In a changing world where every day seems to bring to light a new fight for equality, we need to question at what point did we as humans create these differences to begin with, and how did we as a society collectively agree to abide by them. At what point did we create the concept of binary, or feel the need to divide ourselves into barrier? When did we let the concept of money drive us and why did we create these divides in the first place?
When we talk about society, we are usually restricted in terms of how we view it. In most cases, our perception of society is limited to our environment, what we see and how we process it. That’s the reason why our definitions of normal change as we look across cultures. In fact, the concept of culture itself is another construct that we create because we are bound to a view.
Now as societies grow, they go through habitualization and basically how certain actions when done repeatedly cast a pattern which then gets accepted by others. In simple terms, whatever we define becomes a part of our society only when others also accept it as something normal in their lives. So if we think about it, society is nothing but a collection of habits or in some sense, a habit on its own.
When these habits or societies start differing, we as humans find a need to classify it and this is exactly where the social construct starts to originate. As sociologists would say, we as humans, have an inherent need to make sense of the physical world in an objective way. Which meant that when we encountered someone from a different skin colour as our own, we created the concept of race. In our mind, in whatever way we had defined our society, we had certain definitions in place and when something changed from that we had to understand it and in order to make sense of it, we created these classifications, which over time got exploited and turned into divisions.
So when the construct is man-made, its scope and meaning is too. Which means that the construct changes with us. The way we saw gender roles 50 years ago, is not the same as we see it today and yet it’s not where we would have wanted it to be. The construct redefines itself only when we again collectively acknowledge the change and the fact that we still are restricted by most of these differences is proof that we as a society still haven’t overcome them. However, although the change is slow, it is change nonetheless and while we won’t be able to destroy the construct as such, we are capable of destroying the barriers that it holds.
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