Society
The simple definition according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is:
1: people in general thought of as living together in organized communities with shared laws, traditions, and values
2: the people of a particular country, area, time, etc., thought of especially as an organized community
In this and (potential future posts), “society” will be referring specifically to the society in which I have lived my life – working class Australian – and more broadly as “Western Society”; that is, societies based around capitalism.
Like any organised body, society relies on systems and processes to function, and, again, like any organised body, these systems and processes purportedly cater more for the good of the whole than that of the individual. Unfortunately, the two are often the same, and the systems and processes fail by being too rigid.
When I say systems and processes, I’m not just referring to legal ones. This includes traditional processes, which extend (more often than not) into the ways people/things should or should not be.
And while it is easy to blame “society” for some of our troubles, given that we ARE society, it’s hard to escape the fact that we have the power to change the way we see and do things.
Given I have some direct experience with navigating this from inside a neurodivergent, trauma-shaped brain, I’ll be writing a few bits and pieces about some of the ways in which I have seen our society fail and succeed and perhaps some options on how to make things “better”.
I’m going to start with something sideways from what you may expect after reading this: personal relationships.
Why relationships? How is that even relevant to what I’ve just written? Because we as a society have very strong rules about what a relationship can and should be and not all of them are written down. But also, because these rules are a good example of how we can change the shape of things if we choose to do so.
