Sociological Notes

All of Us Are Slaves to Culture

There is no escaping the webs of significance that we ourselves have spun.

When I was growing up, I used to think that society was mostly b*llshit.

None of it made any logical sense to me.

Why did we have to work a job and get tired at work? And then to alleviate the tiredness of commuting, buy a car, and end up having to work even more to pay it off?

The younger me thought there was a more rational, more logical way. I had not realized that the world was irrational.

I thought, wrongly, that I could reject society.

And then, I studied sociology — and it changed the way I look at the world.

We Think Money, University Degrees, and Passports Are Real

Think about money — the one human creation that we live and die by. It’s completely arbitrary and made up. Still, we mistake it for something that has a transcendental quality. We think money has some kind of essence, when in fact, money is meaningless outside of cultures that ascribe meaning to them — as an agreed-upon store of value and medium of exchange.

Today, in modern economies, banks create money out of nothing — but they are backed by authorities, giving us faith that we can use them to buy and sell goods and services.

And even when we intuitively know that money is fiction, world-famous investors like Warren Buffett have trouble believing that Bitcoin could also have quasi-money-like characteristics.

We think university degrees are real. Yet, their reality is much more contingent. They are magical symbols willed into existence by universities — themselves another cultural artifact, and it’s clear that degree inflation has cheapened their value. Now, top tech companies like Google hire people without four-year degrees, calling into question if there’s any intrinsic value left to them.

The same is true with passports. These wouldn’t exist in a world without states.

But it would be an oversimplification to say that money, university, and passports are socially constructed and think that we could simply ignore them. No — their effects are very real. Try to cross a country without a valid passport or visa, and you might just get deported. Try to take an orange from a supermarket without paying for it in currency, and you’ll get arrested.

Laws are made up but try to break them, and you soon find yourself in a hot mess.

And so, we learn, from a young age, to accept these socially created fictions as taken-for-granted facts.

Capitalists Are Also Trapped by Capitalism

It’s fashionable to deride capitalism today. Heck, even I have lamented my fate as a wage worker trying to find a way out of the corporate world.

I’m working on it by slowly creating content that I own.

But capitalists are also trapped by the monster that they’ve given birth to. In the initial beginnings of the bourgeoise revolution, all that happened was that the owners of capital revolted against the aristocrats.

Most likely, no one — not even the bourgeoisie — could have imagined the massive monster they would help give birth to.

Today, we all play by the rules of capitalism — none more so than the capitalists themselves.

They compete against each other for profits. They are forced to expand all over the globe in search of new markets to buy materials from, cheap labor to manufacture with, and new consumers to sell to.

Yes, some of them get very rich in the meantime — ridiculously so.

But it’s a relentless game. If you don’t do it someone else will.

Social Norms Exist, Therefore Society Exists

It’s unpopular to talk about the notion of society today.

We live lives and see ourselves as individuals. Neoliberal ideology has done nothing to change this view. So today, we cannot rely on the government, we cannot rely on others — we can only rely on ourselves.

Yet, this is a misleading train of thought.

We know society exists because social norms transcend individuals. They penetrate us and we feel their force. If you reject a standard life, why do you feel justified to defend it?

Today — there is much talk about diversity. Much of this has been driven by what we can call the inclusivity movement. We feel much of this making itself felt through what some would call woke ideology.

Much of this power comes from the leverage of social media. It’s become very, very easy for people to get canceled for going against the emerging norm of diversity and inclusion.

Today, all of us need to be extremely careful about what we say on social media.

We have become very careful not to prescribe social norms.

This is the story society tells itself: People come in all kinds of shapes, sizes, genders, preferences, and predispositions, and we want to honor diversity — and that is what we believe.

So now, a new social norm — inclusivity is coming into place.

Try as you might, but you cannot escape the power of social norms.

Culture Is Like Clothing — We Can’t Get Rid of Either

Every human society has some kind of clothing. Yes, we need protection from the elements — but clothing is also magically imbued with meaning.

Clothing tells people about your status in society. Certain clothes have ritualistic significance. All kinds of ceremonies demand certain dress codes. Special clothing marks events as moments different from the normal flow of time.

Uniforms erase all semblance of personal identity within a disciplined organization — either the military, the factory, the school, or the prison. It is probably not a coincidence that the military resembles the factory, which resembles the school, and all of them resemble the prison.

This is not an original idea, of course. I took it from the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Today, in the business world, the uniform of the businessman is disappearing. Suits are vanishing from the office. The entire world is casualizing in how we relate to one another, rituals are becoming less important, and that dynamic finds its expression in the realm of clothing. Now, what you put on your body is about self-expression and identity construction. Clothes are less about group identity than self-identity.

We create our own identity using scraps of fabric.

But clothing is also a great metaphor for culture.

We can choose what we want to wear, and it gives us great comfort and even pride. Our clothes allow us to identify with a group. They let us tell people about our social status. Clothes carry meaning — like culture.

Today, clothing is also about fashion. We look into the future and imagine that the future will always be different from the past. In the same way, our fashions tell us that what is new today will be old tomorrow. Tradition gives way to modernity, and you will always be more modern today than you were yesterday.

And, just like how we will never be rid of culture, we will never be rid of clothes either.

We Are Trapped by Webs of Significance We Ourselves Have Spun

Everything we attach any kind of meaning or significance to is made up.

National borders appear fixed on maps, and yet, when we pass them, we do not feel like there is something that has inherently changed.

Nations are imagined communities, yet the force they exact on us is all too real — people are willing to fight, go to war, and die for their countries. A cultural and political fiction, but fiction all the same.

But it is fiction that calls to us. It is fiction that compels us. It is fiction that moves us. And in doing so, it is these stories we have written that we trap ourselves with.

The late American anthropologist Clifford Geertz knew this when he wrote that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” The gendered language is a bit dated, but the message surely is timeless.

For it is the same truth that even a conqueror knew.

“A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him.” — Napoléon Bonaparte

We are all slaves to the collective fiction of culture we have made. There is no escape and no “outside” of culture. So, the only practical question left to answer is, do you know what are the webs that bind you?

If you’ll need to wear some kind of clothing, what do you choose to wear?

The author is an editor of Japonica, a Japan-focused publication, but also writes on a wide variety of topics. His key topics of interest are society, culture, modern work, creator economy, and cryptocurrency, with the occasional fictional story, creative piece, or personal essay. Discover his most-read stories here.

If these topics interest you, subscribe to receive a monthly digest of new stories via e-mail.