Thread by @NateB_Panic

Last week in the UK more than 600 people died of covid. Last week climate scientists warned that we're on the verge of ecological catastrophe. Nothing much happened in response. Why? Social constructions of reality are clashing with brute facts. A 🧵

The social construction of reality is an idea formulated by ancient Greek philosophers and 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 create communities structured around norms. But this isn’t the only thing that exists. Alongside socially constructed realities there are natural realities, or brute facts. Things that you can’t socially construct your way out of. Gravity. Oxygen. CO2. Viruses

In recent years we’ve heard a lot about “post-truth,” most often in reference to the far right that deny factual things. But post-truthism is no longer confined to the far right. No longer a pejorative label to throw at Trumpers or Brexiteers. Post-truthism has gone mainstream

Despite death numbers being at levels that provoked lockdowns, despite record workforce sickness and despite record excess deaths, people from across the political spectrum agree: the pandemic is over. A socially constructed reality has been created to deny natural reality

Part of the process of creating a socially constructed reality, says sociologist Dennis Hiebert, is creating a cognitive and moral basis that will explain and justify behaviour 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, he says. But this doesn’t apply to secular societies. We need another explanation, a new God to justify our behaviours. And that God is individuality. Which we might also label freedom

Not long into the pandemic, business interests, politicians and 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. We saw 'freedom' marchers and the 'freedom' truckers

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

Few would disagree that freedom is worth aspiring to. Freedom from hunger, persecution and suffering has been the fuel of every revolution in history. But under consumer capitalism, freedom has been warped. The freedom we are sold today is not a freedom *from* but a freedom *to*

A hyper-individualised idea of freedom has become the God we need to justify the behaviours necessary to construct a social reality where there was no pandemic (or no climate crisis)

The mass media have been key agents in this social construction of reality, refusing to report the truth about ongoing high death numbers, refusing to report on the studies showing immune damage, or the harm from repeat covid infections

But natural reality will always and inevitably impinge upon our social constructions. We can continue to develop 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

Read more in the article:

donotpanic.substack.com/p/freedoom