Sociology of Health and Health Care Book

This book will say that culture is reality and is created by our typifying the institutions and its agents that we have subjectively made into objective reality through reifying what we are socialized into believing through the facticity (thrownness) of our existential reality and we re-litigate our past selves through our current understanding, or in other words the authors unconvincingly argue we don’t exist in a Bayesian world and they will say that we have no prior expectations except for the stifling conforming norms of the prevailing ruling identity. There is also a strange mixture of some psychoanalysis with existential angst best explaining our social reality from the socialization process leading to our self identity that comes from outside of us not through ourselves and blaming our own behavior when we don’t fit exactly into the binary stifling conforming norm of the ‘they’.

Yes, that first sentence is somewhat cumbersomely constructed but I wanted to get that out of the way before I note that the authors clearly are influenced by Husserl’s book Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology and Heidegger’s Being and Time and the last of the phenomenologists Hans-Georg Gadamer in particular his book Truth and Method in which he will say “All understanding is interpretation. Being that can be understood is language", and there was a section within this book where the authors were talking about the psychological construction of knowledge through language composing their theory of the social construction of knowledge where it felt as if I was reading Gadamer.

There is a lot I didn’t like about this book. I’m going to have to illustrate by citing three different examples the authors appealed to. First example, A is a heterosexual male, B a lesbian female, and C a bisexual female and they are working together as a group. The author brought up this example twice to make their points. If Sartre’s Huis Clos (No Exit) doesn’t come to mind, then that’s only because you haven’t read it or seen the play and the author is similarly trying to show how we construct our social reality through the dialectic of our expectations foisted upon us by the thrownness into our world while forgetting that we just might be born a certain way and we are the way we are because we were born that way. The authors make the point that each A, B, and C are only playing a role by choice and are performing only according to societal expectations and are neglecting to realize that sometimes individuals are not by nature fitting into the preconceived category of a stifling conformity and the others expectations do not define who we truly are.

The second example I’ll cite is their somewhat obnoxious certainty that if a boy was raised by his smothering mother with an absent father and her three sisters and he became feminized further socialization through reeducation or psychoanalysis could fix him into the stifling conformity of the conforming privileged identity that defines truth through their consensus path of socially constructed reality of knowledge, that is culture is reality and must be obeyed. (Side note: If we were alive in 1933 -1945 Germany, should we accept the certainty of the NAZIs; or similarly today the certainty of MAGA hat (hate) wearing imbeciles if they become the super majority. I would hope not. Contrary to what the authors are saying, the society with its stifling conforming norms may not always be the functionally correct norm to follow because sometimes we have to see beyond the social construction of reality in order to preserve our own humanity).

The third and I promise last example, was their thought experiment of imagining an army made up of only homosexuals and how heterosexuals would be destructive to the cohesion of the fighting force. What rubbish and false framing in order to give the reverse logic for why gays should conform to the majority framing even when it would go against their nature because the authors clearly think that sexuality is a choice and that we all are interchangeable parts that need never rock the boat of normality. Elsewhere in the book they also spoke about how destructive non-conformist could be to society at large and seemed to advocate that square pegs needed to be pounded into round holes and better yet they should never pop their head up in the first place.

I like Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer probably as much as the next person or even more since they have written three of my all time favorite books, and their influence within this book overall is obvious probably to most readers even though they aren’t cited within the text. I don’t like the author’s overall points which seem to me to have taken the three philosophers to an absurd extremity, but overall I can say I would recommend this book for its laying out what they were trying to say in 1967 even with its foolish framing of the world while ignoring the importance of how sometimes people are just born that way and it’s not necessarily a problem that should be fixed except by those who force a binary (or digital) world view onto the world as the authors do. After all sometimes the world is not easily categorized into archetypes and the world just might be best considered continuous as with sexuality or a host of other dispositions which go into making a person their authentic self.