So if demand is basically socially given, aren't efforts to alter it on an individual level pointless. because they do nothing to alter the causal force behind it?
Well, no. How does commercial advertising function to alter the social status of demands? It works on the individual level by building a false social image, and when that false social image becomes institutionalised by individuals, actual society conforms more closely to the false image.
Of course, in the false social image, inconvenient, unintended, or even unexpected consequences can be omitted, while they actually occur in actual society.
However, when we are trying to work with the real consequences of our actions, we must beware of slavish imitation of commercial advertising ... since we intend to have a different form of impact.
I believe that one important focus for our actions should be on smoothing the path and lowering the barriers to changes in the direction of sustainable economic development. There is, after all, plenty of pain coming down the track ... but when pain is the driving force, it does not provide much specifics in terms of direction. What we have to do is to provide directions to move where the reported experience is, "hey, this isn't that bad", so that as the news filters back into the panicky mob, that is the direction that they start to take.
For American Outer Suburbia, more specifics and less sweeping generalities in Retrofitting Outer Suburbia. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
So is culture essentially subjective or intersubjective?
If culture is subjective than we can understand it through though the internalized meanings that people give to concepts that vary person to person. So culture doesn't exist in any real sense.
If culture is intersubjective then we can understand it as shared symbols and meanings, that are socially determined rather than resulting from the individual internalizing social values. Individuals don't determine meanings, and may not even be aware that what they believe to be their own opinion results from social influence not individual choice. In a real sense, we are not entirely "free to choose" with our decisions being conditioned by social rules. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
Societal structures and individual social behavior are in a mutually self-reproducing loop. Societal structures are composed of rules and common understandings distributed among individuals, and they constrain and enable individual social behavior. In turn, it is those individual social behavior that creates those rules and common understanding.
That is, at least, my view of it. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
