like you.
And both their work on the book, The Social Construction of Reality, basically aligns
with the 20th century movement, particularly in response to the growing interest in phenomenology
and existentialism, which basically emphasizes subjective experiences of the individual in
understanding the world.
So they did a lot of work in basically understanding social construction of reality.
So basically their work, their work, and this is important to understand that this ho-concept
is relatively new as well, because before that, even though you would have philosophical
doctrines that challenged existing models in social science by focusing on everyday
social interactions, basically as the core component of societal constructs, even before
them, but they really brought the whole notion of social construction of reality to light.
Another argument they proposed was that knowledge itself is not just an individual construct,
but a social product, and that is true.
I mean, I believe it to be true.
I shouldn't say it's true as though it's a solid statement, it's an objective statement,
because it's not.
But they argued that knowledge is not just an individual construct, but a social product.
So what we consider to be true is largely, as I just stated, is largely- I can't even
speak today- is largely agreed upon in society through a process which they called externalization.
And this is basically where individuals project their meanings into the world.
We project our meanings- an objectivization, where these meanings gain objectivity.
So basically the idea here with Berger and Luckman is that we take our personal meanings
of reality, of our reality, project them into society, where society objectifies them as
though we get like-minded people agreeing upon that, therefore we think it's an objective
reality when in fact it's not, because just that group of people, that society will agree
upon it, and then they would internalize it.
The individual person would internalize it, basically absorbing this objective reality
back into their belief system to create this construct of their reality.
So if we do a 32,000-foot view of this whole concept, basically you walk along, create
a concept, an ideology, a belief system, you project that into your common society, the
people in there take that, buy into it, and objectify that, and when they speak about
that, talk about it, preach about it, whatever they do about it in society, you hear it and
that comes back to you to reinforce the belief that what you believed was true because they
believe it's true because you told them that and they all agreed upon it and then they
spit it back and now you believe it.
It's like full circle.
You know, it happens.
If you take a look at it, if you break down religion, if you break down government politics,
if you break down even family household traditions, you'll see that this is true, that it starts
with one or two people, gets pushed out into society, society buys it, objectifies it,
talks about it, solidifies it into their cultural norms, and it gets pushed back onto the individual
as a belief system and objectivity, which it's not objective at all.
Again, it's subjective, purely subjective, and I'll give you an illustration on how that
works too.
Education.
Our educational systems are prime examples of this process.
The curriculum taught in schools represents basically a body of knowledge, right?
That society has agreed is valuable and true.
And then this body of knowledge that society has agreed is valuable and true is internalized
by the students who accept this knowledge as reality.
And folks, I don't know if you've been following the news, but Oklahoma, the state and the
USA just mandated that all schools need to incorporate the Bible into their curriculum.
I mean, this is perfect timing for this podcast because now what you have is a governor who
wholeheartedly believes that the Bible, which we have separation of church and state in
the USA, but this governor believes that the Bible, its curriculum, its ideology should
be placed into public school curriculum and taught back to the children.
Now, I don't know about you, but I'm all about the freedom of religion.
You are free to believe in what you want to believe as long as you don't bring harm to
you or society.
But in this case, I think you have other belief systems.
You have Native Americans that have a different belief system.
You have Muslims in the region.
You have Judaism, which doesn't necessarily accept or believe in the New Testament.
You have Buddhists and you have all walks of other minority types of religions.
So it's one man or one group pushing their agenda onto an educational system, which pushes
it onto the child as reality.
Talk about a perfect social construct of reality right there, an example.
We've seen it happen right before our eyes.
Now, you might be saying there's nothing wrong with that and you know, you have the right
to do that.
But I think as a society as whole, you shouldn't project your own ideologies onto everyone
else who may not have those ideologies because now you're making everybody try to think and
believe like you do or the group does and I don't agree with that.
And then Berger and Luckman also talked about the concept of habitualization and institutionalization.
Both mechanisms basically perpetuate social conducts or constructs, I should say.
Habitualization basically describes how repeated actions become patterns that people perform
without thinking.
So again, back in our public education example where the Bible is being now forced to be
taught in public schools, that pattern, that repeated action becomes a pattern that the
students begin to perform without thinking.
And institutionalization follows when these habits are codified and become stable in their
thinking, in their mind, making certain actions or behaviors expected and normal within a society.
So that's how you can normalize a behavior or a belief.
And that's how you can take a society or group of people with one belief and change the belief
by indoctrinating it into their educational system, for example, or forcing it into the
culture of the society or the way they think.
And then once you force that into it, it becomes part of society.
They regurgitate it.
They start to buy into it and then it gets spit back into the individual who begins to
believe it and accept it as normal.
And we see that in politics here in the USA.
We see that politics everywhere in the world.
But we're seeing that here definitely.
And another example of habitualization and institutionalization is money.
So initially, back in the day, the idea of trading goods with symbolic tokens or currency
required a leap of faith, so to speak.
I mean, there was nothing really backing it up.
But through habitualization and institutionalization, money has become a normal and unquestioned
part of economic transactions.
Look what money does to people and makes them crazy.
They've been, it's been normalized as a way to bring yourself to power to have wealth.
And I'm not saying money's bad.
I'm just saying the abuse of it and the abuse in the pursuit of it may not be a positive
trait.
But by all means, make money.
If that's the vehicle that we use to make trade, then make money.
If we use bags of rice, then go grow rice.
And speaking of money, let's let's explore how the complex social constructs like money,
marriage and education systems shape our understanding of the world.
Because they play a big part.
I mean, marriage itself in this whole, you got to buy a girl a diamond ring concept.
You know, that's an invention by the Beers, the Beers family, who basically had a monopoly
on the minds, the diamond mines in Africa.
And I want to say Europe or Asia as well.
But in any event, controlling that market and then marketing it that a diamond is a
girl's best friend and it becomes a symbolism of love.
And know if you were to open up the market in the mines, it would basically be worthless
diamonds.
And here's a kicker that you probably haven't thought about.
But money is a social construct, right?
Okay, so we've talked about that.
So here's something that may kind of blow your mind.
I don't know, maybe it won't.
But money, we talked about it as a social construct, but it has no intrinsic value.
There's no intrinsic value to money.
It's worth get this is decided by the collective agreement and trust of the society that you
use as it.
We've seen countries print money, governments fall that money becomes worthless.
Why?
Because the government is gone.
The leadership is gone.
What's the point of the money now?
A new government comes in, they print their own money.
There's no intrinsic value.
It's what the people say the value is.
And it usually starts with the government.
Think about that about money.
While we think it's a stable entity in capitalism, in fact, it's not very stable if a government
decides or people decide it's worthless.
Hence fiat money being printed in the US.
It's no longer backed by gold.
And gold is also a social construct of value too.
From what I understand, there's still a lot of gold in the earth that would make the gold
that we have now not as valuable if mined.
However, it's hard to mine that gold.
It's deep in it's in places that we can't get to.
But back to money, the concept of money basically varies across different societies.
Money has a different idea of money and even historical periods too.
We barter systems, bartering systems back in the day, back in the middle ages.
Even earlier, we bartered for goods.
I barter sometimes too.
I still try to trade people stuff I have.
Hey, you want my drone for your camera type of thing.
And I'm okay with that.
If it's something that I find valuable, it doesn't have to be equal value.
It's got to be something I find valuable.
And then you also have digital cryptocurrency, which in itself is a Ponzi scheme.
It's not backed by anything, but neither is fiat money really, other than the government.
But the government, the whole concept of crypto is to not have government involvement.
So what's it backed by?
You know, there's no intrinsic value to crypto, but yet we still keep driving the value of
it up.
So again, these are all social constructs that you probably haven't thought about in
the past that I'm bringing to light to you for the first time.
And maybe it's not the first time, maybe it's just a reminder, but it is important to understand
that money is a social construct of reality.
It's not something rooted in nature.
It's something that we've created in order to do trade.
We created a value system around this paper money, even marriage.
I mean, I don't know that they had very many marriages with wedding rings in the flowers
back in the early days of Homo sapiens some 200, 300,000 years ago, but it's a societal
construct basically defining relationships and roles according to cultural norms.
And of course, legal frameworks.
You always got to have the legal frameworks because they got to get their fee out of it
too, right?
The government's got to have a cut in something.
I mean, we can make a comparison to traditional arranged marriages and some cultures, especially
in India or the Middle East, compare that to Western idea of marrying for love, basically.
There's societal expectations, shape, personal relationships.
So in the West, we marry for love.
And if you don't like that person, you divorce them, go find someone else you love for the
day, so to speak.
But in the Middle East or Central Asia, like India, or even Asian cultures, you're going
to have prearranged marriages and they're not necessarily for love.
There's other advantages for that.
So again, marriage is really a social construct based on the society in which is performing
the marriages, having the marriage.
And individual identity is also shaped by society.
It's a social construct as well, because each person's reality is molded by the constructs
they interact with, which basically influences their choices, beliefs, and their behaviors.
For example, you know, some professional identity, some professional identities, they shape, they
are shaped by educational and occupational constructs, such as the belief in certain prestigious
careers over others.
There are people that I know that have doctorate degrees that snub their nose and look down
on those who are not educated formally, institutionally.
And I'm not a big proponent of institutionalized education, even though I have advanced degrees
from institutions.
But the bottom line is, I don't necessarily agree that it's for everybody.
And I don't agree that you can gain knowledge from an institution and you can't without
the institution.
Because I think equally you can gain it without the institution.
But yet, because they have this piece of paper, again, a construct of reality, stating that
oh, he has a doctorate or a master's from this prestigious university, he's better.
No, unfortunately, I hate to burst your bubble, but you're not.
What makes a person better?
And I don't even think a person is better.
I think what gives a person an advantage in society is their ability to think critically.
Is their ability to be open-minded and accept other people, not so much because of their
degree.
And that's a lot to take in.
I mean, and hopefully, you know, you've gained something from this segment.
But I challenge you to take a look at your own social constructs.
What have you created in your society, in your mind, about who you are based on your
cultural norms?
What are your belief systems?
Those are all social constructs of who you are, where you live, and how you were brought
up.
That's a good exercise to go through is to examine that.
All right.
So I want to turn to some real-life applications on this whole idea of the construct of a social
construct of reality.
You know, I want to preface that by saying that social constructs are really not static.
They evolve.
They evolve and can be reshaped through societal actions and even events.
So for example, let's take gender roles.
Gender roles in Western societies, specifically in the 20th and 21st century, we've seen women's
suffrage, you know, the right to vote, feminist movement, and recent shifts towards recognizing
non-binary and transgender rights.
These changes have reshaped societal expectations and norms around gender.
This has had a tremendous impact on everything from workplace policies to family dynamics.
I mean, it's still ongoing.
We're right now in the midst of this transformation and this shift in the social construct of
reality in our Western societies.
Think about it for a second, folks.
There was a time when you wouldn't say that you were even gay or that you wouldn't say
that you're a transgender or even bring that to surface.
Now there's a complete shift in mindset, ideology about the acceptance of transgenders and non-binaries
and even, like I said, women's suffrage, the right for women to vote, the whole feminist
movement.
And again, I'm not saying this is wrong.
I'm just saying this is just how society shifts and the fact that social constructs are not
static.
They don't stay one way because if they did, we'd all be still in the Middle Ages or the
Stone Ages.
We wouldn't accept the concept of money, marriage, a religion that didn't exist over
2000, well, over 4,000 years ago, maybe.
So none of this, we would still be back in those days.
Even significant changes in racial attitudes through the civil rights movement here in
the United States has had a profound impact on social constructs of our reality, how we've
shifted our mindset.
I mean, we've seen it in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act movement and even Black Lives Matter
movement.
We've seen that shift in our reality.
And these movements have challenged and sometimes shifted racial stereotypes and systematic discrimination
within various societal institutions themselves.
So again, it reinforces the fact that the social construct of reality is not a static
ideology.
It's not static at all.
And it will continue to change as we come to the light with new ideas and new ways of
living and new thoughts.
I don't know.
It's kind of kind of worrying to me what's going to happen in the future.
And here's a big one too.
Social media's role in reality construction, that's big.
Take a look at what social media is doing in political races, you know, in, in fake
news.
And I'm not using fake news as in everything's fake news.
I'm talking about mis, miscommunication or dis or misinformation and disinformation by,
you know, nefarious parties.
I mean, you've got Facebook, Twitter, which is now X and Instagram, TikTok.
These are all reshaping public perceptions and realities.
I mean, TikTok alone is to me, a modern day freak show.
But yet somehow we learn to accept this and think, okay, well, this is, is this the new
normal?
I guess it's the new normal.
Let's carry on then.
And I don't mean freak show in a negative way.
I'm just saying it's just deep parts from what I'm used to.
And I understand I have biases just like everybody else has biases, right?
We all have these biases.
We all make these judgments.
And I try not to make judgments, but I do.
And when I do, I realize it and I step back and say, you know, that's not right.
You know, people are entitled to be who they want to be.
But when I look at TikTok, man, that's like, that's like an emerging new shift in a reality
for me sometimes.
And one of the biggest things on social media is the echo chambers or these filter bubbles,
basically where a user is exposed to only information that reinforces their preexisting
beliefs.
It's confirmation bias right there because the algorithm is designed to feed you what
you're already looking at.
So if you're looking at, let's say, anti gay stuff or pro maga stuff or whatever the case
is, that algorithm is going to feed you that nonsense.
I know with me, those algorithms, they probably don't know what to do because I look at everything.
It's not just one thing I look at.
I don't ever get the same thing because I'm constantly scrolling and looking for different
things and ideas and just really trying to take a look at human behavior in the scope
of social media.
But it does it.
It puts you into these echo chambers and it feeds you stuff that you already have this
predetermined belief system in further shaping your reality on that.
That's insane.
And yet most people aren't aware of it.
By now, the majority of people understand the algorithm.
I don't even know if it's the majority of people.
That's not even fair to say.
I don't know if everyone's aware of that.
And COVID-19 also had a major shift, big global perception and changes regarding health, safety
and science just because of the pandemic.
It really, I don't want to say it messed people up, but it messed people up to a certain degree
and really rattled their belief system, shook the foundation of what they thought.
I mean, it was a constant shift and changing in mindset through that entire process.
Some came out okay at the other end.
Some are just like completely non-believers of anything.
It's baffling to me.
The real takeaway from COVID-19 though is that how different countries, their responses
have reflected in influenced public trust and science and government.
Here in the United States, you had the number one viral ologist, Dr. Fauci talk about and
basically pretty much leading this charge on COVID-19.
And some of the stuff that he was saying was probably not 100% by his own admission at
the time, but it's what we knew best to do, for example, lockdown the schools.
Later on, he admitted that was probably not the best thing to do.
However, at the time, based on the data, that was the best thing to do because we didn't
really know what to do because we hadn't really gone through something like this with this
type of population.
So in any event, it caused a lot of uproar with people and they started to hate him.
And not just because of that, because of other bits of information that he put out, which
later proved to be true.
But my point is you had people who couldn't think critically and accept the fact that
we're going through this together and that this is our new reality.
And we have to figure out the best way to approach this to minimize the collateral damage that
this virus has caused on humanity.
And yet it charged a lot of people towards hatred.
It changed their reality and created a mistrust about the government and science in them when
it shouldn't have.
Maybe I shouldn't say it shouldn't have, but it did in any event.
So I mean, these are life events.
These are current events that set off a chain of events that lead to a complete shift in
the reality of society, our social construct of reality.
I don't know about you, but I think it's quite fascinating to do some deep thinking about
just reality itself and the construct of reality and what we put into it and what we get out
of it.
I get it.
We need rules and regulations for a civilized society.
We need to learn to identify with certain groups of people for safety reasons, for health
reasons, for survival reasons.
But I think the big takeaway from understanding this whole idea of constructing realities
based on our life experiences and society is that we should continue to do that.
However, we should also be open-minded and accept other people.
We don't have to agree with their point of view because if we agreed with everybody,
then we really would all be one, you know, basically one big construct, one big ideology.
And that's not how life is and that's not how humanity is and that's not how cultures
and societies develop.
But if we learn to accept other cultures and other societies and their belief systems and
have a mutual respect for one another, I think we can survive in this world with a little
bit more peace.
Like I said, you don't have to agree with it and you don't have to accept it.
But don't go out of your way to destroy it, you know what I mean?
And that's what we do.
We like to destroy other people's ideologies, their beliefs because we feel ours is better
when ours is no better than theirs.
I mean, you probably think, oh, mine's better.
Yeah, I don't think so, buddy.
But in any event, that was my spiel on the social construct of reality.
I want to encourage you, you know, as you go through the next few days, week, months,
the rest of your life, I want you to reflect on how your own realities are constructed.
Think about what you believe in.
Think about how they're connected to the society in which you live in and to your family and
to your history.
What role do they play within the social construct of your community, of your country, you know,
of your belief system?
And then I want you to sit there and think, well, you don't have to sit there.
You can stand.
But what I want you to do is be able to think what parts of your perceived reality might
be open to reevaluation or even change.
So for example, if you anti a certain group, and that's predicated on maybe a religious
belief, just a personal belief, just something you were taught, whatever it is, is that open
to reinterpretation to reevaluation and to change?
Again, it doesn't mean you're going to become that person.
It just means you understand them a little better and accept them as human as people
as well, who are entitled to have their own belief system.
And as always, if you want to discuss any of this, you're free to do it on my YouTube
channel where I have my audio podcast, and there's a discussion, you know, room for comments,
and it would be life unscripted with Alan Stafford.
Or you can listen to this podcast on any of your favorite streaming stations.
I want to really express my gratitude to the listener to you for taking the time out of
your day to listen and engage with this podcast.
I look forward to doing more to bring in the light, more of my insights, and maybe helping
people understand that reality really is a construct, and we can be and decide who we
want to be.
We're not limited by any doctrine.
Until next time, my friend, stay positive, think critical, and be open.
I'm Alan Stafford for Life Unscripted.