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Until relatively recently, I never thought of myself as disabled, but in the past year I found this model helpful in understanding how I’m excluded from many parts of society because I’m autistic, and autistic needs are never considered. In reality, there’s nothing wrong with me, but many aspects of society are incompatible with me.
Lucky you, that you don’t have this problem!
Dividing the world into "me" and "society" is a simplistic perspective that is far from the truth. The same for "us" and "society". It's always people, and each bears an individual responsibility as to their behaviour.
How do you differentiate between what exists only in your head vs what exists elsewhere?
Societies make choices that have physical and pragmatic realities associated with them. Those choices impact our everyday lives.
No, only people can make choices. Societies can never make choices, because they do not exist in the real world. One of the greatest mind prisons of this age is believing "societies" have any agency. It's always people, always was, always will be.
We can also give up an offering to "luck" and pray for our luck to change, since luck "makes choices" all the time. Choices which impact your everyday life much more than "society". Or we can accept that these things don't have agency.
How to differentiate between what exists in your head and elsewhere? Good question. Metaphysical. Society is an idea, an abstraction. It is only useful for us as long as we understand it doesn't really exist. Man should never be enslaved by man-made ideas. Other abstract ideas are more powerful and more beneficial. These are better to treat as real than "society".
> Individuals exist, "society" has never existed and will never exist. It's only individuals who can take actions. "Society" does not have any means at all, because it's just a mirage within the imagination of some people.
It's one of those critiques that hits really hard when you've been doing lines of cocaine off of stacks of Hayek and Mises books and doesn't really inspire anyone outside of those niches. "Oooh! Checkmate! Got you now, Statist! That's not a society! it's a collection of individuals!" etc.
If you were to say something like "an individual with impaired eye sight is not considered disabled when they have access to eye glasses. disability does not consist solely of an individual's medical impairment, but in the relationship between the individual, other individuals, and available infrastructural and technological means" maybe it'd hit better for them.
"the obstacle is not some property of the individual experiencing an access issue, but are created by a system made by other people who didn't provide alternative access methods" (roughly the same thing) is just super objectionable though /eyeroll
It's not about who's at fault, it's who has to provide a solution. Society has far more means to provide a solution than each individual.
major problem that needs fixing is leave things alone when there is no problem.
forcing new tech, standards and spec, into place so even more money,influence,control can be attained is not a solution to any problem, its a source.
It's individuals mandating the building of wheelchair ramps, it is individuals who build them, and individuals who use them. You don't need to give your nephew or niece a high paying job to make some weird theories about "society". You can instead just state the truth that some people can't walk and if you have the power you can mandate that business owners need to make their places accessible for these people.
I suspect you mean to appeal to the recognition that, unlike water molecules, individual humans have free will and agency and the ability to make choices completely independently. I suspect you abhor the notion of 'groupthink' and excuses for behavior that are underpinned by concepts of culture and social constructs. And there is truth to these ideas, but as with most things, they are helpful as part of a broader model, and not as a totalitarian view of human behavior. We are complex creatures, in complex systems; to ignore the tendencies of our emergent behaviors is as risky as turning your back to a rough shorebreak, believing all the individual water molecules will simply be rational and choose not to hit you, only to be engulfed in a wave that really does exist.
In lack of better comparisons from myself, Santa Claus does not exist. As a concept and an idea he of course exists and has real impact on what people do and what they feel. But part of growing up is differentiating between what is real and what is lie. Enlightened adults shouldn't believe in "society", while still being aware and updated of the possible threats from people who believe in it.
Another example: "Courage" is an abstract idea, but also a very real description of acts by some people. But we all learn when we are kids to not let another kid manipulate us into doing something by saying "Do it or you're a coward!". Even kids learn this early.
And that is true and a useful analysis in a lot of circumstances, like when you're asking questions of "how?" To take this back to the ancestor comment, if you're looking at "how did this wheelchair ramp get built?" you can describe the chain of events from the creation of a law to the construction of the ramp and all the individuals involved along the way making decisions and doing actions. And that is a good and useful analysis. Some tangible entity called "society" is not involved in that chain. And I think that might be your original point. And yes, that's accurate, in that kind of analysis.
So now, take that chain of events, and multiply it by, I dunno, a very large number; hell, infinity. Every outcome and the chain of individuals and actions that led up to it. How do we study this? How to we increase our understanding without having to treat every single outcome and every chain of events completely independently? You probably see where this is going already... :) We could treat every possible combination of coin tosses as an infinite set of independent events. What someone flipping a coin 10 times has to do with someone flipping a coin 1000 times isn't anything tangible - the flips, the individuals who make them, and the outcomes are independent. So... shrug and move on? Nope. We study probability. It helps us describe WHY - if 1000 people each flip a coin 1000 times, most will have a near 50/50 split heads/tails. Probability isn't tangible, but it certainly is real.
My revised argument then is: society is a concept like probability. It is like probability distributions that come from an ever-changing sea of individual opinions, predispositions, and actions. We can measure certain parts of it at points in time and review historical outcomes, and develop theories about why certain patterns are more common, certain outcomes more likely, and use this to enhance our decision making and understanding of the behaviors and tendencies of large groups of people. So to say "society isn't real" is true in the sense of tangibility, but also myopic - and like saying "probability isn't real, there are only outcomes."
Hows that?
I think that was a bad call. Society should not shape itself for the sake of a minority of people. That's just silly.
In hindsight, this is a pretty obvious conclusion if we would have taken a bit of extra time to consider why we might want accessibility ramps, but instead we get sidetracked by exactly the kind of thinking displayed by your comment.
When people say "accessibility is good for everyone" it's not a naive feel-good comment. It's an acknowledgement that at some point all of us could use help with accessibility (e.g. when you become a parent, when you get old, etc)
From my perspective, bootstrapping is reality. It is the people who deny that who are ignoring reality in favor of idealistic but false paradigms.
Who would ever blame a disabled person for their condition?
Blaming people who have nothing to do with it is exactly the modern ideology that twists people into evil.
You may enjoy "Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard" (Groce '85)
In communities where many individuals share a common sign language, deafness doesn't function as a disability in the same way it does when few individuals speak sign language.
Isn't that somewhat obvious? If you only speak Greek, it's a disability if you're not in Greece, but an advantage if you're there.
I think it's a pity that sign language is almost never taught outside of for hearing impaired kids. Every person could have great use of sign language being commonly spoken. It lets you communicate silently and at long distances.