Last revised: Monday, 16 January 17 00:09:03 Europe/London
<LINK: Discussion of these pages>
The phenomenon whereby any concept / social usage / mechanism that is in common currency in a human environment for long enough acquires the character of a property of the world - that the fact that it is a human invention, developed (consciously or not) to address some particular circumstance, is effectively forgotten.
The most obvious example is money. Money is a human invention - we all agree to pretend that some symbol (physical or virtual) represents value-in-the-world, and that it can be exchanged as if it were property - as if it were something real. However, to the great mass of humanity, the idea that the rules around this invention are mutable is hard to consider.
This is a problem, because, of course, any particular set of rules has a structural impact on how the game is played, and thus on its outcome. It is deeply important for us to realise this, and to actively bring reification to consciousness - to examine whether human inventions that have become knotted into the fabric of life still work in ways which are positive, to consider whether and how to change the rules.