Quote Originally Posted by lungs View Post
It just seems as clear to me as my hand in front of my face that I wear jeans and not hijab, speak a certain English vernacular and not Spanish, and spend my days in a cubicle instead of in a mine because of the time and place in which I was born and my socioeconomic status. How does this not apply to everything, including the ideas I have about race, for example? It doesn't necessarily follow that all identity politics is 100% legitimate. But the idea that everything is about the individual and there is no society strikes me as so patently absurd that I don't know how to address it.
"No society" is a bit harsh, but this kind of broad Society that people think of seems to not exist at all. I think the sort of contextual things you mentioned are the antithesis of Society in some way. Like there are many different, smaller societies, and that's why all the "social issues" don't exist in the sense that @strangeling agreed with. Some broad The World would homogenize things too much, but no world would leave everyone a bunch of solipsistic animals. The real state of things has to be set up rather differently than people think for people to do stupid and terrifying things like enslave only people of their own skin color or help perpetuate genocide against their own ethnicity and somehow evade inclusion in what they're doing. Sociology seems to have started with Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and those seem rather different from "issues in society" in the way people think of since those are societies rather than some human macrocosm. And societies, as non-universal, is more in line with historicism than Society. And I mostly just think of these societies as basically groups of people, not really connected to Society as an idea ta all. And the idea of Gesellschaft was something people joined out of rational interests, and since there's nothing rational about wanting to be oppressed, all "social issues" would be in Gemeinschaft, and therefore personal, not what people think of as Society at all.