Freedoom

When brute facts collide with social constructions

I’ve been thinking a lot about reality. Because last week in the UK more than 600 people died of covid, like they have done more or less every week in 2023. Because a Sars virus continues to infect and harm hundreds of millions a week. Because last week the world’s best climate scientists said we’re on the verge of a catastrophe that will upend our entire existence as a species. Because in response to these things nothing happened. There were some articles about the end of the world at least. But there was no media coverage about the virus deaths. No articles about the implications of ongoing mass infection. Politicians didn’t urgently mobilise to stop these existential threats. There were no government statements in response to either. Everything carried on as normal.

I was always a slightly strange kid. Things bothered me. The existence of countries. The existence of money. The idea of mortgages. Of jobs. War. Everything really. I was always trying to understand why things had to be like they were and I didn’t understand why everything was as it was. Especially when it was bad or seemed abnormal in some way. What my young brain didn’t understand was that adults socially construct their reality.

It’s a theory that can explain a lot about what’s going on in the world, especially now.

Two realities

An idea formulated by ancient Greek philosophers but popularised by sociologists Peter L Berger and Thomas Luckmann in the 1960s, the social construction of reality is the idea that people continuously create, through their actions and interactions, a shared reality that is experienced by those people as objectively factual and subjectively meaningful. This process helps people create communities, structured around norms, shared ideas and understandings. All the good stuff you need for a society, basically. We agree as a culture that money exists, that it is exchanged for goods and services, that a border is a line separating one land mass from another, etc etc. But this isn’t the only thing that exists. Alongside the socially constructed reality there are natural realities. Or brute facts, as some sociologists call them.

Things that you can’t socially construct your way out of.

Things that just are. Gravity. Oxygen. CO2. Viruses.

But not everyone believes in these things.

The mainstreaming of post-truthism

In recent years, we’ve heard a lot about the so-called “post-truth” world from the media, most often in reference to Trump/MAGA people, Brexiteers and other strands of the far right that deny factual things, or obvious truths. Not ideal, but not really new, I didn’t think. Political lies told to people for political gains. But in the last year, something significant has happened. Post-truthism is no longer confined to the far right. And it is no longer a pejorative label liberals can throw at Trumpers or Brexiteers. Post-truthism has broken free of politics and gone mainstream. It has infected the culture. And it’s gone global.

Socially constructed realities are no longer clashing with brute facts at the political level, they are clashing with brute facts at the level of a civilisation.

Because progressives, liberals, MAGA, the right, the left, and all their leaders agree on one thing: the pandemic is over. Despite death numbers being at levels that provoked lockdowns in the past, despite a virus mutating beyond vaccines, despite a rising toll of sickness putting record numbers of people out of the workforce, despite record excess deaths and plummeting life expectancy…..silence.

People of all political flavours have united like never before to socially construct a reality in order to deny natural reality.

It is quite a sight. It is not so different from climate breakdown. The far right might deny or ignore it, but rarely more than lip-service is paid by progressives and their leaders. Rarely does the policy or the behaviour match the existential scale of the crisis.

So what’s going on? Socially constructing reality, says sociologist Dennis Hiebert, requires the formulation of a cognitive and moral basis that will explain and justify behaviours necessary to maintain the reality. Hiebert says the most powerful form of legitimation is religion. God is the higher calling that justifies the behaviours necessary to construct the reality. But this doesn’t really apply to secular societies. We need another explanation. We need a new God to justify our behaviours.

And to me that God looks like individuality, which we might also label freedom.

Freedoom

At the start of the pandemic, governments worked to socially construct a reality in line with natural reality, and the media reported it as such. It made sense. Two realities – the social and the natural - in alignment. (This has never been the case for the climate crisis, by the way). But this fell apart quickly. Business interests, politicians and much of the media engineered a ‘freedom’ narrative to get everything back to normal as fast as possible for the sake of profits, regardless of the human cost. I’ve written about this before (btw you see them using the same ‘freedom’ narratives to argue against climate measures).

And then something strange happened. A far right narrative of freedom that had been sneered at as dangerous and against public health, became, six months later, the majority, mainstream position.

The UK called the day it ended all covid protections “freedom day” for fucks sake. There were no protests in support of public health measures.

We were all freedom truckers in the end.

Freedom is a powerful word. And few would disagree that freedom is something good worth aspiring to. Freedom from hunger, from persecution and from suffering has been the fuel for every revolution in history. Freedom from.

But under consumer capitalism, ideas of freedom have been warped. The freedom we are sold today, from venal political leaders to the media, is not a freedom from, but a freedom to. To consume, to travel, the freedom “to do you.”

And this hyper-individualised freedom became the God we needed to justify the behaviours necessary to construct a social reality where there was no pandemic.

A culture of denial

As others have noted, the desire to forget a pandemic is also a trauma response. And some people are just wired differently I suppose, cursed to stare at natural reality, unable to indulge in social constructions. The media have also been shameful conspirators in the covid silence, refusing to report the truth about ongoing high death numbers, refusing to report on the studies showing immune damage, or the harm from repeat infections. Refusing to make the connection between record excess death or record workplace sickness.

At times, media efforts to ignore the pandemic have been off the scale denialist. In December there was a barrage of media coverage about how bad flu season in the UK. And it was bad. But there had been four covid waves in 2022 that each killed more people than the single flu wave, but there were no reports. I look at the Guardian most days, and almost every time I do there is an article about health, wellness and living longer, but try finding one that mentions covid, the world’s leading communicable cause of death.

The media are doing a stunning job in helping create this socially constructed reality. It’s really a hard time to exist if you can see that there are two layers to reality.

One winner

The thing is, natural reality will always and inevitably impinge upon our social constructions.

We can act like there is no pandemic or there is no climate crisis, we can broadly agree as a culture that this is the case through the actions we take, but we can’t pretend our way out of brute facts.

We can continue to develop condos on the Florida coast, but the water will rise.

We can continue to burn fossil fuels, but the heat will build.

We can continue to catch a Sars virus, but disease will come.

In the end, a fossil-fuelled, virus-ridden culture with individuality and consumerism at its ideological core is on an inevitable collision course with brute facts.

Divergence

The process of divergence between humanity and nature has been a long one. Ever since the industrial revolution, perhaps back to settled agriculture. The belief that humans are apart from, not a part of nature, has been the cultural driving force for the climate, ecological and biological destruction that now surrounds us: we can build a civilisation on fossil fuels with no climate consequences; we can plunder the seas with no ecological consequences; we can live with a Sars virus with no biological consequences.

And capitalism is the political-economic driving force that has propelled these cultural beliefs forward.

The belief that humanity has conquered nature is one of modernity’s founding myths.

But we haven’t done this at all.

What we’ve done – at best - is defer the consequences of our actions into the future.

And now those consequences are coming on top.

(Artwork @ronniefurbear on IG)