Major Social Structures
As time moves on, we need to look past individuals and examine the things that bring us together and force us apart. These things are structures. Social constructs provide a method for groups of people to maintain a consistent balance on abstraction (human elevation and creativity) and animal instinct (competition and reproductive drive).
Government – provides framework for other structures
Law – guidelines regarding ethics
Economy – orients competitive drive towards social productivity
Culture – framework for social meaning
Media – framework for information transfer
Education – handles sustainability of structures
Government evolves from the innate desires of life as it applies to any situation that involves more than one human. Some kind of shared understanding of life is inevitable in functional societies – hence, government.
Law develops to honor any social contracts that are created – the concept of human rights falls under the watchfulness of this social construct.
Basic economics is inherent in animal competition, but economy evolves as a social construct when people are moved by social contracts to specialization, which means that people agree to work with each other to accomplish that which is defined within social contracts.
Culture is derived from the human capability to perform abstractions. For example, physical objects having human-generated characteristics often results in the application of meaning to such objects. Thus, culture exists when meaning is given to objects – in this case, objects can refer to 1) anything that tangibly exists and 2) every subsequent meaning that is generated from these tangibly existing things.
Media forms when language is advanced to a point where it can be recorded in some fashion.
Education sustains other structures by advancing the acceptance of structures as necessary to existence, particularly to new members (i.e. children) of the society. It is a unique structure because it requires other structures to exist before being explicitly realized by a society.