What is our Mind-set?

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“All human activity is subject to habitualisation. Any action that is repeated frequently

becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of

effort and which, ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that pattern.”

(Peter L. Burger and Thomas Luckmann, THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY)

 

In many ways, the socialization process is an exploitation of habitualisation by authority groups. Synonymous with habitualisation is the concept of taming. Authority uses the socializing process of habitualisation to create a concept of reality in which all its members are so deeply immersed that they accept it almost unconditionally.

In charge of a tamed society, authority is given a leeway that enables it to protect itself and act in absolutely unrestrained ways without having to implement obvious uses of force or tangible instruments of oppression.

Whatsmore … “Habitualisation carries with it the important psychological gain that choices are narrowed. While in theory there may be a hundred ways to go about the project … habitualisation narrows these down to one.” Berger and Luckmann regard this as a positive thing, seeing that it frees the individual from the burden of decision making, but, by narrowing down possibilities, the individual is being sunk into the swampy reality of reduced options that authority desires.

There is no freedom in such a reality, and yet the individual has been nurtured to believe that he or she is free, and largely accepts the discourse that his or her society is the best of all possible systems. The individual even believes that he or she can choose, even though they cannot clearly see what their choices might be.

“Habitualised actions retain their meaningful character for the individual although the meanings involved become embedded as routines.”

This embedded meaningfulness is the reality of coherence. Things are because that is how things have to be in order to ensure that things remain as they are. But this concept of reality is not in fact particularly meaningful. Rather it is a mind-set blind to possibilities of other realities. Whenever the socio-cultural rule of this-is-how-we-are and this-is-how-we-should-be comes into effect it not only destroys the roots of creativity and truly progressive notions, it also threatens the power of common-sense notions of what should be done when the correct answers to that question lie outside the framework of habitualised reality.

Berger and Luckmann themselves argue the opposite: according to them, habitualisation “opens up a foreground for deliberation and innovation.” Yet now, as wealth flaunts its riches in ways we haven’t seen since the times of the absolute monarchs; when international conflicts broil and simmer and lunatic leaders talk of pressing the button; while our economic system grows and plunders, pillaging the last remnants of natural resources, leaving us standing on the threshold of an apocalypse; with the membrane of the ecosystem tearing apart right under our noses and opening a window to the most inhospitable of climates …

While all of this goes on, habitualisation creates a lack of deliberation and innovation to handle any of these crises … And it does this over and over again.

 

Peter L. Burger and Thomas Luckmann, THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY, pp.70-71

Ibid, p. 71

Ibid

Ibid