Was sociology created so that individuals could blame everything on society?

I've been thinking that these intellectuals behind sociology just try to make society like an all encompassing monster to mask up the problems caused by the state and by peoples individual actions. Society is the cause of all things according to these sociologists and everything happens to society. Your actions, they say are determined not by you, but by what society makes you do. You must conform they say to society as it will be better for you. They say-- act in certain ways and you will conform, and certain people act in certain ways and get more advantages for it. For "society" treats them better. People who don't do things or don't have advantageous situations they say are able to blame their problems on "society." Does anyone else find this whole field discredible as I do?

reply to post by Frankidealist35


We are social animals , it is in our nature . We construct complex social networks , layer upon layer of them ...... couple this with our inquisitiveness and knack for spotting patterns etc .....and you pretty much have the field of sociology .

Don`t go hating on "these intellectuals" .... i had shut the memory of Mr.s Palin out of my mind .

There is a huge jump between politics and personal choices...If you want to know about how people think--study Psychology, if you want to know why governments are in the state they are in--study political science. For the overlap between the two sociology pretty much covers it. But honestly I am not even following what you are saying, sociologists blame society? That doesn't make a lot of sense. An example of how someone in sociology would look at things would be-the economy is bad, so crime rates will go up. People are losing their jobs so suicide rates will go up. If that is blaming society or the economy, ok then whatever. But it seems someone has issues with something that they know very little about.

reply to post by mkultraangel


I know what sociology is. I just think the reason why it was created was so that individuals could blame problems on something other than themselves. Does that make sense?

Originally posted by Frankidealist35
reply to post by mkultraangel

 

I know what sociology is. I just think the reason why it was created was so that individuals could blame problems on something other than themselves. Does that make sense?

Or rather, society has been, and is continually being, moulded to fulfill whatever function is required of it. Society needs moulding in order to control it and one consequence of this, is that as government grows and asserts more and more control over our lives, there comes a point where people, having been so use to acting as the government requires, naturally blame anything wrong on that same government, even if the problem is of their own making.

The government have their ranks of academic experts and advisors who treat us all as some huge experiment.

No, Frank, it doesn't make sense. You do not understand what sociology is.

Sociology: the study and classification of human societies

To understand something does not mean that we are looking to absolve ourselves of responibility.

There is a clear correlation between poverty and crime for example. This does not mean that were you poor you are excused from having to be responsible for crimes you commit. Instead, understanding that poverty may cause more crime, perhaps you'll allocate more funds for poverty stricken areas, or make sure that being poor doesn't have the social stigma attached as it currently does.


Knowledge is power, the more we know the better off we are.

So no, sociology was not created to give people the opportunity to shirk responsibility.

reply to post by Merigold


Okay, I understand that but I'm trying to think of an alternative theory for why sociology was created.

Couldn't it be at the time though that there were a lot of stereotypes out there and people just wanted to explain them all?

Originally posted by Frankidealist35
Okay, I understand that but I'm trying to think of an alternative theory for why sociology was created.

No you don't, and no you're not.

Just like in your other thread, about 'private property', which you haven't come back to and commented on the explanation given that you asked for, you are trying to bash something you don't understand and you keep falling flat on yer face.

You really should do some reading if you really want to understand what the terms socialism, society, sociology etc., actually mean.

If you did understand you wouldn't be making these posts, trying to make connections that aren't there, and mixing up terms.

BTW sociology wasn't 'created', we've been studying society since societies came to be.

reply to post by ANOK


I understand what socialism is.

I read your replies in my thread and you seem to just be taken aback by what I said. I know what socialism is and why it's impossible but that's besides the point. People on the left debate whether private property is a right or not (en.wikisource.org...) so I was basically asking about that.

I just disbelieve in the concept of society and the whole thing of what I'm saying is that I think that society is like the whole study of this monster that constitutes everything and anything. Whereas I'm an individualist, and, I see not society as a collamoration of everything, but the interactions between individuals... but sociology makes it seem like society is responsible for everything you do.

I hope I'm making sense here.

Sociology and anthropology are simply NWO forms of systematic racism

reply to post by Britguy


I do not picture sociology intellectuals sitting around at the White House hatching maniacal schemes to get people to conform if that's what you're getting at. What you are seeming to miss is that everyone is part of a group or groups, whether it be your family or even as a member of this site. So yes it's good for people to take individual responsibility, but there are groups we are part of and groups that influence us to do much of what we do. Sociology was not "created" to take something away from you that already exists....

"Sociology" is just the study of social systems. It doesn't argue or explain anything; sociologists argue and explain things, and come at the study from all different viewpoints.

I don't know what exactly it is that you're reading that's bringing up these questions recently, but I don't think you're getting a balanced view of the breadth of these studies.

Both sociology and (social or cultural) anthropology study how humans exist in groups. They can be pursued from the point of view of radical individualism, but as it turns out that doesn't usually explain how society actually works.

It's not a moral question though. You seem to be assuming that there is no difference between reason and excuse, which is not true.

Our society and culture (that of the late 20th to early 21st century United States of America) raise the idea of the autonomous individual to a privileged position that almost no other human society has or does. We have reified (that's a nice sociology word for you) the individual, arguing that a person is nothing more than the sum of their biological and mental processes, and can be examined without reference to his or her social surrounding.

Yet we don't behave that way. In experiment after experiment we find that social relations shape individual behavior. That doesn't mean that they make individual behavior right, or moral; just different.

Crowds behave differently than small groups of people.

Families behave differently than random groups of people.

Peer groups behave differently than intergenerational groups of people.

All these differences are different in different settings.

Sociology and anthropology attempt to study these interactions, not to excuse behavior.

Do you really think that your sense of morality is not affected (or even effected) by the social setting that you grew up in, and the social setting that you're in now?

ATS itself is a social setting, and our interactions here can be studied to see how they are shaped by the medium (text-based, short messages with long lifespans) as opposed to the medium of a chat room (text-based, short messages with short lifespans) or "real life" (mixed verbal, visual, physical, pheromonal, etcetera messages with differing lifespans).

Sociology does not mean "society excuses your behavior".

reply to post by americandingbat


I think you're probably right in that I am not getting a balanced approach to sociology. I'm taking a sociology class right now and my textbook author is obsessed with poor people and is obsessed with people who are overweight, and, my textbook author seems to make opinions seem like facts. It's lead me to the belief that people can't be objective even if they tried to. That is why I think that lots of sociology is BS because once you put your value judgment on it that becomes an opinion. It's that sociology seems to view things as if there is a society that encompasses everything whereas in reality it is only individual people that acts within a territory which they are referring to when they talk about society. There is not an omnipotent society that sociology refers to. I just find a lot of it nonsense to be honest and I think it's just one more way that people have of labeling people and groups.

reply to post by Frankidealist35


Can I ask who the author or authors of your sociology textbook are?

It definitely sounds like you're not getting a balanced view of the different theories current in sociological thought. It's hard I think to find (or teach) a truly unbiased Intro Sociology course, but you should (in my opinion) at least be exposed to several different strains of thought and philosophical perspectives.

I understand where you're coming from being uncomfortable with the idea that a society is an entity that can act in some way. Does it help at all to think about it by analogy to biology? There are different "layers" that you can look at and analyze, but they don't negate the importance of the other "layers".

So a biologist can talk about how cells behave, how organs behave, how an organism behaves, or how an ecosystem behaves. Similarly, a sociologist might talk about how an individual behaves, or how a family behaves, or how an office behaves, or how a whole society behaves. But they're doing so without denying that the basic unit of behavior is the individual, just as if a biologist describes how the circulatory system works they are not denying that each muscle cell in the heart has its own pattern of behavior, or that there is important behavior going on at the level of protein synthesis in those cells.

So individual morality and psychology are not in conflict with the study of social systems; they're just at a different level. Just as organic chemistry is not in conflict with physiology; it's just a matter of what level of organization you choose to focus on.

reply to post by americandingbat



Exactly. Sociology is all about forming generalizations concerning certain groups that are unrelated to that group's stated functions, purposes or goals. That is not only prejudiced but also unreliable; a group's "profile" can often change, given changes within the group itself or changed inferences about available data.

What's disturbing is when groups then redefine themselves using the feedback that they've been given by a sociologist. This leads to an indirect form of social engineering. The mainstream media does that a lot. The Nazis did it, too. The Nazis were bad, therefore sociology is bad.

Efforts to actually create labels tend to lead to overly long labels, as minute sub-divisions within a group are discovered.