See I dont really get this. Seeing as we all live in a society and learn from what society teaches us as 'normal' - then - what are the standards of what is acceptable and what isnt? Dont we all play, more or less, by the same rules? - where do these ideas about what society is like come from to begin with? How do we get an idea of our values and culture and identity? From what society teaches us.... I would have thought. To understand the world we live in, I would think making some kind of generalization makes sense - to understand and make sense of the world we live in.
And you cant encompass the entire human race as one society - there are lots of different kinds of societies - but when we belong, in one specific kind of society - you learn what it values as important and how it operates.
That probably makes no sense to anyone - I thought I would just give it a try.
The point I was making is that I don't see how society is as one-sided as people often make it out to be nor why the apparent societal trends should govern my perceptions of the people around me.
I could say that the UK is a materialistic society - we are a powerful and developed nation, and there is a significant portion of the population concerned by money and material items. But I also know that there's a whole spectrum of people who are the polar opposite. For all that people on this forum may say about society being shallow etc... isn't the fact that so many people posting here disagree with shallowness further proof that not everybody is that way? So when it comes to 'what society thinks', I don't actually know, because there's not a single viewpoint that can account for everybody within it. Take something like celebrity culture for example, I probably know of more people who don't care about celebrities' lives than people who do, yet the media would have you think otherwise by pasting the same faces on all our papers. What we 'see' of the society around us - be it on t.v, in the papers, even on the streets, is only ever a snippet of the whole picture.
Sometimes I think the only thing we need to understand about the world is that it
can't be understood. It is too diverse a place and human beings are too complex a mechanism to 'read' and group together. I don't judge the people I encounter until I have got to know them - if people choose to judge me, that's their issue.
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