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Book Freak #229: The Social Construction of Reality

How everyday knowledge is built, maintained, and transformed through human interaction

Get The Social Construction of Reality

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966) argues that the social world around us, and our understanding of it, is something people fabricated together. Even though we made it, it feels as solid and real as nature, and we usually don’t remember making it.

It reminds me of the “imagined orders” Yuval Noah Harari describes in Sapiens . Enough people believe in money, nations, companies, and human rights that we treat them as real things instead of agreements.…