Dichotomy as a social construct

Dichotomy as a social construct
At first I wanted to name this article end of right and left wing. In my country there are elections right now and the candidates for the president office are more and more likely to end the difference between right and left because they see that the people and vox populi (we have direct vote for the president) is very likely to not listen to the traditional dichotomy of right and left. today it is necessary to attract people not to the traditional difference but to something else. The encumbent is populistically claiming that he is the president of the low ten millions of people (surprisingly, my country has ten millions of residents). These talks are very hard to overcome once the oppositinal candidate wants to talke facts and unpleasant words that belong to the correct way of doing politics-one cannot have the sweet without the sour. Drawing back to the dichotomy of right and left, I also see that other dichotomies-social constructs are losing their former strength and value, although some would be glad if this did not happen. Take for example race. Till some time, it was terribly important to keep this construct working because the whole economy of the former south of US was based on free labor by black people. It was impossible the draw the line perfectly and thus they chose to set a -one drop rule- meaning that just one ancester in ones blood line was from African descent and they would consider such an individual black, basically property-thus without any rights. Race is a social construct from the presumption that there is a fine line between ˋracesˋ. It is virtually impossible to distinguish one from the other. Now imagine that the only facter one uses is ones color of sking, which is preposterous. What does the color mean? If we come back to Blumenbachs distinction of five races, we see that even he could not be sure about it. Although he lived in a world that was not so globally interconnected and where people from same community (usually same color) pursued marriage from the same community, even then it clearly could not be possible to find a representative that would fulfill all the traits that that particular race should have. Nevertheless, nowadays social antropologists believe this is virtually useless and irrelevant taxonomy which brings us nowhere. This black and white vision can only bring us to division of people, nothing else. Why would we need it? In the end it is not about differences and although differences between people exist, there is no need to try to create division between races- which paradoxically do not exist. Take for example the difference between men and women. We may accept that in generaly male and female population there are differences which should be accepted and used to benefit from our social interaction between men and women, but not for creation of division between male and female world by saying that due to some intrinsic differences men or women are better than the other part. I have the famous book by dr. Gray on mind-men are from mars, women from venus. He gives very vivid examples of the differences between men and women and although I do not agree with all of them, I basically think that he is right in the claim that perception of (most) women is same and the same can be applied vica versa to men. This distinction should be used as a bridge to mutual understanding, not as something that should divide us even more.

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Používam Rychlý zápisník

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